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Things to do in New York this Saturday

The best things to do in New York this Saturday include amazing shows and parties to keep you going all day and night.

Written by
Time Out New York editors
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It’s the weekend, you’re in the greatest city in the world, and its time to get wild—but what are the best things to do in NYC this Saturday exactly? We’ll tell you!

Hit up some of the best New York attractions and events and be sure to fit in time to check out the best museum exhibits.

Strapped for cash? Fear not! We’ve picked out some of the city’s top free things to do so that you’re not broke by Sunday.

RECOMMENDED: Full guide to things to do in NYC this weekend and on Sunday

Popular things to do this Saturday

  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Tamara de Lempicka is best known for the Art Deco portraits she painted in the 1920s and early 1930s: sculptural, imposingly sexy fusions of Cubism and Mannerism—her women’s conical breasts often press out from under luscious folds of bright fabric—that still present an enticing idealization of cosmopolitan life. In many of her works, the main figures’ heads are slightly bent to the spectator’s left, as though the paintings could not contain their subjects’ full size. And that, to less pleasing effect, is the feeling one gets from the messy new musical Lempicka, a portrait of the artist that tries to cram her into too small a frame, without the benefit of strong composition. Lempicka’s story, which spanned most of the 20th century, offers no dearth of drama. As a Polish-Jewish teenager summering in Russia, she married an aristocrat, Tadeusz Lempicki, then saved him from the Bolsheviks at considerable personal cost. She embraced the louche life in Paris, rising to artistic prominence while taking multiple lovers of both sexes. (“I live life in the margins of society,” she reportedly said. “And the rules of normal society don’t apply in the margins.”) But in the late 1930s, with the Nazis on the march, she was forced to flee again, this time to America—with a rich and titled new husband—where she spent most of her remaining four decades in cultural obscurity. Lempicka | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman The most persuasive
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Drama
  • Midtown West
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  David Adjmi’s intimately epic behind-the-music drama Stereophonic has now moved to Broadway after a hit fall run at Playwrights Horizons. At the smaller venue, the audience felt almost immersed in the room where the show takes place: a wood-paneled 1970s recording studio—decked out by set designer David Zinn as a plush vision of brown, orange, mustard, sage and rust—where a rock band is trying to perfect what could be its definitive album. Some fans of the play have wondered if it could work as well on a larger stage, but that question has a happy answer: Daniel Aukin’s superb production navigates the change without missing a beat. The jam has been preserved. With the greater sense of distance provided at the Golden Theatre, Stereophonic feels more than ever like watching a wide-screen film from the heyday of Robert Altman, complete with excellent ensemble cast, overlapping dialogue and a generous running time: Adjmi divides the play into four acts, which take more than three hours to unfold. This length is essential in conveying the sprawl of a recording process that goes on far longer than anyone involved had planned, but the play itself never drags. As the band cracks up along artistic, romantic and pharmaceutical fault lines—fueled by a constant flow of booze, weed and coke, often late into the night—we follow along, riveted by the details and the music that emerges from them. There’s nary a false note.  Stereophonic | Photograph: Courtes
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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Hell’s Kitchen, whose score is drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys, could easily have gone down in flames. Jukebox musicals often do; songs that sound great on the radio can’t always pull their weight onstage. But playwright Kristoffer Diaz, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have found the right recipe for this show—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients—and they've cooked up a heck of a block party.  Loosely inspired by Keys’s life, Hell’s Kitchen has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon—in a stunningly assured debut—plays Ali, a beautiful but directionless mixed-race teenager growing up in midtown’s artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the 1990s, a period conjured winsomely and wittily by Dede Ayite’s costumes. The issues Ali faces are realistic ones: tensions with her protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean); disappointment with the charming musician father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), who yo-yos in and out of their lives; a crush on a thicc, slightly older street drummer, Knuck (Chris Lee); a desire to impress a stately pianist, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who lives in the building.  Hell’s Kitchen | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin The show’s chain of Keys songs is its most obvious selling point, but it could also have been a limitation. Musically, the tunes are not built for drama—they tend to sit in a leisurely R&B groove
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Regina Robbins  When the women’s-rights activist Alice Paul, the central figure of Shaina Taub’s musical Suffs, starts planning a march down Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration, a fellow protester volunteers to ride a white horse at the head of the procession. Paul and others are skeptical: With everything else on their plates, who has time to find a horse? But when the day arrives, their comrade does lead the demonstration astride a white steed—an amusing and historically accurate flourish in an otherwise earnest scene. This early triumph for the suffragists, however, is followed by a steep uphill climb toward the passage of the 19th Amendment. Their struggle is compounded by political and personal conflicts among women divided by age, race and class; alliances are strained, friendships are tested and blood is spilled for the cause of equality. When the curtain comes down for intermission, the returning image of that young woman on horseback may now put a lump in your throat. Suffs | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus After premiering at the Public Theatre in 2022, Suffs now marches to Broadway with its intrepid director, Leigh Silverman, still leading the way, and most of its principal cast intact: Writer-composer-lyricist Taub makes her Broadway debut as Paul; the invaluable Jenn Colella is Carrie Chapman Catt, the reigning grande dame of the suffrage movement, and Nikki M. James is the civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells. These p
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  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Deep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa—the poor, scrappy Greasers and the rich, mean Socs (short for socialites)—has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage, just as it did in the most recent Broadway revival of West Side Story. The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other. This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers. But it may also be significant that the rumble contains no dialogue or songs. Elsewhere, despite some lovely music and several strong performances, The Outsiders tends to attenuate the characters and situations it draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation. Action, in this show, speaks better than words.  The Outsiders | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Like Hinton’s novel, which she wrote when she was a teenager herself, The Outsiders is narrated by the 14-year-old Po
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Drama
  • price 3 of 4
  • Noho
  • Recommended
Theater review by Raven SnookAn indie theater company is staging a depiction of the highly fraught relationship between liberty advocate Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved lover Sally Hemings. But this period drama extends into an ellipsis thanks to metatheatrical echoes: Its writer, Luce (an excellent Sheria Irving), and its director, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), play the show’s leading roles and are also romantically linked in real life. That’s the premise of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sally & Tom, and it’s a pregnant one.  Luce is losing control of her creative vision, thanks to a meddlesome unseen producer who delivers inane suggestions via Post-it Notes. So it’s no surprise that her play—titled The Pursuit of Happiness, at the benefactor’s insistence—is a stodgy snooze. Unfortunately, it constitutes much of Act I. There are amusing depictions of downtown theater's DIY aesthetics, and of the microaggressions that underlie the multicultural troupe's camaraderie; and Luce’s play includes searing monologues for Jefferson and for Sally's brother James (Alano Miller). But most of this first half feels like a slow setup. Sally & Tom | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus It’s in Act II that the two stories begin to intertwine in discomfiting and revelatory ways, as Luce fights for her freedom: from selling out, from white male fragility, from the legacy of slavery. Her spellbinding 11- o’clock monologue, which graphically describes what Jefferson did to the teenage Sally—"Reparations? Please. The
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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended
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
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Comedy
  • price 3 of 4
  • West Village
  • Recommended
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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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “I’m a sensation!” declares the title character of The Who’s Tommy when, as a 10-year-old boy, he first stands before a pinball machine. We hear this feeling through narration sung by the grown-up version of Tommy (Ali Louis Bourzgui), because the child version is mute; in a psychosomatic reaction to trauma years earlier, he has become a “deaf dumb and blind kid,” albeit one with an astonishing gift for racking up points in arcades. It may be hard for the audience to relate to Tommy, who spends most of the show in the expressionless mien of a child mannequin. The sensation we experience in the trippy nostalgia of this 1993 musical’s Broadway revival is closer to that of a pinball: batted and bounced from one flashy moment to the next in a production that buzzes and rings with activity.  Tommy is based, of course, on the 1969 concept album that Pete Townshend wrote for his band, the Who. The plot of this rock opera is not entirely clear just from listening, so the stage musical—adapted by Townshend with director Des McAnuff—reorganizes a few of the songs and fills out the story in a different way than Ken Russell’s outré 1975 film did. During the overture, we see Tommy’s father (Adam Jacobs), an officer in the Royal Air Force, get captured by the German soldiers. (Between this, Harmony, Lempicka, Cabaret and White Rose, it’s quite a year for Nazis in musicals.) When Captain Walker returns to his wife (the very fine Alison Luff), he winds up kil
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown West
  • Recommended
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,

Concerts to see this Saturday

  • Music
  • DUMBO

Dance the night away with Latin Mix Saturdays, featuring Ronnie Roc & DJ Torres every Saturday from 7 to 10pm. Special drinks will be available at the Time Out Market Bar to cool you down and spice things up including specials from Casa Del Sol Tequila like the Tequila Solrise and a pomegranate margarita. With great music and tasty drinks, there’s no reason not to come dance with us!

Looking for the perfect brunch?

The best brunch in NYC
  • Restaurants

Consult our comprehensive guide to the best brunch NYC has to offer and enjoy the perfect late breakfast this weekend

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