Gramercy and Flatiron events: The best shows and happenings

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Todrick Hall has kept very busy in the past two decades, rising from chorus boy to early YouTube star, RuPaul's Drag Race judge, recording artist and Broadway leading man. His latest project certainly doesn't lack for ambition: It's an original musical that tells the stories of 12 characters, half of them white and the other half Black, whose lives intersect in the 19th-century American South. Hall not only leads the cast of 20 actors and nine swings—a huge ensemble by Off Broadway standards—but is also the show's writer, composer, director, choreographer and lead producer. After two developmental runs in London, he is ready to unveil his creation in NYC. 

Puppet master Jonathan Rockefeller's kaleidoscopic adaptation of Eric Carle’s classic children’s stories is a pure, kid-pleasing joy. The ravenous larva doesn’t appear until the final quarter, but there are plenty of colorful puppets, dancing and music to entrance youngsters until then. Along with the main story, the show dramatizes three of these seven other Carle books: 10 Little Rubber Ducks, The Very Lonely Firefly, The Very Busy Spider, Mister Seahorse, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, Dream Snow and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See. (A different combination of stories is performed at each show.)  

After more than a decade performing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, an ever-changing collection of 30 two-minutes plays, the New York Neo-Futurists had to change course when piece's author pulled the rights abruptly in 2016. Now the troupe performs a different ever-changing collection of 30 two-minute plays called The Infinite Wrench. (We wrote about it here.) 

The highly skilled New York mentalist Jason Suran attempts to blow your mind—or at least read it suprisingly well—in a new biweekly solo show at the fancy Ned Nomad hotel. If his past shows are any indication, expect autobiographical storytelling and comedy alongside the how-the-heck-did-he-do-that stuff.