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
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 a disco nap for our picks of the best parties in NYC. 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
Featured things to do this Saturday
Smorgasburg
Everything you need to know about visiting Smorgasburg (90 Kent Ave; East Dr at Lincoln Rd). At this massive grub hub, there’s only one rule: Come hungry. The Brooklyn Flea spin-off draws more than 20,000 to 30,000 visitors per week, with a slew of 75 to 100 incredible food vendors doling out everything from Dutch waffles to pasta doughnuts. Where is it?Depends on when you go. For the spring/summer 2019 season, the fest is in Williamsburg’s East River State Park (90 Kent Ave) on Saturdays and Prospect Park’s Breeze Hill (East Dr at Lincoln Rd) on Sundays. Additionally, starting April 12 2019, Manhattanites won’t have to cross the river to taste the treats. A Smorgasburg market at Westfield World Trade Center, Oculus Plaza is open every Friday from 11:30am to 7pm. When can I go?Smorgasburg is open year-round. The summer months might be the most popular, running from April through October at 11am to 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays, but in the winter months (November to March), the market joins forces with Brooklyn Flea and moves indoors. This past winter, the indoor Smorg was located at Atlantic Center (625 Atlantic Ave) on weekends from 10am to 6pm. Is there anywhere to sit?There are some picnic tables set up by the Smorgasburg team, but don’t plan on snatching one unless you have patience of steel. The organizers encourage you to bring picnic blankets with which to sit on the lawns of East River State Park or Prospect Park. Are there rain dates?Nope. The grub will be there rai
Side Ponytail
This free weekly getdown from Carolyn Busa, Julia Shiplett, Ben Wasserman and Emily Winter is a reliable night for solid laughs and surprise stars in Crown Heights.
Accomplice
Tom and Betsy Salamon’s unique adventure—part interactive theater, part scavenger hunt, part walking tour—draws participants into an amusing web of puzzles and intrigue. You can choose between the three-hour New York tour, which takes participants through various neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, or the two-hour Village tour, which travels through quirky Greenwich Village. Groups of as many as 11 are booked every half hour.
"Leonard Cohen: A Crack In Everything"
The late poet turned singer-songwriter’s legend lives on in this tribute, which makes its way to the States from Cohen’s homeland of Canada. In it, a dozen artists have been commissioned to create new works that interpret the lyricist’s themes. Spread over two floors, the exhibit, which was green-lighted by Cohen before his death, will also feature original drawings by the man himself, as well as a multimedia area where you can listen to Cohen covers by the likes of the National, Feist, Moby and Sufjan Stevens.
Hester Street Fair
This Lower East Side flea and street fair hosts one of Manhattan’s best collections of vendors, with more upstarts joining the fray every week. Standouts from recent years that have gotten their start at the fair include Macaron Parlour, Petee’s Pie Company, Melt Bakery, La New Yorkina, Arancini Bros and Cheeky Sandwich. Eeach weekend, each fair covers a specific theme from Vintage Day to a CBD Fair and Lobster and Beer Fest. Check the website in advance to see what's happening next.
Iron Maiden
In any discussion of rock acts that have improved with age, English heavy-metal institution Iron Maiden has to come in somewhere near the top: Even if Bruce Dickinson can't hit every screeching high note of his prime (cut him some slack, the guy just overcame tongue cancer), he deploys his resources for maximum impact, something that could be said equally for his restless bandmates.
Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz: Twohander
The stars of the original Off Broadway production of The Last Five Years, having gone on to major Broadway careers, reunite for a nightclub set. Scott is a blond bombshell with a paradoxical flair for understatement, a reticent power that reached its apex in her 2010 Broadway showcase, Everyday Rapture; Butz has an unlikely but winning combination of everyday guyness and star magnetism. In addition to The Last Five Years, the two have also shared the stage in Rent and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and both are highly accomplished nightclub performers, so this should be a doozy. Todd Almond is the musical director.
Joseph Keckler
The intensely eclectic baritone Keckler draws on his operatic training and his performance-art instincts in an evening of story and song.
Meshell Ndegeocello
Singer, songwriter and bassist Ndegeocello is endowed with an undeniable charm that enables her to sing about almost any topic—including such heavy subject matter as politics and race—and make it sound as intimate as pillow talk.
New York City Poetry Festival
The ninth annual New York City Poetry Festival takes over Colonel's Row on the picturesque Governors Island for the last weekend of July. With over 250 poets presenting their work and more than 60 literary organizations participating, the festival is much more of an epic than a haiku. Along with readings from many poets, the festival includes music, visual art, performance art, local vendors hawking literary-themed goods and a plethora of delicious food and drink.
Popular things to do this Saturday
Encores! Off-Center: Road Show
Encores!'s summer series concludes with a rare look at Stephen Sondheim's final musical to date: a collaboration with John Weidman (Assassins) that looks at the quintessentially American story of brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner. After a tortuous decade-long path through multiple revisions, the show finally made it to New York in 2008 in a wan production; this concert staging, directed by Will Davis (Men in Boats), may provide a better platform for its virtues. The cast includes the charismatic Raúl Esparza as con man Wilson, Brandon Uranowitz as architect Addison, and Jin Ha, Mary Beth Piel and Chuck Cooper in the main supporting roles.
“Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless”
A lesser-known light of the Pictures Generation, Gretchen Bender (1951–2004) set deconstruction to a dance beat in her pioneering video installations of the 1980s. This excellent retrospective gives the artist her due as a compellingly prescient interrogator of images, technology and mass communication, and the ways in which all three seduce and manipulate us. Arriving in New York in 1980, Bender quickly fell in with likeminded artists, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, who became her partner. These artists explored how images work—like how, say, Sherman’s film stills of lone women engender both cultural attitudes and personal subjectivity. Bender followed suit, exhibiting reliefs that juxtaposed panels bearing appropriated images from advertising and television, along with others featuring works by her peers that pointed to the self-aggrandizement and sexism of the art world. But, dissatisfied with the limitations of static formats, she turned her sights on critiquing larger issues through moving images. Her experiments with multichannel videos on stacked monitors culminated in the ambitious Total Recall (1987), a theatrical arrangement of 24 monitors on four tiers. Eighteen minutes long with 11 channels and a driving post-punk soundtrack, Total Recall shows a rapid-fire succession of then-nascent computer animation, glittering 3-D corporate logos, TV commercials, military recruiting ads and clips from Oliver Stone’s film, Salvador, about El Salvador’s bloody civil
Hester Street Fair
This Lower East Side flea and street fair hosts one of Manhattan’s best collections of vendors, with more upstarts joining the fray every week. Standouts from recent years that have gotten their start at the fair include Macaron Parlour, Petee’s Pie Company, Melt Bakery, La New Yorkina, Arancini Bros and Cheeky Sandwich. Eeach weekend, each fair covers a specific theme from Vintage Day to a CBD Fair and Lobster and Beer Fest. Check the website in advance to see what's happening next.
Romeo and Juliet
The Drilling Company's Shakespeare in the Parking Lot returns for a 25th season of classical theater on the Lower East Side. Lukas Raphael directs the Bard's cautionary tale of ardent young lovers ground up in the gears of a family feud.
Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz: Twohander
The stars of the original Off Broadway production of The Last Five Years, having gone on to major Broadway careers, reunite for a nightclub set. Scott is a blond bombshell with a paradoxical flair for understatement, a reticent power that reached its apex in her 2010 Broadway showcase, Everyday Rapture; Butz has an unlikely but winning combination of everyday guyness and star magnetism. In addition to The Last Five Years, the two have also shared the stage in Rent and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and both are highly accomplished nightclub performers, so this should be a doozy. Todd Almond is the musical director.
No One Is Forgotten
Theater review by Raven Snook Held in a dirty, claustrophobic cell for unexplained reasons, the two women of No One Is Forgotten pass the time by bickering, bantering and baring their souls. Playwright-director Winter Miller has said that her chilling one-act drama was inspired by the kidnappings and executions of high-profile journalists such as Daniel Pearl and Jamal Khashoggi, but she injects the proceedings with a Beckettian timelessness. This could be anywhere; they could be anyone. When we meet the sarcastic Beng (Renata Friedman) and the volatile Lali (Sarah Nina Hayon), they've been sequestered together for a while, so biographical revelations are scarce. In brief scenes, we learn tidbits (Beng is a lesbian with a child, Lali has a husband, they both once loved to travel for work), but their outside lives have ceased to matter. They spend their captivity exercising, playing morbid games—is it better to die of AIDS or Ebola, by gas or asphyxiation?—debating whether their food is poisoned, and engaging in painful intimacy. They are everything to each other: BFFs and lovers, confessors and confessants, reasons to live or to want to die. Leaving their vanity at the stage door, Friedman and Hayon are harrowing in physically and psychologically demanding roles. Bleak though their plight may be, Miller gives them surprising moments of levity and love. Their sanity and health are eroding, but their connection keeps them going—which is why the play’s scariest moments occ
The Bacchae
A proud Theban king goes to pieces after snubbing the Greek god Dionysus and his pack of wild women in Bryan Doerries's adaptation of Euripides' ripping tragedy. Carl Cofield directs Classical Theatre of Harlem's free alfresco production at Marcus Garvey Park, starring Jason C. Brown as the vengeful diety and featuring choreography by Elisa Monte Dance's Tiffany Rea-Fisher.
Joseph Keckler
The intensely eclectic baritone Keckler draws on his operatic training and his performance-art instincts in an evening of story and song.
Meshell Ndegeocello
Singer, songwriter and bassist Ndegeocello is endowed with an undeniable charm that enables her to sing about almost any topic—including such heavy subject matter as politics and race—and make it sound as intimate as pillow talk.
New York City Poetry Festival
The ninth annual New York City Poetry Festival takes over Colonel's Row on the picturesque Governors Island for the last weekend of July. With over 250 poets presenting their work and more than 60 literary organizations participating, the festival is much more of an epic than a haiku. Along with readings from many poets, the festival includes music, visual art, performance art, local vendors hawking literary-themed goods and a plethora of delicious food and drink.
Free things to do this Saturday
Hester Street Fair
This Lower East Side flea and street fair hosts one of Manhattan’s best collections of vendors, with more upstarts joining the fray every week. Standouts from recent years that have gotten their start at the fair include Macaron Parlour, Petee’s Pie Company, Melt Bakery, La New Yorkina, Arancini Bros and Cheeky Sandwich. Eeach weekend, each fair covers a specific theme from Vintage Day to a CBD Fair and Lobster and Beer Fest. Check the website in advance to see what's happening next.
Romeo and Juliet
The Drilling Company's Shakespeare in the Parking Lot returns for a 25th season of classical theater on the Lower East Side. Lukas Raphael directs the Bard's cautionary tale of ardent young lovers ground up in the gears of a family feud.
The Bacchae
A proud Theban king goes to pieces after snubbing the Greek god Dionysus and his pack of wild women in Bryan Doerries's adaptation of Euripides' ripping tragedy. Carl Cofield directs Classical Theatre of Harlem's free alfresco production at Marcus Garvey Park, starring Jason C. Brown as the vengeful diety and featuring choreography by Elisa Monte Dance's Tiffany Rea-Fisher.
New York City Poetry Festival
The ninth annual New York City Poetry Festival takes over Colonel's Row on the picturesque Governors Island for the last weekend of July. With over 250 poets presenting their work and more than 60 literary organizations participating, the festival is much more of an epic than a haiku. Along with readings from many poets, the festival includes music, visual art, performance art, local vendors hawking literary-themed goods and a plethora of delicious food and drink.
The Man in the Iron Mask
Hudson Warehouse presents Alexandre Dumas's tale of a French prisoner whose identity was concealed for decades. Adapted by Susane Lee and directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith, the play is the third installment of the D'Artagnan Romances, a four-year project that has already presented two pieces about the Three Musketeers and is slated to include a future production of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Smorgasburg
Everything you need to know about visiting Smorgasburg (90 Kent Ave; East Dr at Lincoln Rd). At this massive grub hub, there’s only one rule: Come hungry. The Brooklyn Flea spin-off draws more than 20,000 to 30,000 visitors per week, with a slew of 75 to 100 incredible food vendors doling out everything from Dutch waffles to pasta doughnuts. Where is it?Depends on when you go. For the spring/summer 2019 season, the fest is in Williamsburg’s East River State Park (90 Kent Ave) on Saturdays and Prospect Park’s Breeze Hill (East Dr at Lincoln Rd) on Sundays. Additionally, starting April 12 2019, Manhattanites won’t have to cross the river to taste the treats. A Smorgasburg market at Westfield World Trade Center, Oculus Plaza is open every Friday from 11:30am to 7pm. When can I go?Smorgasburg is open year-round. The summer months might be the most popular, running from April through October at 11am to 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays, but in the winter months (November to March), the market joins forces with Brooklyn Flea and moves indoors. This past winter, the indoor Smorg was located at Atlantic Center (625 Atlantic Ave) on weekends from 10am to 6pm. Is there anywhere to sit?There are some picnic tables set up by the Smorgasburg team, but don’t plan on snatching one unless you have patience of steel. The organizers encourage you to bring picnic blankets with which to sit on the lawns of East River State Park or Prospect Park. Are there rain dates?Nope. The grub will be there rai
Side Ponytail
This free weekly getdown from Carolyn Busa, Julia Shiplett, Ben Wasserman and Emily Winter is a reliable night for solid laughs and surprise stars in Crown Heights.
Queens Night Market
Consider yourself a travel-loving foodie? Queens Night Market is your one-stop shop in NYC to discover bites from 80 countries. Try a diverse range of grub that runs the gamut from Middle Eastern stews and Barbadian fishballs to Romanian-Hungarian chimney cake and tacos al pastor. The open-air bazaar operates from 5pm to midnight every Saturday, but the market has more to offer aside from fulfilling your late-night food cravings. Plus, stick around for the performances of Bollywood dancers, Indian electronica tunes, DJs and more.
Iphigenia Among the Taurians and Daughters of Troy
American Thymele Theatre's 11th annual New York Euripides Summer Festival travels to three locations to perform two rarely seen plays by the Ancient Greek master. Stephen Diacrussi directs Iphigenia Among the Taurians, in which a tormented Orestes discovers that his sister—whose sacrifice prompted a series of murderous revenges—is still alive and making human sacrifices of her own; Annabelle Lau directs Daughters of Troy, in which refugee Trojan women moan themselves hoarse in the wake of their city's destruction. The two shows are performed in rep.
FAD Market
Every season, FAD—which stands for Fashion, Art and Design—takes over a different Brooklyn venue with a horde of independent vendors and creators. Drop in to hobnob with local artists and designers while perusing jewelry, clothes, bath and body care, original art, furniture and lots more.
Movies to see this Saturday
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
The besieged spirit of an entire city infuses this remarkably ambitious indie, one that touches on gentrification and race
Rocketman
The much-anticipated Elton John biopic reinvents the movie musical with a blast of raw energy
Booksmart
Sheltered high-school besties expand their horizons in a confidently weird comedy
The Souvenir
Writer-director Joanna Hogg dredges up bad romance in this ravishing reminiscence
John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum
Keanu Reeves’s aggrieved assassin delivers another wildly fun gun-fu spectacular
Avengers: Endgame
Marvel's big finish earns its heaviness—it may even wreck you
Under the Silver Lake
David Robert Mitchell's inspired neo-noir joins the ranks of the lovably loopy L.A. stories
Hail Satan?
The documentary is possessed not by evil but by a clear eye, a cool head and a sense of humor
High Life
Robert Pattinson deepens his post-Twilight career in an arrestingly strange sci-fi film
Shazam!
Boldly—even proudly?—silly, a superhero movie weaponizes its own boyishness
Concerts to see this Saturday
Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz: Twohander
The stars of the original Off Broadway production of The Last Five Years, having gone on to major Broadway careers, reunite for a nightclub set. Scott is a blond bombshell with a paradoxical flair for understatement, a reticent power that reached its apex in her 2010 Broadway showcase, Everyday Rapture; Butz has an unlikely but winning combination of everyday guyness and star magnetism. In addition to The Last Five Years, the two have also shared the stage in Rent and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and both are highly accomplished nightclub performers, so this should be a doozy. Todd Almond is the musical director.
Joseph Keckler
The intensely eclectic baritone Keckler draws on his operatic training and his performance-art instincts in an evening of story and song.
Meshell Ndegeocello
Singer, songwriter and bassist Ndegeocello is endowed with an undeniable charm that enables her to sing about almost any topic—including such heavy subject matter as politics and race—and make it sound as intimate as pillow talk.
Iron Maiden
In any discussion of rock acts that have improved with age, English heavy-metal institution Iron Maiden has to come in somewhere near the top: Even if Bruce Dickinson can't hit every screeching high note of his prime (cut him some slack, the guy just overcame tongue cancer), he deploys his resources for maximum impact, something that could be said equally for his restless bandmates.
54 Sings Broadway's Greatest Hits!
Broadway by the Year impresario Scott Siegel curates this monthly concert series, in which Broadway stars sing some of the Great White Way's best-loved tunes.
Manilow Broadway
A Barry Manilow concert is a cheese-fondue set: a gift to those with a taste for music that is gooey, savory and strongly evocative of the ’70s. As he showed in his two-month Broadway run in 2013, the Brooklyn-born singer's voice remains pleasingly strong and familiar, and the songs have an elemental sentimental appeal that transcends kitsch. Dip your fork in and enjoy.
Love, Noël: The Letters and Songs of Noël Coward
Cabaret masters KT Sullivan and Steve Ross bring decades of wit, sophistication and musical expertise to this selection of writings by the peerless English songwriter, playwright and smoking-jacket enthusiast Noël Coward. Assembled by Barry Day and directed by the Irish Rep's Charlotte Moore, the show touches on Coward's relationships with such notable personages as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Elaine Stritch, Virginia Woolf and the Queen Mum.
Looking for the perfect brunch?
The best brunch in NYC
Consult our comprehensive guide to the best brunch NYC has to offer and enjoy the perfect late breakfast this weekend