Goings on
About Town

Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman started performing as the cabaret duo Kiki & Herb in San Francisco in 1992, their tipsy, scorched-earth revelry providing a demented catharsis for the AIDS years. The act went all the way to Carnegie Hall and Broadway before disbanding, in 2007. News of a reunion show, “Seeking Asylum!” (April 21-May 22), caused such a commotion that the Joe’s Pub Web site crashed the day tickets went on sale. As the septuagenarian Kiki would say, “If I could love, I would love you all.”

Credit Photograph by Ioulex for The New Yorker

  • American Psycho

    Benjamin Walker plays the murderous financier Patrick Bateman, in Duncan Sheik and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s musical adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel. Rupert Goold directs.

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  • Dear Evan Hansen

    Michael Greif directs a new musical by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, and Steven Levenson, in which a lonely teen-ager (Ben Platt) becomes the accidental subject of viral Internet fame. .

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  • The Father

    Frank Langella stars in a play by the French writer Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton and directed by Doug Hughes for Manhattan Theatre Club, about an eighty-year-old man who is losing his grip on his life story. .

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  • Root Progression

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    For many fans, Esperanza Spalding’s story starts with her 2011 Grammy award for best new artist; it’s a foundation that she has both built on and evaded. The award, which she certainly deserved but didn’t need, has been interpreted in countless ways: as a bid for credibility on the part of the Recording Academy; as a step toward the center for jazz, a genre that can seem paralyzed by its history; and as a huge upset for Justin Bieber.

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  • Alex G and Porches

    This doubleheader might be the best indie affair that the city has to offer this spring. The songwriter-guitarist Alex Giannascoli has a golden ear for concise, shy phrasing and casually sewn arrangements that find intimacy in a morning riding shotgun or late nights lounging on a buddy’s Persian rug.

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  • 79.5

    This slow-paced, psychedelic outfit is enjoying a weekly residency at C’mon Everybody, a pleasantly snug bar, bordering Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, that’s always good for a night of music that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. The six-person ensemble includes four women, and the cooing choral arrangements on its 2012 twelve-inch “Boogie/OOO” sound like Donna Summer and Evelyn (Champagne) King playing a Steve Rubell club.

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  • Terrace Martin

    Martin is coming down from a whirlwind year: after becoming one of Snoop Dogg’s most sought-after producers, in the early aughts, the Los Angeles saxophonist and composer was brought into the fold at Kendrick Lamar’s TDE label, where he helped to craft many of the jazz elements on Lamar’s celebrated 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly.” The thirty-six-year-old spent his teen-age years bouncing between eight-hour jazz-practice sessions and studying West Coast rap classics, before a long tenure touring with both jazz groups and rap bands.

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  • Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains

    A sequel, of sorts, to last year’s blockbuster “Artists of Earth and Sky,” at the Met, this impressive exhibition unites nineteenth-century notebooks and painted hides with nearly sixty works by contemporary artists, many commissioned for the show by the curator Emil Her Many Horses. Among the peoples of the Great Plains, warriors were also artists, and they immortalized their battles and hunts in narrative tableaux.

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  • Haris Epaminonda

    In the spellbinding sculptures of this Cypriot artist, fragments from the natural world find their counterparts in shards of historical materials. In one work, a palm frond is suspended from a metal armature above a sheet of gold foil.

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  • Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin

    Marcel Duchamp’s notion that the viewer completes a work of art has rarely found a more persuasive expression than the delirious installations of Trecartin and Fitch. In their fever-dream cineplexes, more hours of footage are screened simultaneously than can be ever absorbed in one visit, forcing—or freeing—each viewer to become the de-facto editor of a new director’s cut.

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  • New York City Ballet

    The enticing spring season includes performances of both the evening-length “Jewels”—composed of three ballets, each suffused with the palette of a different gemstone—and, toward the end of the season, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of George Balanchine’s most appealing narrative works. There will be a new Christopher Wheeldon ballet, with music by George Gershwin, a composer with whom, if “An American in Paris” is any indication, Wheeldon has a particular affinity.

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  • “Transcendent Arts of Tibet and India”

    In the context of a festival of Tibetan and Indian music, visual art, and dance at the Winter Garden, the New York-based choreographer, dancer, and teacher Malini Srinivasan will present a series of twenty-minute group dances in the bharata-natyam style. (The final performance, on April 15, is an evening-length solo by Srinivasan, accompanied by a Carnatic and Hindustani music ensemble.

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  • “Rhythm in Motion”

    The American Tap Dance Foundation’s annual sampler of what’s new in tap choreography is unrivalled, which is both laudable and unfortunate: some competition might help to raise standards. As it is, the interesting and the extraordinary are mixed in with the lacklustre.

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  • Miami City Ballet

    This is the first visit by the full company since 2009, and since Lourdes Lopez took the helm, in 2012. It seems not to have lost its distinctive effervescence, and it comes bearing gems.

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  • A Man in Full

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    In the nineteen-nineties, those days of peace and prosperity and Pax Americana, Aaron Copland (1900-90) was the beau ideal whom young American composers strove to emulate. The tonal-atonal split in classical music, embedded in Cold War cultural politics, no longer seemed urgent, and the values that shone from such mid-century scores as “Appalachian Spring,” the Clarinet Concerto, and “Fanfare for the Common Man”—clarity, optimism, and impregnable craftsmanship—were hugely attractive.

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  • The Met: “Simon Boccanegra” (Review)

    Despite reports that some members of the company would like to see James Levine retire as music director, the current revival of “Simon Boccanegra” proves that the orchestra still plays Verdi for him like it does for few others, with sensuous phrasing and richly saturated color. The beloved tenor Plácido Domingo is dramatically suited to the title role, but his increasingly weathered voice lacks the dark baritonal hue required to blend into Verdi’s sumptuous orchestral texture.

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  • BAM: “Les Fêtes Vénitiennes”

    The conductor William Christie, the paramount practitioner of French Baroque opera, joins forces with the director Robert Carsen for André Campra’s eighteenth-century ode to the often illicit pleasures of Venetian carnival. Taking the form of five discrete vignettes, each with its own story line, Campra’s saucy yet elegantly composed opéra-ballet fuses singing and dance in a single meta-entertainment; Christie conducts his esteemed early-music ensemble, Les Arts Florissants.

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  • N.Y. Philharmonic with Bernard Haitink

    The distinguished Dutch maestro Bernard Haitink brings a uniquely understated yet commanding touch to Mahler, a composer whom the Philharmonic rightfully claims as its own. This time, he guides the orchestra in the composer’s most transcendent score, the Ninth Symphony.

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  • The World’s a Stage

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    The copious programming of the Tribeca Film Festival (April 13-24) stretches quality a little thin, but the best films in this year’s edition are worthwhile viewing, starting with “Actor Martinez,” a tough-minded yet wryly ironic behind-the-scenes look at the personal relationships that can make or poison a movie. The title character is Arthur Martinez (played by a man of the same name), a Denver computer repairman who dreams of a career as an actor.

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  • Born to Be Blue

    This bio-pic about the jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) focusses on two pivotal episodes in the musician’s career, both from the mid-sixties. One, Baker’s performance as himself in a dramatic movie about his own life, is fictional; the other, a brutal beating that cost Baker his front teeth and forced him to rebuild his technique from scratch, actually happened.

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  • The Boss

    Early in this boisterous and sentimental comedy, Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), a high-powered motivational speaker, thrills a packed arena with her hectic and reckless exhortations to financial success. Offstage, Michelle is solipsistically indifferent to the needs of others; she’s feared but hated, and no one laments her downfall in an insider-trading scandal.

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  • Green Festival

    For the fifth year, the Jacob K. Javits center hosts this three-day environmental festival, featuring more than two hundred and fifty exhibitors and fifty speakers.

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  • Christie’s: “Classic Week”

    The two big houses are busy this week with an assortment of sales spanning various disciplines. Over at Christie’s, the selection begins with an auction of antiquities (April 12) led by a second-century Roman bronze of Bacchus.

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  • Apexart

    “Double Take” rethinks the reading series, inviting pairs of emerging and award-winning novelists, poets, editors, and artists to exchange ideas on a shared topic. In this week’s edition, organized by the Bookforum editor Albert Mobilo, the editor and playwright Donald Breckenridge and the educator Johannah Rodgers consider Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Saratoga Park; the novelist and musician Stephen Tunney and the writer and translator Peter Wortsman muse on sleepless nights; and the photojournalist and New School professor Lauren Walsh chooses a photograph at random and trades observations about it with the author Colin Dickey.

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  • Powerhouse Arena

    Fay Wolf, an actress, singer, and pianist, may claim most proudly her role as a professional organizer. For nearly a decade, Wolf has helped countless clients, including Hollywood celebrities and stay-at-home parents, rid themselves of excess possessions and give structure to those objects that they hold on to.

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  • Ocean’s 8

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    “Do you want to go play games?” a waitress asked, a few nights ago, at Ocean’s 8, a subterranean spot on the Park Slope side of Flatbush Avenue. A trio of customers nodded with enthusiasm, and stepped across the bar’s eight-ball-embedded floor to a vantage point at the top of a small set of stairs.

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  • Sofrito

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    When the artist Milo Mottola was commissioned to design the Totally Kid Carousel for Harlem’s Riverbank State Park, in the mid-nineties, he collected a set of drawings of animals made by elementary-school students and replicated them in brightly colored fibreglass. The result is gaudy, outlandish, and utterly fun, a little like Sofrito, the Puerto Rican restaurant that sits next to it.

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