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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

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

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Step right up, come one, come all, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up to the greatest—well, okay, not the greatest show on Broadway, but a dang fine show nonetheless. Although Water for Elephants is set at a circus, and includes several moments of thrilling spectacle, what makes it so appealing is its modesty, not glitz. Like the story’s one-ring Benzini Brothers Circus, a scrappy company touring the country in the early years of the Depression, this original musical knows it’s not the ritziest show on the circuit. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in wonder, and it’s pretty wonderful at making things up. Water for Elephants has a book by Rick Elice, who wrote the delightful stage version of Peter and the Starcatcher, and songs by the seven-man collective PigPen Theatre Co., which specializes in dark-edged musical story theater. This team knows how to craft magic moments out of spare parts, and so does director Jessica Stone, who steered Kimberly Akimbo to Broadway last season. Together—and with a mighty hand from circus expert Shana Carroll, of the Montreal cirque troupe the 7 Fingers—they have found the right tone for this adaptation of Sara Gruen’s 2006 romance novel, which operates on the level of a fairy tale. The plot is basic. The impoverished Jake Jankowski (The Flash's Grant Gustin), a sensitive and floppy-haired fellow, is forced by family tragedy to drop out of his Ivy League veterinary school. With nothing

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

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  It’s not easy being Strong. Licking his wounds in the aftermath of a divisive 2021 magazine profile of him, Succession star Jeremy Strong found that he could relate to the maligned and besieged hero of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 social drama An Enemy of the People: Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who discovers that the spa water in his small Norwegian resort town is polluted with deadly bacteria. “Doing Enemy of the People is my response to what I experienced from the New Yorker article,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview, noting that Ibsen wrote the play out of a sense of betrayal by people he trusted. “I’m an actor: I want to channel things that I feel into a piece of work, and that’s why I’m doing this play.” The actor’s aggrieved but steadfast self-image is a succesful match for his role in this engrossing new production. Stockmann’s refusal to back down from his findings, even though they could destroy the town’s economy, alienates him from the locals at every level: the managers, led by his stuffed-shirt brother, the mayor (Michael Imperioli, imperiously contemptuous); the industrialists, such as his ornery father-in-law (David Patrick Kelly); the tradesmen, embodied by the chair of the landowners association (a hilariously complacent Thomas Jay Ryan); and the working class, represented by the firebrand editor of a local socialist newspaper (Caleb Eberhardt). Only his daughter—played with luminous composure by Victoria Pedretti—is rel

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Hell's Kitchen

Theater review by Adam Feldman  “I’ve got some really crazy stuff going on downstairs,” says Dawn (Alyse Alan Louis), a devout Christian teenager, in advance of her first gynecological exam. As her overly handsy doctor soon learns, that’s putting it mildly. Against all medical probability, this toothsome girl suffers—or is it benefits?—from the mythical condition known as vagina dentata. Her lady plumbing has a little something extra: a garbage disposal that cuts off the junk of any guy who tries to force his way in. Welcome, if you dare, to the savage world of Anna K. Jacobs and Michael R. Jackson’s Teeth, a dark and sharp new musical comedy adapted from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s cult 2007 fright flick. In the sparsely populated territory of horror-themed musicals, this one has clear antecedents in the Eve-was-weak religious shame and apocalyptic body horror of Carrie and the fabular, edge-of-camp knowingness of Little Shop of Horrors. But it is gorier—and much, much raunchier—than either of those two shows, and more overtly mythopoeic; by the end, it is tapping the wild feminine destructive power of Euripides’s The Bacchae.  Directed unflinchingly by Sarah Benson, Teeth starts small and builds slow. Dawn begins as the stridently chaste leader of the Promise Keeper Girls, a youth wing of the fundamentalist church run by her driven and abusive stepfather, Pastor (Steven Pasquale). Her sweet jock boyfriend, Tobey (Jason Gotay), seems fine with waiting until they are married to c

  • 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

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  • 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

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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  • 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

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

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Days of Wine and Roses, a musical treatment of alcoholism, raises a toast that ends in shattered glass. “Magic time” is what Joe (Brian d’Arcy James) calls drinking, and soon he has Kirsten (Kelli O’Hara) caught up in its spell. He’s a Korean War vet who works in the shadier nooks of public relations in the 1950s, greasing the social wheels for his superiors; she’s his boss’s pretty secretary, fresh from the farm and eager for danger. He teaches her to drink—she’s a quick learner—and at first the bottle’s genie grants their wishes: happiness, love, professional success. But beware the gifts of spirits.  Days of Wine and Roses reunites composer Adam Guettel with playwright Craig Lucas; as in their previous collaboration, 2005’s The Light in the Piazza, the result is ambitious, artful and musically sophisticated. But whereas Piazza delivers a sweeping romantic breadth of Florentine airs, this piece is more intimate and interior in scope, at times claustrophobic. Joe and Kirsten are very nearly the only people in this 105-minute musical who sing at all—their daughter (Tabitha Lawing) has a few lines in the second half—in keeping with the increasingly small world they share. “What about our secret language?” she wails, betrayed, when he decides to go sober. “Who will I talk to?”  Days of Wine and Roses | Photograph: Joan Marcus Guettel’s score has the feel of a chamber opera. For moments of drunken euphoria, it dabbles in cocktail jazz: Passages

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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