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Things to do in New York this Friday

It’s time to punch out, wind down and start your weekend off right with the best things to do in New York this Friday

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There are too many incredible things to do in New York this Friday to spend it on the couch. Whether you want to rage at one of the best parties in NYC or if you’re interested in checking out free comedy shows, you have unlimited options. That’s why we decided to make the planning process easier for you by selecting the very best events that are guaranteed to show you a good time. Forget road trips, the best way to spend your Friday night is right here in NYC.

RECOMMENDED: Full guide to things to do in NYC this weekend

Popular things to do this Friday

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Here comes the rain again. Fans of the 2004 movie The Notebook will remember its most famous scene: After gathering steam for years, the romance between Noah and Allie condenses into a downpour, and their drenched bodies fuse together in a passionate embrace. Not since the Bible, perhaps, has a Noah taken better advantage of a deluge.  Ingrid Michaelson and Bekah Brunstetter’s Broadway version of Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel (the first of several musicals this season adapted from books that became films) takes pains to get this moment right, and it does. Rain descends in sheets from above, Noah and Allie come through in a clinch, and a significant portion of the audience swoons. A little of the water even splashes onto spectators in the front row; this is a show that wants to make people wet. That The Notebook succeeds to the extent that it does—at the performance I attended, multiple people were moved to tears by the musical’s final scenes—is a testament to the power of the familiar, and of talented actors to make it seem new.  In the movie, Noah and Allie are played at different ages by two pairs of actors; in the musical, there are three pairs of actors, and their stories are interwoven less chronologically. Younger Noah (John Cardoza) and Younger Aliie (Jordan Tyson) fall in love as teenagers but are separated by fate and meddling parents; Middle Noah (Ryan Vasquez) and Middle Allie (Joy Woods) reunite a decade later. We learn of them as O

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Drama
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown West

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and as strong as certainty,” preaches the charismatic Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) in the sermon that begins John Patrick Shanley’s gripping 2005 drama Doubt: A Parable. The forward-thinking priest teaches religion and physical education at a Bronx elementary school in 1964, and his speech may or may not reflect unspeakable personal struggles. Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan), the school’s disciplinarian principal, is convinced that Flynn has sexually abused a 12-year-old boy named Donald, her first black student. When a younger teacher, the malleable Sister James (Zoe Kazan), waffles about his guilt, Aloysius scolds her naiveté: “Innocence could only be wisdom in a world without sin.”  But is suspicion, based largely on intuition, any better? In refusing innocence, is this nun the wiser? For Sister Aloysius, a staunchly conservative Catholic, the responsibility to protect a child from violation—even by moving from vigilant to vigilante, outside the Church’s patriarchal chain of command—is a pious calling, despite conflicting with her vows. “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you move away from God,” she says, “but in His service.”  On its surface, Doubt is an odd kind of mystery, less a whodunit than a wasitdunnatall. More profoundly, it’s an epistemological mystery play, religious not merely in setting but in theme: an interrogation of faith itself, of choosing what to believe for reasons beyond evidence.

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Comedy
  • price 3 of 4
  • West Village

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.  Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a bottle she h

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Drama
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown West

Theater review by Raven Snook No set to speak of, no fancy costumes, nowhere for the actors to hide: Director Jamie Lloyd's signature clinical style is just what the doctor ordered for The Effect, Lucy Prebble's brain-tingling meditation on what makes us tick. The play centers on two participants in an antidepressant drug trial in England, who flout the study’s rules against fraternization: flirty jokester Tristan (Paapa Essiedu, charm incarnate) and wary Canadian psychology student Connie (Taylor Russell).  That the two of them have chemistry is undeniable. But is that just a product of the chemicals they’re ingesting? Connie dismisses it as medically induced, while Tristan has more faith in his heart's desire. Observing them are Dr. Lorna James (Michele Austin, fabulously dry), a psychiatrist with depression struggles of her own, who has a loaded history with her supervisor, Dr. Toby Sealey (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), a proselytizer for the psychopharm industry. The Effect | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner At Lloyd's behest for this production—which premiered at London's National Theatre last year and has now moved to the Shed—Prebble has made judicious changes to her 2012 work, streamlining it to one act and adding dialogue that acknowledges the backgrounds of the all-Black ensemble. (The new racial element adds shades of Tuskegee.) Even at 100 minutes, it feels a bit too long and too slick, especially in the paralleling of the pairs' relationships and in a far-fetched lat

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Drama
  • price 3 of 4
  • DUMBO

Theater review by Joey Sims In the gripping new British import The Hunt, Tobias Menzies (The Crown) plays a kindergarten teacher in a small Danish town who is falsely accused of sexual abuse. As hysteria grows and his loved ones look at him with new eyes, a mob mentality soon places Lucas’s life in danger—and David Farr’s horror-infused thriller, adapted from Thomas Vinterberg’s 2012 Danish film, gradually reveals itself to be a moving, melancholic character study. The centerpiece of Rupert Goold’s production, which has moved to St. Ann’s Warehouse from London's Almeida Theatre, is a small and suffocating glass house into which a multitude of town scenes—tense homes, cramped offices, packed churches—are discomfitingly stuffed. Scenic designer Es Devlin (The Lehman Trilogy) specializes in glass boxes; here, the tight encasement is smartly used to suggest both individual isolation and the lure of social conformity. Goold’s muscular staging establishes a tight-knit community with violence lurking at its edges: The local hunting group, heavy-drinking and heavily armed, chants and stomps in Kel Matsena’s frightening movement work. Flashing glimpses of a minotaur-like figure suggest the fine line dividing the hunters from their prey.  The Hunt | Photograph: Courtesy Teddy Wolff Menzies is a remote, reserved performer, and Goold plays smartly upon that blankness. Lucas feels disconnected from the other adults, and only seems to come alive with his students—or with his dog, Max, pla

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown West

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Merrily We Roll Along is the femme fatale of Stephen Sondheim musicals, beautiful and troubled; people keep thinking they can fix it, rescue it, save it from itself and make it their own. In the decades since its disastrous 1981 premiere on Broadway, where it lasted just two weeks, the show has been revised and revived many times (including by the York in 1994, Encores! in 2012 and Fiasco in 2019). The challenges of Merrily are built into its core in a way that no production can fully overcome. But director Maria Friedman’s revival does a superb job—the best I’ve ever seen—of overlooking them, the way one might forgive the foibles of an old friend.   As a showbiz-steeped investigation of the disillusionment that may accompany adulthood, Merrily is a companion piece to Sondheim’s Follies, with which it shares a key line: “Never look back,” an imperative this show pointedly ignores. Adapted by George Furth from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the musical is structured in reverse. We first meet Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff) in 1976, when he is a former composer now leading a hollow life as a producer of Hollywood schlock; successive scenes move backward through the twisting paths on which he has lost both his ideals and his erstwhile best pals, playwright Charley (Daniel Radcliffe) and writer Mary (Lindsay Mendez). The final scene—chronologically, the first—finds them together on a rooftop in 1957, as yet regardless of their doom,

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  • Things to do
  • Midtown West

Hundreds of items have been pulled from the New York Public Library's expansive and centuries-spanning archive to be put on display—many of them for the first time—in a permanent exhibition called "The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures." Inside the NYPL's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and its beautiful Gottesman Hall, are more than 250 unique and rare items culled from its research centers: the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Library for the Performing Arts and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The exhibit, which opens to the public on Friday, September 24, spans 4,000 years of history and includes a wide range of history-making pieces, including the only surviving letter from Christoper Columbus announcing his "discovery" of the Americas to King Ferdinand’s court and the first Gutenberg Bible brought over to the Americas. We visited the stunning collection this week to find the top 10 must-see items at the NYPL Treasures exhibit so when you go, you can make sure to see them for yourself: 1. Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence Photograph: Max Touhey / NYPL Only six manuscript versions of the Declaration of Independence are known to survive in the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson made this copy for a friend shortly after the July 4th, 1776, ratification of the Declaration, which announced to the world the American colonies’ political separation from Great Britain. He underlined words t

  • Theater
  • Experimental
  • price 3 of 4
  • Lenox Hill

Director-choreographer Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet's resident choreographer, turns Sufjan Stevens's 2005 concept album, Illinois, into a dance-theater piece with a narrative throughline he has devised with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. Three vocalists and an 11-piece band perform the music while a cast of 16 dancers—including Gaby Diaz, Robbie Fairchild, Ben Cook, Ahmad Simmons and Ricky Ubeda—brings new blasts of movement to Park Avenue Armory's massive Drill Hall.

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  • Art
  • Fort Greene

A new public art installation by artist Curry J. Hackett has just taken over The Plaza at 300 Ashland in Brooklyn, and it's as futuristic as art gets these days: the piece, dubbed Ugly Beauties, features panoramic, AI-generated images of Black folks among various native weeds. According to an official press release, the work, on display through May 2, highlights a “metaphorical connection between society’s perception of these species and its treatment of Black people.” Upon approaching the structure, the viewer will immediately notice the juxtaposition of the various elements depicted, prompting all to think of our perception of what is beautiful and what is part of society at large. “Ugly Beauties expands on Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s commitment to activating itsshared spaces with art installations that enliven the public realm and capture the spirit of theneighborhood,” said Regina Myer, President of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, in a statement. “With residents, shoppers, workers, diners, and other visitors rushing around the neighborhood, we hope this piece will impart a moment of reflection and help Brooklynites to realize the beauty all around them. ”

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Shakespeare
  • price 3 of 4
  • East Village

Theater review by Raven Snook  Fiasco Theater, ever daring, sails straight into the storm of Shakespeare’s nautical adventure Pericles. The wild shifts of narrative and tone in this rarely revived tragicomedy-romance tend to leave audiences feeling a little green. But the troupe's enchanting blend of low-tech story-theater and music make this rocky epic of the high seas sing. The Prince of Tyre sets out to win the hand of a fair princess, but runs afoul of her nasty father. In fleeing, he launches a sequence of adventures filled with love, loss, pirates and multiple shipwrecks (beautifully conjured with sheets and sound effects). Did I mention incest, sex trafficking and attempted murder?  Fiasco makes magic out of this mess by streamlining the text and incorporating stirring songs by director Ben Steinfeld—who also portrays troubadour-narrator Gower—and adding clarifying prose passages from The Painful Adventures of Pericles by George Wilkins (who allegedly wrote the first two acts of the play). The merry cast of nine, switching characters as deftly as costumes, leans into the comedy, which makes the later scenes of grief, heartbreak and unexpected reunion all the more moving. Perhaps the riskiest choice in this rollicking reinvention is the multiple casting of the royal title character, who's played by a succession of different actors: Paco Tolson, Tatiana Wechsler, Noah Brody and Devin E. Haqq. Though initially confounding, this innovation ultimately pays off as life-alter

Movies to see this Friday

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Movies
  • Action and adventure

Joaquin Phoenix is devastating as a monster-in-the-making in this incendiary tale of abuse

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