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With spring comes fresh air, and rebirth. This is especially true on the packed culture horizon, which includes visits from Japanese Breakfast, Mary J. Blige, and Kim Gordon, a strong slate of Broadway revivals—Betty Boop! Gilbert and Sullivan! Chekhov, Williams, Mamet!—a newly renovated Frick Collection, plus the welcome return of “The Threepenny Opera” and PBS’s “Wolf Hall.” There are also movies from Wes Anderson, Ryan Coogler, and David Cronenberg, and, thank goodness—it’s almost summer, after all—a new “Mission Impossible.” Your subscription makes it possible for our critics to canvass the cultural landscape and bring you the best shows, films, concerts, exhibitions, and pop-ups in New York City and beyond—thank you for letting Goings On be your guide to the season.—Shauna Lyon
Jump to: Contemporary Music | The Theatre | Art | Dance | Classical Music | Television | Movies
Contemporary Music
Illustrations by Jesús CisnerosLeading Ladies, K-Pop Stars
As the memoirist Michelle Zauner, of “Crying in H Mart” fame, returns to her musical project Japanese Breakfast (National Sawdust; March 19), she sets the tone for a spring concert slate of renewal and reëmergence. Trevor Powers, who brought his Youth Lagoon project out of retirement in 2023, shares glowing new music built around unearthed home videos, at Warsaw, on April 24. After losing his wife and creative partner, Mimi Parker, to cancer, ending the band Low, Alan Sparhawk wades through distorted solo songs of grief at Elsewhere (April 2).
Wide-ranging jazz acts manifest the genre’s myriad paths. The L.A. soul and hip-hop producer and composer Adrian Younge, co-founder of Jazz Is Dead, arranges a ten-piece orchestra at Sultan Room (March 4-5). The British saxophonist and bandleader Nubya Garcia brings her epic 2024 album, “Odyssey,” to Music Hall of Williamsburg (April 5). On March 30, at Carnegie Hall, Samara Joy shows off the pipes that won her the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2023. Blurring the line between traditional and exploratory are Saul Williams (Blue Note; May 27-28) and the trio of the pianist Vijay Iyer, the saxophonist Henry Threadgill, and the drummer Dafnis Prieto (Jazz Gallery; May 30-31).
As K-pop continues to take over the Top Forty, members of its gate-crashing supergroups, BLACKPINK’s Jennie (Radio City Music Hall; March 10) and BTS’s j-hope (Barclays Center; March 13-14), set out on their own. A bit more cutting edge is ARTMS, a spinoff girl group whose 2024 début, “<Dall>,” pushed a historically twee genre toward the experimental (Town Hall; April 4). For the inverse, look no further than the British auteur FKA Twigs, whose tantalizing new album, “Eusexua,” recasts her avant-garde work for the club (Knockdown Center; April 3-4). Other titans of niche electronic music convene in Brooklyn. At Public Records, catch the multi-instrumentalist and dance-music maestro Ela Minus (March 18) and the ambient minimalist Tim Hecker (April 29-May 1). Darkside, a duo made up of Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington, brings “Nothing,” its first album in four years, to Brooklyn Steel (March 21-22). On March 25, at Warsaw, the Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens drifts off into the euphoria of “Dreamstate.”
But the season is dominated by artists experiencing a late-career bloom. At Beacon Theatre, the Portishead singer Beth Gibbons performs her solo début, “Lives Outgrown” (April 1). The queen of hip-hop soul Mary J. Blige takes on a home-town enthronement at Madison Square Garden (April 10). The singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, who has continued churning out classic Americana into her seventies, appears as a special guest for Heart’s Royal Flush tour (Radio City Music Hall; April 16). At Pioneer Works, Kim Gordon carries on her one-woman noise movement (May 2). And, in the spirit of restoration, the partners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings pay tribute to the rebuilt Woodland studio that defined their folk-fusionist sound (Carnegie Hall; May 7-8).—Sheldon Pearce
The Theatre
Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, Stanley and Stella
The retro atmosphere is strong this spring, kicking off with such musicals as Bob Martin, Susan Birkenhead, and David Foster’s “Boop!” (Broadhurst; beginning previews March 11), in which the titular nineteen-thirties cartoon Betty boop-a-doops into “reality,” and Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Rick Elice, and Bob Martin’s throwback backstage comedy “Smash” (Imperial; March 11), inspired by the NBC series from 2012 but emerging—Boop-like—into three dimensions.
Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren appear in Jason Robert Brown’s time-in-reverse musical, “The Last Five Years” (Hudson; March 18); the revue “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends” (Samuel J. Friedman; March 25) stars the tried-and-true divas Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga; and Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s 1994 musical, “Floyd Collins” (Vivian Beaumont; March 27), revisits a cave-in from 1925. A take on Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 treasure, “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” (Todd Haimes; April 4), cries ahoy; Itamar Moses, Erik Della Penna, and David Yazbek’s musical about a mummified desperado, “Dead Outlaw” (Longacre; April 12), does a do-si-do uptown; and Lisa Loomer, Joy Huerta, and Benjamin Velez set the beloved 2002 film “Real Women Have Curves” (James Earl Jones; April 1) to music.
Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor’s “Lights Out: Nat King Cole” (New York Theatre Workshop; April 23) stars Dulé Hill, and Jonathan Groff plays Bobby Darin in “Just in Time” (Circle in the Square; March 28). Dramas, too, get new life: LaChanze directs Alice Childress’s “Wine in the Wilderness,” from 1969 (Classic Stage; March 6); St. Ann’s Warehouse imports Benedict Andrews’s production of “The Cherry Orchard” (March 26); Awoye Timpo directs Wole Soyinka’s 1958 drama, “The Swamp Dwellers,” for Theatre for a New Audience (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; March 30); and Jack Cummings III revives William Inge’s “Bus Stop” (Classic Stage; May 8). The Wooster Group débuts “Nayatt School Redux” (Performing Garage; March 8), remaking their seminal “Nayatt School,” from 1978.
A season of retrospection will necessarily feature men behaving badly: Paul Mescal plays the violent Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (BAM; Feb 28); Kieran Culkin stars in David Mamet’s vicious “Glengarry Glen Ross” (Palace; March 10); Sarah Snook channels monstrosity, playing every character in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Music Box; March 10); and Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain” (Booth; March 20) knocks a certain hero off his pedestal. In George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” (Winter Garden; March 12), Clooney plays Edward R. Murrow, but his antagonist, the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy, appears only via archival footage.
For women behaving well, you’ll need to go farther afield. Maryann Plunkett confronts death in Abe Koogler’s exquisite “Deep Blue Sound” (Public; February 25); Crystal Lucas-Perry stars in “The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar),” by Nia Akilah Robinson, for Soho Rep (Peter Jay Sharp; in previews); and Deirdre O’Connell graces an evening of four elliptical works by the great Caryl Churchill, “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” (Public; April 3). The rest is memoir: Tommy Dorfman stars in Emil Weinstein’s dramatization of the trans rabbi Abby Chava Stein’s autobiography, “Becoming Eve” (Abrons Arts Center; March 19); Ryan J. Haddad talks about falling in love in “Hold Me in the Water” (Playwrights Horizons; April 10); Adil Mansoor’s solo “Amm(i)gone” (Flea; March 13) addresses his family’s homophobia; and Shayok Misha Chowdhury follows “Public Obscenities” with “Rheology” (Bushwick Starr; April 22), an onstage collaboration with his physicist mother.—Helen Shaw
Art
Abstract Textiles, Revisionist Porcelain, the Frick Returns
If you like blockbusters, some MOMA visits are in order this spring. There are close to two hundred works in “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” (opening March 23), the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective, and—even considering that he painted, drew, and sculpted from the nineteen-sixties to the twenty-tens—they are ridiculously various. Blockbuster No. 2 is “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” (April 20), in which fibre artists ranging from the early twentieth century (Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch) to the present (Igshaan Adams, Rosemarie Trockel) paint a picture of a visual avant-garde that was not, first and foremost, concerned with painting pictures.
Another traditionally feminine medium, porcelain, is the star and possible villain of “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition (March 25) takes a wary view of its own contents, which span half a millennium, arguing that the West acted out its daydreams of a docile Orient one cup-and-saucer at a time. The museum also honors the centennial of the American painter John Singer Sargent’s death, with “Sargent and Paris” (April 27)—another show about racy fantasies of foreignness, in a way. Inevitably, everything is centered on the artist’s early masterpiece, “Portrait of Madame X,” the painting that made French society pant. Yes, it’s in the Met’s permanent collection, but a year without a Sargent exhibition somewhere is like a lovely young heiress without a secure dress strap.
The reopening of the Frick Collection, on April 17, following almost five years of renovations, should make everyone pant. There is a host of new goodies to reward us for our patience, including sculptures by the Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky and a stunning roomful of drawings by Goya, Degas, and others, too fragile for long-term display but on view through the summer, at least. The building’s second floor, previously off limits, will be full of ceramics and Bouchers from now on, much as it was when actual Fricks lived there.
A day later and a mile north, the Guggenheim Museum opens “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” a major survey of one of the most intriguing American artists of the past twenty-five years. If you know him, you probably know “The Broken Five,” the huge, howling mosaic inspired by the Central Park Five; if not, it’s here, along with almost ninety of its siblings. By the time you exit, their scrawls and dried-shit textures should be almost as recognizable as the Coca-Cola logo.
Another mile north, at El Museo del Barrio, “Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” (April 24) honors the multidisciplinary artist with her first large-scale museum survey. Like Johnson, Alvarez has hopped between figuration, abstraction, and conceptualism; her finest work, though, may be her “Air Paintings,” the ingenious flypapers of acrylic, ink, enamel, and glitter which are incapable of being dull for even one square millimetre.
Spring ends with the Morgan Library’s “Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron” (May 30), a celebration of the early photographer who lived on the Isle of Wight and, when she was nearing fifty, started taking pictures of her friends. If you were trying to preserve as much of Victorian England as possible and had only one Victorian’s work to help, you could do a lot worse than these images; everybody’s here, from Tennyson to Darwin, looking wistful and profound and utterly unamused. Brood with them all summer long.—Jackson Arn
Dance
Portraits of the Artists
Martha Graham was known for laying bare the inner landscapes of her female protagonists, with psyches as incandescent as hot coals. Several works in Martha Graham Dance Company’s spring season (Joyce Theatre; April 1-13), such as the second act of “Clytemnestra,” “Errand Into the Maze,” and “Frontier,” share this burning intensity. But “Deaths and Entrances” (1943), which the company brings back after a long absence, is a particularly interesting case, a portrait of a woman artist—Emily Brönte, originally danced by Graham herself—who, like Graham, fights to preserve her creative impulse.
The dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, too, probes the vicissitudes of a creative life in “Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin . . . the un-Ailey?,” an outgrowth of the Whitney’s recent excitingly multifaceted “Edges of Ailey” exhibit. Jones, still vigorous at seventy-two, moves through space with ferocious intent while conjuring stories from the past: early dance sensations, tense interactions with the legendary Ailey, and clashes with critics who tried to box him in as a Black artist. “Do you require moral fervor from Merce Cunningham?” he asks, still furious at the notion. “Memory Piece” alternates with a new work for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company that explores the limits of personal freedom, “People, Places & Things.” (New York Live Arts; May 15-24.)
A little more than a year ago, New York City Ballet unveiled a work inspired by an image from the Russian invasion of Ukraine—a man holding his dead son’s hand after a missile strike. The ballet, “Solitude,” by Alexei Ratmansky, is by turns surreal, harrowing, and poetic, a surprisingly stark statement for a medium not known for tackling explicitly political topics. The piece returns for City Ballet’s spring season (David H. Koch Theatre; April 22-June 1), in a program that also includes Justin Peck’s newest work for the company, “Mystic Familiar,” an elegant display of dreamy youthfulness with music by Dan Deacon and designs by the artist Eamon Ore-Giron. Also not to be missed is a program of ballets set to the music of Maurice Ravel, including a delicate and stylish pas de deux by George Balanchine, “Sonatine.”
Not one for introspection or psychologizing, Twyla Tharp instead brings technical dazzle and musical understanding to the stage at City Center (March 12-16). As usual, there is a new piece, set to Philip Glass’s meandering “Aguas de Amazonia.” But I would place my bets on the older work, “Diabelli” (1998), set to Beethoven’s eponymous piano variations, themselves a feast of invention, wit, and intricacy. This is ideal material for Tharp, whose brain thrives on complexity and minute variations in form. And then there is her energizing effect on dancers, who on this occasion include Renan Cerdeiro, until recently of Miami City Ballet—a classical dancer through and through—and the unstoppable Daisy Jacobson.
In recent years, the tap artist Ayodele Casel has turned her mind to Latin jazz, tap history, and the improvisations of Max Roach, but this spring she embraces something new: early hip-hop. “I love the way the music swings,” she says of the as yet untitled show, at the Joyce (May 28-June 8)—and “the way tap dancing and words come together.”—Marina Harss
Classical Music
“The Threepenny Opera,” J’Nai Bridges
“An aria about an important squirrel” may not be what you’d expect to encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this is one of the things that Joseph Keckler—an artist of operatic talent and irreverent taste—promises the audience at “A Good Night in the Trauma Garden,” newly commissioned for the lapidary surroundings of the museum’s Petrie Court (May 9-10). Across the park and its springtime buzz, birds, not rodents, feature in “Die Zauberflöte,” opening March 23 at the Metropolitan Opera, though they might be overshadowed by Kathryn Lewek’s famed turn as Queen of the Night. If that’s not enough Mozart, or enough farce, “Le Nozze di Figaro” (opening March 31) is quickly followed on the same stage by Rossini’s prequel, “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” (opening April 15), which finds Figaro, the eponymous barber, in his madcap salad days.
Fantastic beasts may seem less out of place in the New York Philharmonic’s performance of movie music by John Williams (May 7-9) or, indeed, of a new monodrama called “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” composed and sung by Kate Soper and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel (May 22-24, 27). At Carnegie Hall, Bernard Labadie, making his final appearance as the conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, leads that ensemble and La Chapelle de Québec in the “St. John Passion,” the spikier of Bach’s two surviving Easter oratorios (April 10). Music by Shostakovich forms the backbone of a visit by the Boston Symphony, which pairs a symphony apiece with outings from Mitsuko Uchida, playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 (April 23) and Yo-Yo Ma, playing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 (April 24). The Gateways Festival Orchestra, an ensemble that brings together top players of African descent from around the country, plays symphonies by Dawson and Dvořák, and accompanies J’Nai Bridges, a mezzo-soprano of burnished tones, in a selection of songs and spirituals (April 27). A month later, the pianist Evgeny Kissin convenes another supergroup—Gidon Kremer, Maxim Rysanov, and Gautier Capuçon—for a rare all-in-one performance of Shostakovich’s singular sonatas for violin, viola, and cello (May 28).
Elsewhere, the viol player Jordi Savall and his ensemble Hespèrion XXI bring pieces from Renaissance England and Catalonia to the 92nd Street Y (April 11), and the choir Stile Antico honors Palestrina’s five-hundredth anniversary at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (March 29). BAM mounts “The Threepenny Opera,” Brecht’s savage satire of capitalism on the brink (April 3-6). The Brooklyn Art Song Society’s New Voices Festival, which punctuates the spring, features recent works for the voice, including Juhi Bansal’s “Love, Loss, and Exile,” which sets traditional Pashtun landays, originally sung by Afghan women, to liquid piano-and-cello accompaniment (April 6, May 4, June 1). And, at Roulette, the Palestinian American oud player Simon Shaheen presents a program of music from the Arab world (April 26).—Fergus McIntosh
Television
“Wolf Hall,” Jon Hamm, a Cinephile Studio Head
If there was a “peak” in the streaming wars, it was in 2022, when the number of scripted series débuting in a single year reached six hundred—too many shows for anyone to keep track of, let alone watch. Now that the battle is over and the fire hose of content has been dialled back, industry observers and TV lovers alike are left wondering what kind of programming this new era of contraction will bring.
If this spring is anything to judge by, the networks’ and the streamers’ favored weapon in the fight for eyeballs is high-concept hooks. Many of the new series in the next few months seem designed for simple yet catchy loglines. Take, for instance, the Jon Hamm vehicle “Your Friends and Neighbors” (April 11), an Apple TV+ drama in which a floundering former finance guy turns to stealing from the homes in his fancy suburban enclave to maintain his life style. Also entering a life of crime are the pampered protagonists of Hulu’s “Deli Boys” (March 6), a pair of Pakistani American brothers who, after their father’s sudden death, discover that the family’s wealth came from a much more unsavory source than its convenience-store empire—and that they might have the grit to take their father’s place. However quickly they get in over their heads, they probably don’t have as much to worry about as the loyal friends in Apple TV+’s “Dope Thief” (March 14). Ridley Scott directs Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura in the first episode of a tale in which two small-fry thieves rob a drug den and become the target of a relentless kingpin.
On the lighter side, Netflix premières “With Love, Meghan” (March 4)—Meghan Markle’s life-style series about cooking, gardening, and being friends with celebrities—after a two-month delay. For those who prefer a bit more edge to their downtime, there’s “The Studio” (March 26), an Apple TV+ comedy about a recently promoted studio head (played by Seth Rogen) who must sacrifice his cinephile sacred cows at every turn to do his job.
Of course, the season’s most anticipated shows are probably the returning favorites. HBO is on the cusp of dominating Sunday nights again with the follow-up season of the hauntingly fungal post-apocalyptic drama “The Last of Us” (April 13), in which a mutant mushroom strain causes mass zombiedom. Sunday mornings, meanwhile, are proverbially soon to be dedicated to the network’s megachurch comedy, “The Righteous Gemstones” (March 9), which comes back for its fourth and final season. Also wrapping up their runs are the “Star Wars” spinoff “Andor” (April 22), on Disney+, and the serial-killer satire-thriller “You” (April 24), on Netflix.
Spring will also see two less conventional returns. In Netflix’s “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” (March 12), the comedian hosts a live weekly talk show, which builds on his earlier six-part experiment “Everybody’s in LA.” And in PBS’s “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” (March 23), Mark Rylance resumes his celebrated turn as Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s devious yet doomed adviser, after a ten-year hiatus. Heavy is the head that wears the crown; heavier still is the heart that loses the king’s favor.—Inkoo Kang
Movies
De Niro’s Gangsters, Coogler’s “Sinners”
Action takes many forms, whether on a grand scale or at arm’s length, in upcoming movies, including “Black Bag” (opening March 14), a spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp. It stars Cate Blanchett as an intelligence officer accused of espionage and Michael Fassbender as the officer’s husband, a fellow-agent, who is torn between his personal and professional loyalties. The director Barry Levinson’s latest film, “The Alto Knights” (March 21), named for an erstwhile social club in Little Italy, is a gangster drama, written by Nicholas Pileggi, in which Robert De Niro plays the dual role of the real-life nineteen-fifties mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. Alex Garland, whose 2024 film “Civil War” was a military fantasy, sticks close to history with “Warfare” (April 11), co-written and co-directed by Ray Mendoza, whose experiences as a Navy SEAL during the Iraq War are the basis of the story. Mendoza is also the main character, played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, and again does his own stunts, in “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” (May 23), directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
The supernatural realm dominates some of the most eagerly anticipated new films. “Sinners” (April 18), the director Ryan Coogler’s first film since “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” is set in the South, during the Jim Crow era; Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers who return to the family’s home town and confront evil in both practical and mystical forms. The octogenarian David Cronenberg’s new horror drama “The Shrouds” (April 18), set in a high-tech near future, stars Vincent Cassel as a widowed scientist who devises a camera and software to observe corpses in their graves and discovers that the system has been hacked for malevolent purposes. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (May 9), directed by Kogonada, stars Colin Farrell as a man whose mysteriously equipped car leads him to a woman (Margot Robbie) and takes them on a wondrous road trip.
Trouble is all in the family in a varied array of new movies, such as the French thriller “Misericordia” (March 21), directed by Alain Guiraudie. It’s set in a rural village, where a young man (Félix Kysyl) attends the funeral of a baker who’d mentored him, stays with the baker’s widow (Catherine Frot), and comes into conflict with her son (Jean-Baptiste Durand). Tracie Laymon’s first feature, “Bob Trevino Likes It” (March 21), is the quasi-autobiographical story of a woman (Barbie Ferreira) who, in a search for her estranged father (French Stewart), instead connects with another man of the same name (John Leguizamo). Wes Anderson’s new film, “The Phoenician Scheme” (May 30), is tightly under wraps but is described as being about a family and its business; it stars Benicio del Toro as a European tycoon and Mia Threapleton as his daughter, a nun. The teeming cast includes Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, and Hope Davis.
Movies themselves are a subject of the season, as in the Chinese director Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film” (March 14), a drama about a filmmaker’s effort to complete a long-abandoned project that again stalls because of COVID lockdowns. Duke Johnson’s “The Actor” (March 14), based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, stars André Holland in the title role of a performer who, after an assault, has amnesia and must rediscover his identity and his art. “Being Maria” (March 21) is a biographical drama, directed by Jessica Palud, about the traumatic experiences endured by the actress Maria Schneider (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) during the shoot of “Last Tango in Paris”; Giuseppe Maggio plays the film’s director, Bernardo Bertolucci; Matt Dillon plays Schneider’s co-star, Marlon Brando.—Richard Brody
P.S. Good stuff on the Internet:
- So you want to be an actor
- “Poog” rules for life
- Remembering Roberta Flack
Sourse: newyorker.com
