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New York Times
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What to Do in New York City in April
Comedy Matteo Lane A man of many talents, Matteo Lane used to live in Italy working as a painter and an opera singer before he returned to Chicago to start his comedy career. Since moving to New York City more than a decade ago, Lane has become a favorite at the Comedy Cellar, where he filmed 'The Advice Special' in 2022 and its follow-up 'Hair Plugs & Heartache' in 2023. Lane has also appeared in the L.G.B.T.Q. stand-up documentary 'Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution,' as well as in episodes of 'Abbott Elementary' and 'Survival of the Thickest.' Lane's recipe and essay collection, 'Your Pasta Sucks: A 'Cookbook,'' came out on Tuesday, while his first special for Hulu, 'Matteo Lane: The Al Dente Special,' will premiere on May 16. Tickets to his performance at Radio City Music Hall on Saturday start at $46.50 on Ticketmaster. SEAN L. McCARTHY Music Kylie Minogue A career entertainer, Kylie Minogue has released some 17 studio albums since her 1988 debut — a vast discography that earned her the designation of all-time highest-selling solo artist in Australia. Over the years, she has made stylistic detours, venturing into R&B with 'Body Language' in 2003 and country-tinged pop with 'Golden' in 2018, but she always found her way back to her lodestar: the disco ball. Despite her reputation abroad, Minogue has struggled to make comparable inroads in the American market. But she managed to capture a slice of the culture in 2023 with 'Padam Padam,' an onomatopoeic sizzler that was championed by queer listeners and earned her a Grammy, her first in two decades. This weekend, Minogue will ride the success of 'Padam Padam' to back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden. Tickets start at $54.50 on Ticketmaster. OLIVIA HORN Marshall Allen About a month shy of his 101st birthday, the saxophonist Marshall Allen will present the first live concert of the time-crossed, space-tinged, warmly inviting tunes that have made his debut solo album, 'New Dawn' (released in February on Week-End Records), such a pleasure. Past, present and future meld as the record finds Allen, a key collaborator with Sun Ra since 1958 and leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra since the early '90s, laying down of-the-moment cosmic grooves and bringing fresh life to long-gone popular sounds, like Ellington-esque blues and ballads or a boogie-woogie cut fit for a sci-fi beach party. At Roulette, Allen, whose sax remains a gutsy thrill, will lead a jazz sextet joined by a string quartet and the singer Rochelle Thompson. Tickets are $45 in advance on Roulette's website and $55 at the door. For more jazz that explores the spaceways, head to Sistas' Place in Brooklyn every Saturday in April to hear sets from other associates of Sun Ra, starting with a quartet headed by the trombonist Dick Griffin. ALAN SCHERSTUHL Kids 'The Magic City' Philomena knows all about bereavement: Her parents died when she was a baby. Now 9, she feels abandoned again. Helen, the beloved half sister who is raising her, plans to marry a widower with a 7-year-old son, Lucas. Helen sees this as a happy expansion of their family; Philomena views it as a betrayal. The little girl's emotions fuel the plot of 'The Magic City,' a show that is magical itself. Based on a 1910 novel by Edith Nesbit and presented by Manual Cinema, a Chicago company that combines live theater and music with filmlike effects, the hourlong play does more than explore the challenges of a blended household. It also celebrates the power of imagination. Created by Drew Dir, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Sarah Fornace (who also directs and stars), the production uses puppetry, cutouts and projections to draw the audience into Philomena's life and the fanciful toy cities she constructs from ordinary objects. When she and Lucas (Jeffrey Paschal) find themselves trapped inside one of these worlds, Philomena begins to learn how to share the space in her heart. Tickets to the remaining performances, on Saturday at noon and 5 p.m. and Sunday at 11 a.m., start at $20 on the New Victory's website. LAUREL GRAEBER Dance Ailey II The sleek headquarters of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater inHell's Kitchen is always abuzz with dance: classes, training programs, rehearsals and performances that illustrate the metamorphosis from student to professional. Since 1974, the company's ensemble for early career dancers, now called Ailey II, has been showcasing the extraordinary talent soon to populate the main company or other top dance troupes. Ailey II's annual spring showcase runs through this weekend with two programs mixing classic repertory with new works. On Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m., the lineup includes 'Luminous' by Ailey II's artistic director, Francesca Harper, honoring the ensemble's 50th anniversary, and 'Down the Rabbit Hole,' a premiere from Houston Thomas that is inspired by 'The Matrix' films. That dance also appears on the bill for Thursday at 7:30 p.m., as well as on Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., joining 'John 4:20' by the exciting hip-hop duo Baye & Asa, and an excerpt from 'Divining' by the revered Ailey dancer and director Judith Jamison, who died in November. Tickets start at $59 on the Alvin Ailey website. BRIAN SCHAEFER Theater 'Othello' Denzel Washington made a Broadway box-office hit out of 'Julius Caesar' two decades ago. On the big screen, he has played Macbeth. Now he takes on Shakespeare's Othello, the honorable general and smitten newlywed. Jake Gyllenhaal is his foil as the perfidious Iago, who goads Othello into unreasoning jealousy with lies about his beloved Desdemona (Molly Osborne). Directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony winner for his revival of 'A Raisin in the Sun,' which also starred Washington. 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. 'The Outsiders' Rival gangs in a musical who aren't the Sharks and the Jets? Here they're the Greasers and the Socs, driven by class enmity just as they were in S.E. Hinton's 1967 young adult novel and Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film. Set in a version of Tulsa, Okla., where guys have names like Ponyboy and Sodapop, this new adaptation is the show with the rainstorm rumble you've heard about. It won four Tonys, including best musical and best direction, by Danya Taymor. With a book by Adam Rapp with Justin Levine, it has music and lyrics by Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) and Levine. Read the review. 'Redwood' The Tony winner Idina Menzel ('Wicked') returns to Broadway for the first time in a decade, teaming up with the relentlessly inventive director Tina Landau ('Mother Play') to tell the story of a woman who retreats from her usual life to heal from grief in a giant tree in a redwood forest. Conceived by Landau and Menzel, and seen in its premiere last season at La Jolla Playhouse in California, this new musical has a book by Landau, music by Kate Diaz and lyrics by Landau and Diaz. Read the review. Art 'The Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism' Conceived as a tribute to the great midcentury Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-88), this exhibition does an admirable job of balancing simplicity of conception with opulence of execution. Colored windows in one section turn cactuses orange and purple as the sun moves across the sky; potted orchids in the aquatic plants and vines gallery fill the room with fragrance even as they draw your attention to water lilies and water poppies; an adjoining show of stylish photographs by Martirene Alcántara, in the garden's nearby Ross Gallery, takes you directly into Barragán's sharp but explosively colorful walls and corners. But I'd recommend making some quick choices before the abundance goes to your head. Take a deep breath, pick a single flower — like a Phalaenopsis Taida Day, whose white sepals are marked with elegant purple veins — and look closely. Read the review. '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 1940s 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.
New York Times
01-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Hair Transplants and the New Male Vanity
Last year, I noticed that two comedians I like talked about getting hair transplants. One of them, Matteo Lane, named his special 'Hair Plugs & Heartache,' which opens with an extended bit about the transplant experience. I appreciated Lane's radical (and very funny) transparency regarding the cosmetic enhancement. He talked about the expense, described the 10-hour surgery and the long recovery, and joked about his hair growing in gradually 'like a Chia pet.' He's very happy with the outcome. Lane also talks about why he got his surgery in the United States instead of in Turkey. He said he didn't want to go through customs with his head swollen like the alien from the movie 'Mars Attacks': 'I want to be ugly at home.' Going to Turkey to get a cheaper hair transplant is such a cliché that there's an entire genre of social media video dedicated to depicting men's beef carpaccio heads on 'Turkish hairlines' flying back to their homes from Istanbul. The British tabloid The Mirror just ran a story about one regular bloke who traveled to Turkey for hair transplant surgery and is quoted as saying that he feels he has 'a new lease of life.' This is a marked change from just a few years ago, when men were less forthcoming about getting surgery on their domes. In 2021, my newsroom colleague Alex Williams wrote about the men who got hair transplants during the locked-down days of the pandemic. 'There's still that old stigma, where guys aren't supposed to worry about how they look and spend a lot of money on their appearance,' one hair transplant recipient said at the time. That stigma is very old, indeed. There's long been anxiety over hair loss among men, according to Martin Johnes, a professor of modern history at Swansea University in Wales who has researched masculinity, modernity and male baldness. But the stress really started ramping up in the 1930s, when men stopped wearing hats regularly and popular media started valorizing youthfulness more aggressively. In the 1930s, it was considered effeminate to pay too much attention to your appearance yet many of these men still wanted to take action if they were unlucky enough to go bald. They called baldness obscene, a major disaster and, poetically, a favored nightmare. One 30-year-old upholsterer said: While the bad feelings around baldness clearly aren't new, talking about those feelings in public is. And hair replacement technology has improved so much in the last couple of decades that transplants look real now — it's not just snake oil or cheesy infomercials for hair in a can anymore. I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I have a bit of schadenfreude. Turnabout is fair play. Men have long been allowed to — with some exceptions — age naturally without being seen as less potent or virile or attractive. They have been allowed to steer clear of the unending pressure that women deal with for their whole lives. If we're expected to look young and hot forever in an increasingly superficial society where we're all selling ourselves on social media constantly, shouldn't they be, too? This question has more salience now in the age of affordable hair replacement. I'm also very much in favor of honesty around any kind of cosmetic procedures. It's far more damaging to normies when we allow celebrities to convince us that they just look like that, as if the rest of us are genetically inferior or doing something wrong. Most 40-something women do not have baby-smooth unlined foreheads from 'eating clean,' and most 40-something men do not have the same naturally lustrous crop of hair they had at 19. And yet, my more rational, generous self finds the whole thing to be kind of a bummer. It would be better for everyone if our idea of what is attractive expanded, and our ideals of beauty broadened to allow people to show their age without intervention. Older does not have to de facto mean uglier. It's not a moral judgment on anyone who chooses to get surgery or injections; believe me, I get it, and I can't promise I'll never succumb to the pressure again myself. I just hate that the pressure exists. I'll always ultimately believe that forcing men to adhere to ever narrower standards of beauty and torturing them with unrealistic expectations isn't the kind of equality I want. I also need to remind any men reading this who are feeling bad about their hair loss that Jason Statham and Taye Diggs exist. I'm trying out something new at the end of my newsletter, where instead of just adding links related to the topic I'm writing about, I'm going to chat a little bit about what I'm reading and watching for pleasure. We could all use a bit of fun and distraction from the news right now. If you've got any thoughts or comments, you can always drop me a line here. Thank you for being a subscriber Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
