What to Do in New York City in May

New York Times

01-05-2025

Comedy
'Solving Your Problems With Chloe Troast'
In the months since her tenure on 'Saturday Night Live' came to an end, Chloe Troast has kept busy, performing at Moontower Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas, and appearing in the movie 'Sweethearts' and in an episode of the Netflix series 'The Four Seasons.'
Troast also occasionally invites her funny friends to join her at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to take crowd work to the next level, where audience members can seek advice from improvisers who act out potential solutions. Her guests for Sunday have yet to be announced, but past shows have included members of the 'S.N.L. '-affiliated Please Don't Destroy troupe. Tickets are $15 in advance on the UCB's website and $20 on the day of the show. Proceeds will be donated to local mental health charities.
Before that, at 7 p.m., the U.C.B. will present 'We Stan Together,' in which Caitlin Bitzegaio and Lauren Brickman take a studious approach to entertainment gossip. Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 day of. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Music
Charli XCX
The long tail of Charli XCX's breakout summer is continuing well into 2025: So far this year, the British singer has won her first Grammys, played a pair of buzzy Coachella sets and scored a surprise Hot 100 hit with a song that she released nearly five years ago. In April, she kicked off a new North American leg of her tour for 'Brat,' her culture-shifting sixth album that left the internet awash in hedonistic club pop and a ubiquitous shade of green last summer.
Indebted to the brash, volatile electronic music of the 2000s, 'Brat' begs for in-person communion rather than at-home listening. As her popularity skyrockets, Charli's concerts have ballooned to arena-size raves, which could serve to prove that an underground musician can go mainstream while retaining that aura of subcultural cool.
You can see for yourself at Barclays Center on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets start at $130 on Ticketmaster. OLIVIA HORN
Long Play Festival
The foghorn blats of 100 tuba players marching through Fort Greene Park at noon on Saturday exemplify the essence of the Long Play Festival, Bang on a Can's annual celebration of classical, creative and improvised music.
Anthony Braxton's 'Composition No. 19 (for 100 Tubas)' is bold, experimental and something that could only be accomplished in a city full of community-minded musicians. That same spirit permeates the 50-plus Long Play concerts happening this weekend, including the premiere on Friday of the composer-improviser Henry Threadgill's 'Listen Ship' (8 p.m. at Roulette). Elsewhere that night, Kim Gordon will perform songs from her latest album (8 p.m. at Pioneer Works). Throughout Saturday, there will be sets from Mary Halvorson and Bill Frisell (1:30 p.m. at Roulette), Idris Ackamoor and the Pyramids (BRIC Ballroom at 6 p.m.) and the Tomeka Reid Quartet (BRIC Ballroom at 8 p.m.). On Sunday, the Bang on the Can All-Stars and special guests will wrap up the festival with a party for Terry Riley's 90th birthday (8 p.m. at Pioneer Works).
Passes are $95 for one day and $235 for three. For the full lineup and to buy tickets, go to Bang on a Can's website. ALAN SCHERSTUHL
Kids
BAMkids SpringFest
The rapper known as Hila the Earth may look as if she has the weight of the world on her shoulders. This isn't because she has a sad expression — far from it — but because she frequently wears a costume in the form of an enormous inflated globe.
Hila's 'eco rap' about preserving the planet will be just one of the highlights of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMkids SpringFest, a free environmentally oriented extravaganza that will be held outdoors on Saturday (or inside the Peter Jay Sharp Building if it rains).
The entertainment will include international music and dance, interactive yoga and performances by three groups that will teach children some of their moves: the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity's step team, Ms. K's Swagga Jumpers (experts in double Dutch) and the circus troupe ABCirque.
Community organizations will also participate. Good People NYC will help young visitors create cups of ready-to-grow seedlings; Big Reuse will teach about composting; and Billion Oyster Project will lead an activity to build model food chains.
A schedule is online; registration at BAM's website is recommended but not required. LAUREL GRAEBER
Dance
New York City Ballet
The beloved ballet 'Paquita' was first performed in Paris in 1846, then revived and reimagined by the influential dance maker Marius Petipa in St. Petersburg, Russia, decades later. In 1951, George Balanchine restaged the first act, and now New York City Ballet's resident choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, who is celebrated for his meticulous reconstructions of classic ballets, has crafted a fresh version that merges past productions with his own contemporary sensibility. After its premiere in February, Gia Kourlas, the dance critic for The Times, called it 'spectacular.'
Ratmansky's 'Paquita' returns this week for six performances as part of City Ballet's spring season. It is part of a program that also features 'A Suite of Dances' and 'Brandenberg' by Jerome Robbins and 'After the Rain Pas de Deux,' a haunting duet by Christopher Wheeldon. The season then continues with an appealing assortment of additional works by Ratmansky, Robbins, Justin Peck and others, culminating in a weeklong presentation of Balanchine's whimsical 'A Midsummer's Night Dream.'
The 'Paquita' program runs on Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., and Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $42 on City Ballet's website. BRIAN SCHAEFER
Theater
'Good Night, and Good Luck'
In his Broadway debut, George Clooney plays the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, exposing the demagogic Senator Joseph R. McCarthy on air in 1954, during his Communist-hunting campaign of terror. Adapted by Clooney and Grant Heslov from their lauded 2005 movie of the same name, and using clips of the real McCarthy, it's a tale that pits truth against disinformation and those who sow it for their own political ends. David Cromer directs a cast that includes Will Dagger, one of Off Broadway's finest, making his Broadway bow as Don Hewitt, Heslov's role in the film. Read the review.
'The Picture of Dorian Gray'
Theatergoing admirers of the HBO drama 'Succession' love to ascribe its savvy artistry partly to the considerable stage chops among its cast. Now Sarah Snook, the Australian actor who played Shiv Roy — older sister to Kieran Culkin's Roman — makes her Broadway debut in Kip Williams's intricately high-tech retelling of Oscar Wilde's classic novel. Snook takes on all 26 characters, a feat that won her raves, and a 2024 Olivier Award, in the London run of this Sydney Theater Company production. Read the review.
'Gypsy'
Grabbing the baton first handed off by Ethel Merman, Audra McDonald plays the formidable Momma Rose in the fifth Broadway revival of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's exalted 1959 musical about a vaudeville stage mother and her daughters: June, the favorite child, and Louise, who becomes the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Directed by George C. Wolfe, with choreography by Camille A. Brown, the cast includes Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Jordan Tyson and Lesli Margherita. Read the review.
'Hell's Kitchen'
Alicia Keys's own coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical, which won two Tonys. Studded with Keys's songs, including 'Girl on Fire,' 'Fallin'' and 'Empire State of Mind,' it's the story of a 17-year-old girl (Maleah Joi Moon, last year's winner for best actress) in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, growing into an artist. Directed by Michael Greif, the show has a book by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Read the review.
Art
'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle'
How did the photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, go from hard-boiled shots of New York murder victims, criminal arrests and tenement fires during the 1930s and '40s — classic images that have never been equaled — to the cheesy distorted portraits of Hollywood celebrities that engaged him for the last 20 years of his life? That question is posed, if not persuasively answered, by this career-spanning retrospective. Like your family's ugly knickknacks that are sequestered in the attic, the lesser-known photographs of Weegee, from the late '40s until his death in 1968, have been mostly ignored by critics as an embarrassment. This is a rare chance to view the work and make a judgment. Read the review.
'Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature'
This is much more than a showcase of the Romantic icon 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,' the wistful rear view Caspar David Friedrich painted circa 1817, which has come to America for the first time. The show has some surprises for audiences who associate Friedrich, and early-19th-century art more generally, with calm and tranquillity. Organized with three German museums, the exhibition includes 88 paintings and drawings, of rocks gleaming in the moonlight, solitary crucifixes in evergreen forests, and lonely Germans gazing out onto the sea. Read the review.
'Picture Stories: Photographs by Arlene Gottfried'
Arlene Gottfried was drawn to everyday folks who sparkled with the flair of performers. And through her eyes, New York took on the excitement of a circus. In her heyday, during the 1970s and '80s, she prowled the city with her camera, finding colorful characters who responded with a knowing urban gaze. Typically, they were Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish, gay. In the neighborhoods where she lived and hung out — the Lower East Side, East Harlem, Crown Heights, Coney Island and Greenwich Village — these groups mixed freely, brewing up a heady cocktail that intoxicated her, as can be seen in this small, tantalizing exhibition at the New York Historical, to commemorate its recent acquisition of nearly 300 of Gottfried's photographs. Read the review.