Things to do near the Empire State Building

Pantone's Color of the Year (Classic Blue) is at the center of ARTECHOUSE's latest multimedia exhibit—"Celestial." Visitors to the underground attraction will be taken on a "journey beyond the skies."  Classic Blue, according to Pantone, brings a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit, offering refuge. The new installation aim to do the same through sights, sounds and sensations. “During these unprecedented times as a society we have found ourselves in a new state of existence. Before 2020 even began, Pantone selected Classic Blue as the color of the year because they saw it as the hue to sustain us during a time of change,” said Sandro Keserelidze, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of ARTECHOUSE. “2020 ended up bringing changes no one expected, making the hue of Classic Blue, and the qualities it represents, more relatable now than ever before. We couldn’t think of a more timeless and timely theme to end the year and launch a new chapter of experiences.”

Discover the artwork of 27 artists along Columbus Avenue from West 67th to 77th Streets, Saturday through January 31, 2021, as part of Art on the Ave NYC. Curator Lisa DuBois of X-Gallery in Harlem chose works from more than 220 submissions that reinforce the gallery walk’s timely theme, “The Art of Healing.” New Yorkers can access recordings of each artist describing their work and an introductory message from actor Michael Imperioli by scanning a QR code on individual storefront windows. Also included is an educational component featuring downloadable lessons accessible through the Art on the Ave website.

Infamous, a solo exhibition by renowned artist Andres Serrano on view at Fotografiska, is a visual exploration of the history of racism in the U.S. via 30 photographs of racist artifacts, including race-based and racist memorabilia. Serrano acquired KKK hoods, consumer products depicting caricatures of Black people, violent documentary photographs, and more, most of which were previously owned and purchased directly from the homes of Americans. Serrano hopes to confront the country’s racist history and have Americans consider racism's influence on culture and society today. The museum will support these conversations through programming, includingwith the National Coalition Against Censorship.

Get immersed in the vivid, saturated and dramatic stained glass works of Brian Clarke, who has been one of the world's most prominent stained glass artists. You can walk between and around 20 free-standing, glass screens that almost come to life with changing light. Since the early 1970s, Clarke has collaborated with some of the world’s most prominent architects to create stained-glass designs and installations for hundreds of projects worldwide. 

Bring your own beer to this night of comedy hosted by the New York Comedy Club at Hudson Mercantile Rooftop. You'll hear from comics like H Foley, Ardie Fuqua, Tom Cassidy, Lean Bonnema, Liz Miele, Rojo Perez, Nick Griffen, Jon Fisch, Caitlin Peluffo and more. Tickets are capped at 50, so make sure you get yours asap.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Teenage girls rule in the tart but sweet new Broadway musical Mean Girls. But their system of high-school government is far from a democracy: It’s a reign of terror, angst and mall fashions, where popularity is arrogated and then ruthlessly enforced. Having spent her childhood being home-schooled in Kenya, nature and math enthusiast Cady (Erika Henningsen) is initially confused by the rigid caste system of her new school in Chicago. She tries to be nice, but the ruthlessness of American teenage culture brings out Cady’s predatory instincts. She reverts to the mean. A canny crossbreed of Heathers and Hairspray, the musical has been adapted by Tina Fey from her own 2004 cult movie, and updated to reflect the new realities of smartphones and social media. Fey is one of the sharpest comic writers in America, and the show remains, in some sense, her vehicle: an auto de Fey, burning with bookish anger at the limits young women place on each other and themselves. (Her film role as a pushy calculus teacher is amusingly evoked by Kerry Butler, who also plays the other adult women.) But this version of Mean Girls is not just a copy of the original. The most famous lines from the screenplay are here, but Casey Nicholaw’s energetic staging wisely breezes past them; the newer jokes get bigger laughs, while the score—by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin—successfully builds on Fey’s knowingly corrective tone. (“This is modern feminism talkin’,” sings a high-hee

Gulliver’s chromatic video installation is projected across 360 degrees to bring the 1960s underground Tokyo discotheque, Killer Joe’s, to life before your eyes. By beaming images from 18 slide projectors across the discotheque, he created an immersive environment that melds the sights and sounds of the underground venue through the about 1,500 slides. The work portrays “a booming postwar youth culture that tapped into global psychedelia” that reigned in the 1960s.

Theater review by Adam Feldman Red alert! Red alert! If you’re the kind of person who frets that jukebox musicals are taking over Broadway, prepare to tilt at the windmill that is the gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffed Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers, this adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.  The place is the legendary Paris nightclub of the title, and the year is ostensibly 1899. Yet the songs—like Catherine Zuber’s eye-popping costumes—span some 150 years of styles. Moulin Rouge! begins with a generous slathering of “Lady Marmalade,” belted to the skies by four women in sexy black lingerie, long velvet gloves and feathered headdresses. Soon they yield the stage to the beautiful courtesan Satine (a sublimely troubled Karen Olivo), who makes her grand entrance descending from the ceiling on a swing, singing “Diamonds Are Forever.” She is the Moulin Rouge’s principal songbird, and Derek McLane’s sumptuous gold-and-red set looms around her like a gilded cage. After falling in with a bohemian crowd, Christian (the boyish Aaron Tveit), a budding songwriter from small-town Ohio, wanders into the Moulin Rouge like Orpheus in the demimonde, his cheeks as rosy with innocence as the showgirls’ are blushed with maquillage. As cruel fate would have it, he instantly falls in love with Satine, and she with him—but she has been promised, alas, to the wicked Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu)

"Making the Met: 1870-2020," takes you on a journey through the institution's history through more than 250 artworks it secured and displayed from its inception through today. Broken up by transitional moments in the evolution of the museum's collection, buildings, and ambitions, you'll see a thoughtful reflection on where it's been and where it's going.  You'll see everything from visitor favorites to fragile treasures that can only be placed on view from time to time. I saw famous Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, and John Singer Sargent paintings, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe by Richard Avedon and a 1960s mod dress from Yves Saint Laurent, religious art like an ornate Hebrew Bible from the 1300s, antiquities from around the globe such as an Egyptian statue of Hatshepsut and a Neo-Hittite decorative stone slab, and so much more.

To untimely rip and paraphrase a line from Macbeth: Our eyes are made the fools of the other senses, or else worth all the rest. A multitude of searing sights crowd the spectator's gaze at the bedazzling and uncanny theater installation Sleep No More. Your sense of space and depth---already compromised by the half mask that audience members must don---is further blurred as you wend through more than 90 discrete spaces, ranging from a cloistral chapel to a vast ballroom floor. Directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, of the U.K. troupe Punchdrunk, have orchestrated a true astonishment, turning six warehouse floors and approximately 100,000 square feet into a purgatorial maze that blends images from the Scottish play with ones derived from Hitchcock movies—all liberally doused in a distinctly Stanley Kubrick eau de dislocated menace. An experiential, Choose Your Own Adventure project such as this depends on the pluck and instincts of the spectator. You can follow the mute dancers from one floor to the next, or wander aimlessly through empty spaces. I chose the latter, discovering a room lined with empty hospital beds; a leafless wood in which a nurse inside a thatched cottage nervously checks her pocket watch; an office full of apothecary vials and powders; and the ballroom, forested with pine trees screwed to rolling platforms (that would be Birnam Wood). A Shakespearean can walk about checking off visual allusions to the classic tragedy; the less lettered can just revel in t