Part spoken-word performance, part concert, part postmodern portrait of the making of a one-man show, Arinzé Kene’s “Misty” comes to the Shed, starting previews on March 3. As a Black Briton moving around London’s transit system, the actor-playwright-rhapsode found inspiration in the idea of people as a virus;...
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Mostly, we associate the late Pina Bausch with works like “Café Müller” and her “Rite of Spring,” dances that peek into the nightmarish corners of the human heart. But, in her later years, Bausch made a series of dances inspired by places where her company took up residence for months...
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The folk-rock ensemble Big Thief has a way of sounding concurrently grounded and unearthly. A Big Thief song is lucid, alchemical, alive, and typically delivered with a sense of wonder that these sacred sounds are even being aired. Playfulness enters the sprawling fray of the quartet’s recent album, “Dragon...
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In 1957, the whirlwind romance—and the fashion shoots—of Richard Avedon and Doe, the model who became his first wife, inspired the movie-musical “Funny Face.” Now another color-drenched, photo-based story of love (the complicated, filial kind) has landed on Broadway, in the play “Pictures from Home.” Its...
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Short films get scant attention apart from the Oscars, which include five nominees each in the Live Action, Documentary, and Animation categories. (The New Yorker has released five of the fifteen this year.) One of the best of the current batch is the live-action musical comedy “Le Pupille” (“The Pupils”...
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Many years ago, a friend described me as “the least athletic person” he knew. I reject this designation on a number of grounds, not least the fact that he’d never seen me at my top sport: Chinese hot pot, a style of eating with ancient origins which involves a...
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Ever since Nora, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist masterwork “A Doll’s House,” from 1879, walked out on her husband and out of her domestic cage, actresses have yearned to play her. Jessica Chastain (above, center), last year’s Best Actress Oscar winner, steps into the role for...
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“Anarchist Gospel,” a wistful new LP by Sunny War, was created with an aerodynamic Nashville band that smooths the singer’s edges, yet the record still revels in taking unexpected turns. Throughout, War skates between worlds, tucking gospel choruses behind ransacking guitars and choosing a melancholic ballad to quote the...
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The best artists do more than reflect their own time—they are also attuned to the future. Take Charles Atlas, a New York-based maverick who has been working at the crossroads of moving images and moving bodies for fifty years. In the seventies, as the filmmaker-in-residence for Merce Cunningham’...
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Anton Chekhov knew that a lazy sojourn in the country could bring out all sorts of vanities, jealousies, and longings—but so do New Yorkers heading back to the city on I-87. In “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” the provocateur-playwright Thomas Bradshaw resets Chekhov’s tragicomedy from the Russian countryside...
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Marcel Ophuls’s vast 1969 documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” is one of the few movies that can rightly be said to have changed the course of history. (It opens Feb. 24 at Film Forum and is streaming on Milestone Films’ site.) In the movie’s four-hour span, the...
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One of the newest additions to New York’s ever-evolving pizza landscape is not so new at all, at least in terms of its pedigree. L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele opened in Naples in 1870 and has since garnered world renown. Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” may...
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Hip-hop was born at a back-to-school party in the Bronx, in 1973, when DJ Kool Herc used two turntables to make the first breakbeat. To celebrate the culture’s half-century mark, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology presents “Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip-Hop Style,” opening...
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In 1913, in Georgia, a Jewish factory manager named Leo Frank was tried and convicted for the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for him. The case became a media magnet and fanned Southern antisemitism; after Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, a lynch...
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The heart of the exhibition “Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair,” on view at the Cooper Hewitt through May 29, is a selection of twenty of the remarkable infographics that Du Bois and his sociology students at Atlanta University, in Georgia, made for...
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Since winning the fourth season of “American Idol,” the singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood has stood as one of country music’s most bankable stars, a generational voice that is nearly synonymous with “Sunday Night Football” and the crossover single. “Cry Pretty,” from 2018, made Underwood the only woman to top the...
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At the beginning of the Singapore episode of the Netflix show “Street Food: Asia,” K. F. Seetoh, the Singaporean curator of the new midtown food hall Urban Hawker, sets the scene. “We’ve got no language,” he says. “We don’t have a national costume like all of our neighbors....
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Madison Square Park hosts the acclaimed Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander’s first public project, “Havah . . . to breathe, air, life,” a striking pair of female figures, on view through June 4. One sculpture appears on the rooftop of the neighboring Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme...
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Is a song merely an inner monologue, allowed to glisten in the light of day? The four members of London’s Dry Cleaning have, it might be said, put that notion to the test. Instantly recognizable as riveting post-punk of the British-art-school variety, the band’s songs consist of droll,...
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In 2019, Netflix débuted its first “sports docusoap,” “F1: Drive to Survive,” a reality show about Formula 1 racing. It became a phenomenon, mostly because Formula 1 drivers are natural stars—handsome, charismatic, competitive, bitchy, and in constant mortal peril. The behind-the-scenes drama also proved delicious; watching the team...
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One of the most crowd-pleasing—and controversial—exhibitions in New York City this winter is “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised,” a twenty-four-foot-square, constantly morphing abstraction, holding visitors rapt on the ground floor of MOMA, through March 5. Anadol, a Turkish-born, L.A.-based digital whiz (whose past partners include NASA...
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The seemingly minor difficulties of everyday life get a major dramatic boost in Eric Gravel’s second feature, “Full Time,” which opens Feb. 3. It’s centered on Julie Roy (Laure Calamy), a divorced woman who lives with her two young children in a small French town and commutes by...
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Last year, I grew so tired of beans that I did the unthinkable—cancelled my membership in the vaunted Rancho Gordo dried-bean club. The other evening at Lord’s, a new restaurant in Greenwich Village, a bite of butter beans revived my interest with a jolt. Simmered in mushroom...
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