What to See and Experience Live in New York This Spring

Broadway

‘TAKE ME OUT’ Peanuts and crackerjacks may not be available at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater, but anyone who thinks that live theater is the ultimate spectator sport should root for the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s comedy. Set in the locker room of a professional baseball team, the play stars Jesse Williams (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as a big-shot player who wants to come out as gay. Openly queer athletes are somewhat more common than when Greenberg wrote the play, which debuted at the Public Theater in 2002 and later won three Tony Awards. But they remain a rarity in team sports. So the play’s conversations around excellence, sexuality and the boundaries between public and private lives, should still make it around the bases. Scott Ellis directs, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”) and Patrick Adams (“Suits”) co-star. ALEXIS SOLOSKI
Previews begin March 10; opens April 4 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan.

‘FUNNY GIRL’ It’s hard to think of another Golden Age megahit that hasn’t had a Broadway revival. Surely it’s not the fault of the terrific songs, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, including “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “People.” And though the original book isn’t top-notch, it gets the job done, telling the story of the comedian Fanny Brice from teenage years to stardom by way of romantic catastrophe. No, the reason is simple: Barbra Streisand. Nearly 60 years after creating the role, she essentially still owns it. So let’s just say for now that the delightful Beanie Feldstein, who heads this revival, is borrowing it. Whether she can make the production, directed by Michael Mayer and with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, as memorable as the first — well, check back in 60 years. JESSE GREEN
Previews begin March 26; opens April 24 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan.

‘MACBETH’ Is it ever not “Macbeth” time? “The Scottish Play,” as superstitious theater folk call it, has had nearly 50 Broadway productions since 1768, each age no doubt finding in it an echo of its own. In ours, the toxic brew of ambition and credulousness seems to resound most clearly. Will the director Sam Gold, whose takes on “King Lear” and “The Glass Menagerie” were so divisive, draw the modern parallels? All I can say for sure is that with Daniel Craig (a memorably blasé Iago in Gold’s downtown “Othello” in 2016) and Ruth Negga (a riveting Hamlet in 2020) as the suggestible Macbeth and his suggestive Lady, this revival should be a deep dive into cold water. JESSE GREEN
Previews begin March 29; opens April 28 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.

‘FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF’ The year before her death in 2018, the playwright Ntozake Shange went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to see a program by the choreographer Camille A. Brown. It was the first time they met, but they soon saw each other again — and Brown found herself in the startling position of hearing Shange, the revered author of the landmark choreopoem “For Colored Girls,” ask to interview her about her work, because she so enjoyed Brown’s movement language. Dance is elemental to “For Colored Girls,” which first opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for nearly two years, with Shange herself as the Lady in Orange, one of the rainbow of women of color who tell their stories in the play. Revived at the Public Theater in 2019 with Brown (“Once on This Island”) as choreographer, it comes to Broadway this spring with Brown both directing and choreographing. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Previews begin April 1; opens April 20 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan.

‘THE MINUTES’ Tracy Letts kills with laughs. In his 2007 breakthrough, “August: Osage County,” the victim was the American family. In “Linda Vista,” which hit Broadway in 2019, men took the blade of his scythe. In those plays, and in many others, he gets you rooting for the worst people until you realize you are then complicit in their destructiveness. “The Minutes,” directed by Letts’s frequent collaborator Anna D. Shapiro, is a 90-minute comedy satirizing the workings of a self-satisfied bureaucracy in a fictional Midwestern city called Big Cherry. It features a cast of Letts experts, including Ian Barford, Blair Brown, K. Todd Freeman, Sally Murphy and, as Mayor Superba, Letts himself. But if it looks like he’s wielding his usual weapons, the target is even bigger than before: America’s idea of its own goodness. JESSE GREEN
Previews begin April 2; opens April 17 at Studio 54, Manhattan.

‘A STRANGE LOOP’ Since it premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, Michael R. Jackson’s searingly funny and heartbreakingly frank musical “A Strange Loop,” in which he reflected on his experience as a young, queer Black man, has gone on to earn critical raves and a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Now, Page 73, Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth are bringing the acclaimed production to Broadway, with Jaquel Spivey in the central role of a musical theater writer working as an usher at “The Lion King” and whose thoughts come to blistering life as a sort of Greek chorus. Jackson dismantles orthodoxies with verve and bite, and reserves some of his most pointed barbs for such institutions as church and Tyler Perry. You may never think of that Atlanta mogul the same way again. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Previews begin April 6; opens April 26 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan.

‘HANGMEN’ After Martin McDonagh’s slow-burn thriller was forced to close with the rest of Broadway in March 2020, its producers declared that it couldn’t come back. But McDonagh (“The Pillowman,” “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”) has a way with a plot twist. So here is one more: This 1960s-set work of psychological suspense will return to the same theater, with a somewhat altered cast. Gone is Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as a magnetic London lowlife; in his place is Alfie Allen (“Game of Thrones”). Mark Addy, who played an executioner turned pub owner in the North of England, has also been replaced, by David Threlfall. What remains in this production, which originated at the Royal Court in London, are McDonagh’s shocking gifts: for taut plotting, sharp dialogue and a theatrical style that balances each play on a knife’s edge of comedy and terror. Matthew Dunster directs. ALEXIS SOLOSKI
Previews begin April 8; opens April 21 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.

Off Broadway

‘CONFEDERATES’ Dominique Morisseau, one of the most exciting playwrights working today, is best known for her Detroit cycle, which feels like the magnificent progeny of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. She makes magic with language: Her characters are real, her metaphors are sharp, and her dialogue reads like poetry. Morisseau’s work was on Broadway earlier this season with “Skeleton Crew,” and she follows that with the New York premiere of “Confederates,” which tackles institutional racism as it’s experienced by two Black women who live over a century apart. Stori Ayers directs. MAYA PHILLIPS
Previews begin March 8; opens March 27 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan.

‘SUFFS’ There’s a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!” in which the camera pans a silent assembly of musical theater writers: essential composers and lyricists of the 21st-century New York stage. Blink and you miss her, but Shaina Taub is in there. So don’t blink, and definitely don’t miss her work. The subject of her latest musical, “Suffs,” is the fight, just over a century ago, for American women’s right to vote. The topic might sound potentially dry as dust, or doctrinaire to a fatal degree. But Taub, a musical magpie with a wholly distinctive voice, has a genius for storytelling that’s smart and political but also playful and funny; for proof, see her tuneful adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” And while she’s lately teamed up with Elton John to write the Broadway-bound musical “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Suffs” is all hers. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Previews begin March 10; opens April 6 at the Public Theater, Manhattan.

‘BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS’ The composer-librettist Huang Ruo and the director-designer Basil Twist are calling their new work choral theater, but it’s also puppetry on an operatic scale — bold, elegant, monumental. Adapted from Chinese myths and delayed from its American premiere when the Omicron variant shut down the Prototype Festival in January, “Book of Mountains & Seas” arrives for its brief run at St. Ann’s Warehouse with 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and a half dozen nimble puppeteers. First performed last year in Copenhagen, it’s a sensory immersion of sound, light and movement that feels sometimes as if elements of Twist’s most famous puppet piece, “Symphonie Fantastique,” had escaped the water tank to soar majestically in the open air. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
March 15-20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.

‘HARMONY’ Back in 2019, The New York Times trumpeted that after taking off at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1997 and spending more than two decades circling the runway, Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s labor-of-love musical “Harmony” — about the German vocal sextet the Comedian Harmonists, which was immensely popular between the two world wars — was going to have its Off Broadway premiere. In the spring of 2020. Now, the show is finally arriving, with the choreographer-director Warren Carlyle overseeing a cast led by Chip Zien and Sierra Boggess. If nothing else, this is another sign that after its Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof” and its recent collaboration with New York City Opera on “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” the producing National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene has become a force on the New York musical landscape. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Previews begin March 23; opens April 13 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan.

‘CYRANO DE BERGERAC’ There is no shortage of variations on Edmond Rostand’s 19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in which the brilliant but big-nosed Cyrano writes beautiful love poems that his handsome but — let’s say, less brilliant — comrade Christian passes off for his own to impress Roxane, a woman whom Cyrano himself loves. Next up is the Jamie Lloyd Company’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” adapted by Martin Crimp and directed by Lloyd, which will come to Brooklyn from a critically acclaimed run in London. It’s a slick, modern version, with Cyrano using rap and spoken word as his means of seduction. Starring as Cyrano is James McAvoy, who often seems to alter his very foundations — his voice and mannerisms, his energy, his whole physical presence — for a role. MAYA PHILLIPS
Previews begin April 5; opens April 14 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music.

‘A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD’ Samuel D. Hunter has built a rich oeuvre from fertile ground: the Idaho landscapes of his youth. His deceptively quiet plays (“Lewiston/ Clarkston,” “A Bright New Boise,” “Greater Clements”) explore faith, desire, sex and loss, in dialogue attuned to the rhythms of ordinary speech. The MacArthur Foundation acknowledged his ability to create “dramas that explore the human capacity for empathy and confront the socially isolating aspects of contemporary life across the American landscape.” This new play, directed by David Cromer, is again set in Idaho — and is perhaps the most intimate he has written. It has just two characters, men working to understand what the world does and doesn’t owe them. Though Hunter often prefers characters on what he calls “the losing end of American life,” he has promised that this new play is hopeful. ALEXIS SOLOSKI
Previews begin April 12; opens May 2 at Signature Theater, Manhattan.

‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ The vagaries of postponements and rescheduling now give us two nearly simultaneous opportunities to discover the world of Sanaz Toossi, a young first-generation Iranian American playwright from Orange County, Calif. Hot on the heels of “English” (at the Atlantic Theater Company), which looks at a small group of Iranians preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, “Wish You Were Here” follows five young women in Karaj, a suburb of Tehran. (The actress Marjan Neshat appears in both shows.) They are about 20 when the play begins, in 1978, and we stay with them until 1991 as they navigate not only their friendship, but also their sense of home and belonging. A revolution is unfolding, followed by war with Iraq; life-changing decisions must be made. Toossi reunites with Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who directed last year’s audio version from the Williamsburg Theater Festival and Audible. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Previews begin April 13; opens May 2 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan.

‘WEDDING BAND’ Alice Childress was a force to be reckoned with in the theater, even if she didn’t always get her due. After all, she would have been the first Black female playwright on Broadway if she hadn’t refused to compromise on her work. That would-be first was her play “Trouble in Mind,” which finally premiered on Broadway last fall. How fortunate we are to get her follow-up to “Trouble,” “Wedding Band,” a rarely produced play about an illicit interracial relationship in the South during World War I. Awoye Timpo directs this, only the second New York production, with modern race politics — including the Black Lives Matter movement — as the trouble in mind. MAYA PHILLIPS
Previews begin April 23; opens May 1 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn.

‘THE BEDWETTER’ Sorry, “Urinetown,” you’re not the only musical about a certain bodily function anymore. Subtitled “Stories of Redemption, Courage, and Pee” Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir is frank, vulnerable and, of course, brutally funny. Chances are good these qualities will be present in this musical adaptation, since Silverman herself wrote the book with the playwright Joshua Harmon (“Prayer for the French Republic”), as well as the lyrics, with the composer Adam Schlesinger. The show is bound to be bittersweet: Schlesinger, who is best known for his scores for Broadway’s “Cry-Baby” and the TV series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died of coronavirus complications in April 2020, around the time “The Bedwetter” was originally scheduled to premiere. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Previews begin April 30; opens May 23 at the Linda Gross Theater, Atlantic Theater Company.

‘WHO KILLED MY FATHER’ At the intersection of memoir, sociological study and call to arms, the French writer Édouard Louis’s books, which often dissect his working-class upbringing, have become an unlikely inspiration for successful plays. Two of them, “The End of Eddy” and “History of Violence,” even opened in New York the same week in 2019. Now, Louis is even more directly involved in the theatricalization of his own life: He is starring in a stage version of “Who Killed My Father,” in which he intermingled a look at the destructive impact of physical work on his father’s body with a takedown of France’s class structure. The production reunites Louis with the brilliant German director Thomas Ostermeier, who also staged “History of Violence.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Previews begin May 18; opens May 22 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.

Pop

BURNA BOY Nigerian Afrobeats has gathered a worldwide audience through sleek understatement: an insinuating basic beat that’s equal parts syncopation and silence, productions that conjure bassy depths and open spaces, singers who offer calm confidence rather than histrionics. The pandemic derailed international touring for Afrobeats stars, postponing their chances to claim their ever-expanding American audience. It’s fitting that Burna Boy, the songwriter who won the 2021 Grammy Award for best global music album with “Twice as Tall,” will be the first Nigerian musician to headline Madison Square Garden, with a show billed as “One Night in Space.” With his amiable, husky baritone and the assistance of some of Africa’s most innovative producers, Burna Boy has delivered a steady flow of international hits like “Question,” “Kilometre” and “Want It All” from 2021, and his catalog features cultural messages along with party tunes. He has already headlined arenas in Africa, Europe and England; the United States can soon catch up. JON PARELES
April 28 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.

ALABASTER DEPLUME Performing as Alabaster dePlume, the U.K.-based saxophonist, vocalist and activist Gus Fairbairn draws equally, and a bit cautiously, upon Indian raga, western New Age music, Hailu Mergia’s late-70s recordings with the Dahlak Band and the psych-folk appropriations of the Incredible String Band. He knows that most of the ideas in his music — musically, lyrically, critically — originated somewhere else; they’re a historical inheritance, and they’re here through colonial encounter.

But just knowing doesn’t count for much, and dePlume’s real appeal (as an auteur, a philosopher, a saxophonist) comes from listening to him push through the anxieties of influence into sincerity. More and more, the music wears humane intentions on its sleeve: On “Don’t Forget You’re Precious,” from his latest album, “Gold,” due April 1, he admonishes a listener in a purring first-person: “​​I remember my pin number/I remember my ex’s email address/But I forget I’m precious.”

Those intentions come through strongly in performance, where dePlume encourages his side musicians to “bring your whole self,” as he said in an interview with The Quietus. He avoids playing consistently with the same group so that every show is guided by intuition. When he arrives in Brooklyn, he’ll be joined by the violist Marta Sofia Honer and the electronic musician Jeremiah Chiu, in a band he pulled together with help from Jaimie Branch, a trumpeter and his International Anthem label mate. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
March 19 at Public Records in Brooklyn.

DUA LIPA Released in the surreal and cursed March 2020, Dua Lipa’s nimble, disco-sleek second record, “Future Nostalgia,” was one of the first blockbuster pop albums put out during the Covid-19 pandemic. That it has taken her nearly two years to tour it, though, does not mean its sound has become a distant, early lockdown memory: “Future Nostalgia” has had such a long tail in the usually mercurial pop world that you’d still be hard pressed to scan the radio dial and not come across one of its many smash hits. (Its fifth single, “Levitating,” has been on the Billboard Hot 100 for 66 weeks and counting.)

This also means that Lipa’s star wattage has increased considerably since she last toured the United States, for her 2017 self-titled debut album. Consider that the last venue she headlined in New York was the 2,500-seat Hammerstein Ballroom; the Future Nostalgia Tour will come to two local arenas. If her effervescent, impressively calisthenic performance at last year’s Grammys was any indication, Lipa will have no trouble commanding such a huge stage. And given the fact that Lipa’s buoyant tunes were the soundtrack of so many people dancing on their own during those long, lonely months of lockdown, the prospect of grooving to them in a communal setting promises to be extra cathartic. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
March 1 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan; March 4 at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.

OLIVIA RODRIGO Most musicians — even the ones who appear to be overnight sensations — have to pay their dues on small stages first. Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout year happened while the pandemic paused live music, so while she’s a front-runner for a best new artist Grammy, she’s still barely played in front of live audiences at all, save for a few performances on late night TV and at award shows. And so the sold-out Sour Tour will be a proving ground for Rodrigo, whose alternately punky and wrenching debut album, “Sour,” was one of the best and most talked about of last year. Rodrigo’s recent eight-song appearance at “Austin City Limits,” taped for a crowd of giddy fans, was a better showcase for the quieter, more introspective side of her songwriting, like the world-stopping ballad “Drivers License” or the scorched post-breakup note “Traitor.” But her tour will likely provide an opportunity for pop-punk anthems like “Good 4 U” and “Brutal” to connect with a more kinetic audience — plenty of people have been waiting far too long to scream along with Rodrigo’s every word. ZOLADZ
April 26-27 at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.

WILCO Vindication doesn’t get much purer, or better deserved, than the fate of Wilco’s 2002 album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” After making three albums of rootsy indie-rock, full of 1960s and 1970s echoes, Jeff Tweedy steered Wilco toward studio experimentation, incorporating unexpected instruments, random noises and surreal mixes. Its opening song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” was a frontal assault on naturalism, savoring loops, glitches and distortion. Wilco’s label, Reprise, told Tweedy the album was horrible and “career-ending,” refused to release it and dropped the band. But Wilco then streamed the songs online to a hugely enthusiastic response. Nonesuch (part of the Warner Music Group along with Reprise) picked up “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”; it reached the Top 20 and sold more than half a million copies. Wilco has endured as a shape-shifting band, with songs that can be transformed onstage. It will mark the 20th anniversary of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” by performing the whole album for five nights in New York City and three in Chicago. The sonic palette may seem slightly less radical two decades later, but the songs remain sturdy, full of private yearnings and insights about America. PARELES
April 15-17 and April 19-20 at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan; April 22-24 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago.

Classical

‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’ There have been all kinds of updatings at the Metropolitan Opera in recent years. “Rigoletto,” set in the Renaissance, has been moved to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, then Weimar Germany. “Carmen,” which the libretto places in the early 19th century, was pulled forward to the time of the Spanish Civil War.

But rarer — particularly in a core repertory still dominated by Italian-language classics — are Met productions set in a realistic present day. That can be a step too far for conservative opera aficionados who have grudgingly dealt with (and sometimes booed) the company’s mildly modernized takes on some of their favorites.

The Met’s new staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” is therefore a likely flash point. The Australian director Simon Stone (“Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory and “Medea” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) is setting the work not in its original 18th-century Scottish Highlands, but in a struggling Rust Belt town today.

For Stone, both of those milieus are ones in which society’s denial of the power and prosperity that men had assumed was theirs translates to the abuse of women. Living in what he calls a “wasteland of free-market capitalism,” pockmarked by pawn shops, liquor stores and boarded-up houses, Stone’s title character — forced, with tragic results, into marrying against her will — is an opioid addict who meets her secret lover at a motel.

The 2007 Mary Zimmerman staging being replaced by this one was also updated, to the Victorian era, but retained a sumptuousness that satisfied traditionalists. Abandoning that, Stone is under pressure to render his fresh vision through his cast, led by Nadine Sierra as Lucia, Javier Camarena as her beloved Edgardo, and Artur Rucinski as her cruel brother. Riccardo Frizza conducts what promises to be a very interesting premiere. Opens April 23. ZACHARY WOOLFE

JOHNNY GANDELSMAN The violinist Johnny Gandelsman doesn’t take on projects lightly. In addition to his work with the quartet Brooklyn Rider, and with the Silkroad Ensemble, he maintains a robust solo career that has unfolded with one ambitious undertaking after another.

With feather-light and fiddling bow strokes, he recorded a novel account of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which he programmed as a breathless marathon instead of the usual assortment of selections. Then he transcribed Bach’s six cello suites for his instrument, again presenting them all together, and justified what might have seemed like a gimmick with an illuminating re-evaluation of music that could hardly be better known.

His latest project, “This Is America,” is a swerve from the Baroque, but no less daunting and even more enterprising.

In the spirit of another restless violinist, Jennifer Koh, Gandelsman has gone on a commissioning spree, ordering more than 20 new pieces from a group of composers who collectively demonstrate the possibilities of truly diverse programming. What emerges, he hopes, is an argument for the impossibility of capturing the United States in any straightforward or reductive way, as well as for the benefit in aspiring instead to a prismatic portrait of place.

He has started rolling out the premieres in a tour whose stops include two evenings at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Both programs open with Bach cello suite transcriptions, but spread between them are also 10 “This Is America” works. On the roster are excellent known quantities, such as Tyshawn Sorey (“For Courtney Bryan”), Rhiannon Giddens (“New to the Session”) and Angélica Negrón (“A través del manto Luminoso”); as well as Olivia Davis, Nick Dunston, Christina Courtin, Marika Hughes, Adele Faizullina, and Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin. March 16 and 17. JOSHUA BARONE

CARNEGIE HALL Scan the schedule at Carnegie Hall, and it’s painfully apparent that it’s still impossible for major overseas orchestras to appear on these shores as they once could — at least unless they are led by the conductor Valery Gergiev, who brings his Mariinsky Orchestra to town (May 3, May 4) after an initial visit with the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of February.

One of the few to cross the ocean is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, whose concert with the immaculate pianist Mitsuko Uchida (March 25) would be a highlight of any season, let alone this necessarily sparse one. Together, they will play two Mozart concertos, the repertoire in which Uchida has for so long excelled: the genial, graceful No. 23 in A, and the No. 24 in C minor, one of the composer’s darkest pieces.

But if the Mahler ensemble’s appearance is the exception that proves the rule, Uchida’s is something like the opposite: Pianists dominate at Carnegie this spring. Uchida herself will preface her Mozart by appearing with the tenor Mark Padmore, an ideally penetrating pairing for Schubert’s troubled “Schwanengesang” (March 13).

Daniil Trifonov (March 3), Beatrice Rana (March 9), Gabriela Montero (March 18) and Andras Schiff (March 31) all arrive in March, with Montero offering an intriguing Carnegie debut putting Schumann, Shostakovich and Chick Corea suggestively together with her own pieces and improvisations. Yuja Wang (April 12), Emanuel Ax (April 28) and Evgeny Kissin (May 20) take their place on the piano bench later; if their programs look a little same-old, Yefim Bronfman (April 18) adds to his repertory with a sonata by the uncompromising Galina Ustvolskaya. And if that’s not enough, Igor Levit returns after his January recital to perform Brahms with the New York Philharmonic (May 6). DAVID ALLEN

ANTHONY DAVIS The composer and pianist Anthony Davis’s operas have been absurdly difficult to seek out this century. But that’s about to change.

Portland Opera will present “The Central Park Five” — which earned Davis the 2020 Pulitzer Prize — in March. And Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit will bring Davis’s first operatic triumph, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from 1986, to its stage in May, in a new production by the Tony Award nominee Robert O’Hara.

New Yorkers may want to keep an eye on this “X,” which is bound for the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2023. A concert presentation will also be on offer from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in June. In both Boston and Detroit, the title role will be sung by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, whose fleet, complex characterizations have proved dazzling in New York — including his lead appearance in Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.” (The baritone Will Liverman is scheduled to take the part at the Met.)

Even if the production weren’t headed to New York, Davis’s score would make “X” a destination opera. Just as in his orchestral music and compositions for smaller jazz ensembles, his approach in this opera merges modernism with a wide-angle appreciation of swing and the blues. Although “X” made a strong impression on a 1992 recording, now out of print, Davis is taking this opportunity to revise the score. This spring will be our first opportunity to hear his latest vision of it. SETH COLTER WALLS

Dance

MOVEMENT RESEARCH AT JUDSON CHURCH This weekly series, which dates to 1991, is an ever-shifting bill of experimental dance. Each program, free on Monday nights, is a stand-alone adventure — the chance to see an imagination blossom on a bare-bones stage. Where is dance going? How is the art form developing in a new generation, and how have choreographers continued to work through the pandemic? Now, more than ever, Judson is critical to the ecosystem of downtown dance.

When Movement Research, dedicated to the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, resumed its Judson performances last fall, the idea was to celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary, but cancellations were unavoidable; the same thing happened in early winter as yet another wave of the pandemic hit. When, finally, the show did go on one night in February, it felt like a beam of light.

This spring, Judson gets another shot at celebrating its anniversary beginning with Lai Yi Ohlsen and Brendan Drake on March 21 and continuing with Benjamin Akio Kimitch and the mesmerizing duo of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith the following week.

The season wrap-up is organized by Maria Hupfield, through Movement Research’s Artists of Color Council, a group addressing issues of equity and cultural diversity. The lineup features Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC (KIN), Emily Johnson and Rosy Simas, dance artists very much in tune with the urgency of our time. Dance may have been put on hold, but it has a future. Movement Research proves it. GIA KOURLAS
Through May 23 at Judson Church, Manhattan.

SARA MEARNS The ballet dancer is just one part of the dancer that is Sara Mearns. In this Joyce Theater production, she explores other sides of her artistry in a collection of collaborations, including a crucial one with the choreographer and dance artist Jodi Melnick. It is through Melnick that Mearns, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, delved into a new way of moving, a new way of thinking about dance and about the intricacies of the body.

Together, their contrasts and similarities create, strange as it may sound, a minimalism of excess rooted in delicate, powerfully subtle, liquid dancing. They have spent hours in the studio together; it shows. A highlight will be Melnick’s “Opulence,” a duet that was originally part of a program at Jacob’s Pillow in 2019.

The program also includes a short film — shot in Long Island City in March 2020, just before the pandemic shutdown — directed and choreographed by Austin Goodwin for Mearns and Paul Zivkovich, as well as new duets by Vinson Fraley, a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Guillaume Côté, of National Ballet of Canada.

In other words, this isn’t another ballerina-in-the-spotlight kind of situation. Not only will Mearns debut a solo by the esteemed choreographer Beth Gill — so curious to see this! — but she has also programmed a Cunningham MinEvent, staged by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, featuring live music by John King. Cunningham isn’t new to Mearns; she performed in “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event,” which celebrated that choreographer’s legacy in 2019. She’s assembled a stellar cast: She will be joined by Taylor Stanley, Jacquelin Harris, Chalvar Monteiro, Burr Johnson and Melnick. It’s star power done right. KOURLAS
March 8-13 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan.

STORYBOARD P Storyboard P is an incredible dancer in the most literal sense, the kind who makes it hard to believe your eyes. His name alludes to film, and many people (including him) have likened his style to stop-motion animation and special effects. Gliding and floating in liquid relation to music or flickering to register noise in the signal, he’s a master of illusion whose sophistication and subtlety reward the closest attention. But even more astonishing than his skill is the freedom of his improvisatory imagination. It follows unpredictable twists into deep and strange channels, the territory of dreams.

In the Crown Heights neighborhood where he grew up and in the community that developed the street dance known as flex, he was recognized as exceptional at least by the mid-2000s, when he started winning competition after competition, even if he never quite fit in. Around 10 years ago, news began to spread more widely. Appearing in his own clips, in short films by Khalil Joseph and Arthur Jafa and in music videos for the likes of Jay-Z, he became a YouTube star. In profiles — in The New Yorker, The Guardian and The Wire — he talked about forging a new kind of career for a dancer, as “a visual recording artist.”

Instead, apart from a cameo in another Jay-Z video (the Arthur Jafa-directed “4:44”), he largely disappeared from the public eye. But he’s resurfacing at Performance Space New York for two freestyle performances called “No Diving 2.” Who knows what might happen. BRIAN SEIBERT
April 7-8 at Performance Space New York, Manhattan.

ROBERT GARLAND AT DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM Dance Theater of Harlem was founded in 1969 with two braided missions: to create a place for Black dancers in ballet and to extend the tradition of George Balanchine and New York City Ballet, where Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theater’s mastermind, got his start. These missions have been carried into the present in the work of the company’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland.

In “Return” (1999), set to recordings by James Brown and Aretha Franklin, and “New Bach” (2002), Garland found a way to combine neoclassical ballet with Black vernacular dance and what he has called “Harlem swag.” His “Gloria” (2013), set to Poulenc and incorporating students, movingly encapsuled the troupe’s phoenixlike rebirth after a nine-year hiatus. In their excellence, these pieces to old music showed how values from the past still had relevance.

In 2020, when the pandemic shut down theaters, Garland was about to debut “Higher Ground,” set to some of the more politically sharp tracks from Stevie Wonder’s genius streak of the 1970s. The work finally gets its New York premiere in April, as part of the City Center Dance Festival. The music comes from Garland’s youth but is freshly topical in the age of Black Lives Matter. Even more significant, the dance is an intensely affecting response to that music that could be done only by a ballet company — this ballet company. It feels like the kind of work that Dance Theater of Harlem was made to do. SEIBERT
.April 5, 8-10, at New York City Center, Manhattan.

ASHWINI RAMASWAMY Two years after its originally scheduled New York premiere, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s “Let the Crows Come” finally lands at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Ramaswamy, who lives in Minneapolis, grew up steeped in the tradition of the South Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam, and her work often explores the in-betweenness of her cultural identity, the experience of being from both India and the United States.

In “Let the Crows Come,” she is joined by two other Minneapolis dancers with different areas of expertise: Alanna Morris, who has a background in contemporary and Afro-Caribbean forms, and Berit Ahlgren, a practitioner and teacher of Gaga, the movement language developed by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Each dancer offers an interpretation of the same Bharatanatyam solo, refracting its rhythmic footwork, sculptural postures and intricate gestures through her own lens. Ramaswamy likens the structure to “a memory that’s experienced differently from person to person.” In the live music, along similar lines, the composers Jace Clayton (also known as DJ Rupture) and Brent Arnold take inspiration from an original Carnatic score by Prema Ramamurthy.

New York audiences might know Ramaswamy, a dancer of vibrant clarity and warmth, from the Ragamala Dance Company, the Bharatanatyam troupe led by her mother and sister, with whom she still trains and performs. In a phone interview, she said her work remains intimately tied to theirs.

“I wouldn’t say I’m branching out on my own,” she said, “but figuring out my method and my voice within that aesthetic and that lineage.”

The title “Let the Crows Come” alludes to a flow between past and present, referring to a Hindu ritual of honoring ancestors through offerings of rice. When crows come to eat the rice, Ramaswamy said, “it means your ancestors are telling you, ‘I’m OK. Keep living your life, but I’m always there with you.’” SIOBHAN BURKE
April 13-15 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan.

OKINAWAN DANCE AND MUSIC It’s not often that dance from Okinawa makes its way to New York; when it does, you want to clear your calendar. That’s one lesson I learned from the Japan Society’s exquisite presentation, back in 2015, of Okinawan dance and music. As part of a five-city American tour, a new program, “Waves Across Time: Traditional Dance and Music of Okinawa,” comes to the Japan Society in March. The tour — also stopping at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.; the Kennedy Center in Washington; Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.; and the University of Chicago — marks the 50th anniversary of the return of Okinawa to Japan, following the American occupation of the islands after World War II.

Assembled by Michihiko Kakazu, the artistic director of the National Theater Okinawa, the two-part evening includes court dances from the classical repertory of kumiodori, a kind of Noh-inspired theater, dating to Okinawa’s era as an independent kingdom, Ryukyu, from the 15th to 19th centuries. Stately, slow and lavishly costumed, these contrast with the program’s other half: more recent, upbeat popular and folk dances, zo-odori. A lecture on the histories of these forms precedes each performance, and interactive workshops invite a closer look at their rhythmic and physical structures. BURKE
March 18-20 at the Japan Society, Manhattan.