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      Fun Things to Do in NYC in February 2025

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      Looking for something to do in New York? Enjoy laughs with Liza Treyger, learn about Clara Schumann, or see the Urban Bush Women in a Great Migration love story.ComedyLiza Treyger, above in her new Netflix comedy special, “Night Owl,” will host a “Show and Tell” at Union Hall on Friday.Netflix‘Show and Tell With Liza Treyger’Feb. 7 at 10 p.m. at Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn; unionhallny.com.Hot off the heels of the debut of “Night Owl,” her hourlong comedy special on Netflix, Liza Treyger is presenting this showcase in which her funny friends joke about their most cherished possessions.Treyger, who was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, has made a name for herself in the New York City comedy scene over the past decade through her blunt appraisals of herself and society’s sexual politics. This reputation earned her an appearance on Netflix’s “Survival of the Thickest” and a consultant gig on “The Eric Andre Show.” She recently had a supporting role on an episode of the Amazon Prime Video series “Harlem.”Taking part in Treyger’s “Show and Tell” on Friday are Tommy McNamara, Drew Anderson, Marie Faustin and Molly Kearney. Tickets are $15 on Eventbrite. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicFrom left, Why Bonnie’s Blair Howerton on guitar, Josh Malett on drums and Chance Williams on bass, in Boston in 2022. The band will be at Night Club 101 on Friday.Olivia LeonPop & RockWhy BonnieFeb. 7 at 8 p.m. at Night Club 101, 101 Avenue A, Manhattan; dice.fm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tennessee Williams-Marlon Brando Tango, and Other Riffs on Classics

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      Three new plays onstage in Manhattan, “Kowalski,” “Mrs. Loman” and “Nina,” mine treasures of theater history.In the summer of 1947, when Marlon Brando was young, beautiful and not yet famous, the director Elia Kazan gave him $20 to get himself to Provincetown, Mass., from New York to audition for Tennessee Williams.Less than three years after bestowing “The Glass Menagerie” on the world, Williams had a new play on the fast track to Broadway: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which needed a Stanley Kowalski. But Brando, at 23, was in no hurry to get to Cape Cod. He pocketed the travel funds, hitchhiked there and turned up at Williams’s rented beach house days late.Enticing little anecdote, isn’t it? Gregg Ostrin has taken that historical reality and run with it in “Kowalski,” a diverting new comedy that blends fact with speculation. Brandon Flynn stars as a rough and clever Brando opposite Robin Lord Taylor as a Williams whose default setting is high dudgeon.“Let me make something clear,” the playwright tells the actor in a Southern lilt that stays, thank goodness, well this side of sorghum. “You can be late for Thornton Wilder. You can be late for Bill Inge. You can even be late for Arthur Miller. But you cannot be late for me.”Directed by Colin Hanlon at the Duke on 42nd Street, “Kowalski” neatly sidesteps the largest trap lying in wait, because neither Taylor nor Flynn is doing an impersonation. Each is after an essence of his character, and finds it, satisfyingly.That’s a crucial achievement, since mining treasures of theater history to make new work is always a double-edged endeavor. Audiences, like artists, love the prospect of a show that speaks a language we have already learned; familiarity helps at the box office. But our preexisting notions of who the characters are — whether because they were real-world celebrities or because they are borrowed from canonical dramas — can make us awfully tetchy about other artists’ riffs on them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Merle Louise Simon, a Sondheim Mainstay, Is Dead at 90

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      She originated roles in four of his Broadway musicals between 1959 and 1987, and won a Drama Desk Award for her performance in “Sweeney Todd.”Merle Louise Simon, an award-winning stage actor and the only person to play roles in the original Broadway productions of four Stephen Sondheim musicals, died on Jan. 11 in Lake Katrine, N.Y., in Ulster County. She was 90.Her daughter Laura Simon confirmed the death, in a nursing home.Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)Ms. Simon in 1987, in the Broadway production of the Sondheim musical “Into the Woods.”Martha Swope, via Billy Rose Theatre Division/New York Public Library“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”When “Gypsy” opened, Ms. Simon had a minor role. But she was promoted in early 1960 to be the understudy to the actress playing June, one of two daughters pushed into show business by their ambitious mother, Rose, played by the powerhouse Ethel Merman.Soon after becoming the understudy, Ms. Simon went on for the actress in the role, who was ailing, and ended up becoming the full-time June.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Antiquities’ Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits

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      According to Jordan Harrison’s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg’s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Playwright Larissa FastHorse Doesn’t Want to Be a Cautionary Tale

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      After a delay, “Fake It Until You Make It,” the writer’s follow-up to her Broadway satire, “The Thanksgiving Play,” is finally onstage in Los Angeles.In the 1980s, when Larissa FastHorse was in high school in Pierre, S.D., friends would sometimes forget she was Native American. Talk would turn to the area’s “drunk lazy Indians,” she said, and “I’d be like, ‘um, excuse me, I’m right here.’”“And then it was always, ‘Oh, well, not you!’” she continued. Even after FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” opened on Broadway in 2023, the “not you” slights continued. At one of her own plays in New York, she overheard women in the bathroom joking about how Native Americans would be late to the show because they tell time by the sun — it was an evening performance — and because they would be taking horses, not cars. “People say crazy stuff like that all the time,” she said.In Southern California, where she has lived since 1991, it rarely occurs to strangers that she is Native, or, as she noted, that anyone might be. “It’s all part of the great erasure,” she said. “Everyone speaks Spanish to me in L.A.,” she said. “Which is fine, it’s lovely. But it’s like I have to fight to be Native American here.”Over the years, FastHorse, 53, has transformed her experiences as a Native American navigating her way through the worlds of theater, nonprofits, TV writing and ballet into thought-provoking, often wickedly funny work. Her plays are both a way of confronting that “great erasure” — “the last thing people tend to think about are Native Americans,” she said — and replacing offensive stereotypes, like the “Hollywood Indians” she grew up watching on TV, with more nuanced and human portrayals.In “The Thanksgiving Play,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2018, four well-meaning white people struggle mightily to produce a more historically accurate holiday pageant for grade schoolers, replacing happy pilgrims and prayers of gratitude with a bag of bloody Native American heads. In “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” (2017), the last members of a fictional tribe encounter a pair of kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan members.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      7 Surprisingly Busy Days in the Life of an Experimental Theater Maker

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      Peter Mills Weiss shared details of a week of “everyone doing everything all the time, and by the seat of everyone’s pants.”January is known as a time when New York commercial theater recovers from its holiday bender and takes a break from openings.It’s another story for the experimental performance scene, which struts its stuff at festivals such as Under the Radar, Prototype and Exponential. For someone like Peter Mills Weiss, it’s go time.“January is this incredible crush of everyone doing everything all the time, and by the seat of everyone’s pants,” Weiss, 36, said over the phone. “I’m happy to support in all the ways that I can.”Weiss wears many hats, most prominently as a creator with his regular collaborator, Julia Mounsey, of such unsettling, darkly funny shows as “While You Were Partying“ at Soho Rep (2021) and “Open Mic Night” at last year’s Under the Radar.In addition, he and Ann Marie Dorr are joint interim producing artistic directors of the Brooklyn avant-hub the Brick Theater and its annex, Brick Aux. Weiss, who lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, also juggles projects as an actor and a sound designer. “I like being a jack-of-all-trades,” he said.Weiss kept a diary of his cultural diet during a mid-January week that culminated with his participation in “Soho Rep Is Not a Building. Soho Rep Had a Building…,” a 12-hour “marathon wake” in honor of Walkerspace, the company’s former home in TriBeCa. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Schmigadoon!’ Review: An Affectionate Golden Age Schpoof

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      The Apple TV+ series comes to the stage of the Kennedy Center with its snark and affection for classic Broadway musicals intact.Rejoice, ye musical nerds! On the stage of the Eisenhower Theater, off the Hall of States at the Kennedy Center, between the Watergate complex and the Lincoln Memorial, at the heart of America’s temple to high-minded midcentury cultural propriety, your disreputable art form, with its salty predilections and disruptive mores, is on loving display in “Schmigadoon!”But maybe that’s overselling what is essentially a dandy little spoof of some tuners.You may recall that “Schmigadoon!” was an Apple TV+ series about a contemporary couple who, experiencing relationship problems, find themselves trapped in a world of love-insisting musicals. During its first season, in 2021, that world was highly reminiscent of Broadway shows of the 1940s and ’50s like “The Music Man,” “Carousel” and “Oklahoma!” but with bits of “The Sound of Music,” “Brigadoon” and “Kiss Me, Kate” tossed in. In the second season, the scene shifted to “Schmicago” and musicals of the ’70s. (An unproduced third season would have taken the couple “Into the Schmoods.”)The show being offered through Sunday by the Kennedy Center’s musical theater initiative, called Broadway Center Stage, is essentially the first season’s six-episode arc boiled down to two acts by its author, Cinco Paul. If you loved the television show, you probably know every note. If not, you probably don’t want to.I say that as someone whose feelings run in the middle. Neither onscreen nor onstage was I ever very interested in the on-the-outs couple, Josh and Melissa, for the simple reason that as characters they are skeletally thin. He’s the repressed, flat-affect guy; she’s in touch with her ambivalence to the point of annoyance. Though very smartly and appealingly performed here, by Alex Brightman and especially Sara Chase, neither would have lasted two scenes as protagonists of any of the musicals “Schmigadoon” models itself on.But, oh, those musicals! They are classics for a reason, whether for pure delight or complex feeling, and never as normative as they appear on the surface. “Oklahoma!” asks us to accept the inevitable harshness of life but not buckle under it; “Carousel” questions the possibility of redemption. “The Music Man” suggests that, in River City as elsewhere, even the truest love is a bit of a scam.Sara Chase and Alex Brightman, both seated, as a couple trapped in a world of love-insisting musicals, with McKenzie Kurtz, center, as one of those musical theater archetypes, a variant on Ado Annie from “Oklahoma!”Matthew Murphy and Evan ZimmermanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Wins Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a coming-of-age show inspired by the adolescent experiences of Alicia Keys and fueled by her music, won a Grammy Award on Sunday for best musical theater album.The album, produced by Keys along with Adam Blackstone and Tom Kitt, was released in June and features the original stars of the Broadway production, Maleah Joi Moon and Kecia Lewis, both of whom won Tony Awards for their performances, as well as Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon.Keys was already a 16-time Grammy winner, and on Sunday she was also being honored with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award presented by the Black Music Collective. She is both the composer and lyricist for the songs on the “Hell’s Kitchen” album.The show, which opened on Broadway last spring following an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, is still running at the Shubert Theater and has been selling well, although its grosses softened last month. A North American tour is scheduled to begin at Playhouse Square in Cleveland in October.“Hell’s Kitchen” tells the story of a 17-year-old girl, Ali, being raised by a single mother in an apartment tower where most of the units are subsidized for performing artists; Ali, whose life has close parallels to that of Keys, is starting to find her way romantically and musically.This year’s six Grammy-nominated cast albums were all for musicals that opened on Broadway during the 2023-24 season.The other nominees were “Merrily We Roll Along,” a Tony-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 flop about the implosion of a three-way friendship; “The Notebook,” based on the much-loved 1996 Nicholas Sparks romance novel; “The Outsiders,” the Tony-winning musical based on the classic 1967 S.E. Hinton novel about two warring groups of adolescents in Tulsa, Okla.; “Suffs,” Shaina Taub’s exploration of the American women’s suffrage movement; and “The Wiz,” a revival of the 1975 show based on “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”“The Outsiders” won the Tony for best new musical, and “Merrily We Roll Along” won for best musical revival. Only “The Outsiders” and “Hell’s Kitchen” are still running on Broadway. More