Things to do in New York this Saturday

Broadway review by Adam Feldman A Strange Loop is a wild ride. In a Broadway landscape dominated by shows that often seem designed by corporations for audiences of focus groups, Michael R. Jackson’s musical is the defiant product of a single and singular authorial vision. This wide-ranging intravaganza takes a deep dive, often barely coming up for breath, into a whirlpool of ambition and frustration as Jackson's seeming alter ego—a queer, Black writer-composer named Usher (Jaquel Spivey)—struggles to define himself amid traps of sex, race, family, body image, religion and entertainment. It’s screamingly funny and howlingly hurt, and it’s unmissable.   Smartly directed by Stephen Brackett, the show caused a sensation in 2019 when it premiered at Playwrights Horizons; now, after multiple top-ten lists and an armful of honors (including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), it has reached Broadway without compromising its conflicted, challenging, sometimes actively family-unfriendly content. The songs are welcomingly tuneful and clever, but as Usher warns us in the opening number: “A Strange Loop will have Black shit! And white shit! It’ll give you uptown and downtown! With truth-telling and butt-fucking!”  All of that is true—including, graphically, the last part—but it barely begins to describe the show’s discombobulating melange of anger, joy, neurosis and honesty. In this very meta musical, Usher is the only real character: the unstable “I

Theater review by Raven Snook In comedy, timing is everything—and the timing of Alison Leiby's Oh God, A Show About Abortion is so perfect, you may wonder whether she facilitated the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade leak as the ultimate marketing ploy. But the current judicial chaos is just another illustration of why this politically savvy stand-up has spent three years incubating a solo show about reproductive rights. Her goal is to discuss and destigmatize abortion, and her penetrating comic treatise seriously slays.  The show is powerfully personal. But for Leiby, who knew that she didn't want children and was able to access and afford an abortion at age 35, the actual procedure she underwent was not really that big a deal, and it only takes up about 10 minutes of her tale. Her real subjects are the lack of meaningful discourse on the subject of abortion, the patriarchy's policing of women's bodies and society's compulsion to categorize everyone with a uterus as a mother or not a mother. That may sound more like a lecture than a laugh riot, but Leiby—a co-producer of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and a joke doctor for Broad City's Ilana Glazer, who's presenting this show—knows how to pack a punchline. With endearing offhandedness, she goofs on ignorant male doctors, sketchy one-night stands and her mother; pokes fun at her own flaws (like spending way too much on shoes and plants); imagines candid conversations about menstruation and honest commercials for birth control; and lamba

Theater review by Regina Robbins  Based on the life story of Tony Valdovinos, who tried to enlist in the Marines at the age of 18 only to discover he was not an American citizen, ¡Americano! is full of lessons about community, family, love and resilience. This new musical’s good intentions are obvious. Unfortunately, so is a lot of the writing. You’d have to be heartless not to feel for high school senior Tony (Sean Ewing), who watched the Twin Towers collapse on TV from his Arizona home and vowed to join the military armed forces when he grew up. His best friend, Ceci (Legna Cedillo), also intends to enlist, but they are confronted by issues that could complicate their plans, including the troubled home life of their friend Javi (Pablo Torres) and romantic longings of their own. And when Tony tells the local recruitment center that his Social Security number is “in process”—the excuse he has been given by his father (Alex Paez)—he is turned away. At first he is despondent: He can’t even afford community college, since Arizona has recently voted to charge undocumented residents at out-of-state tuition rates. But he finds a new purpose in politics, working to motivate Latinx voters so that some day, the DREAM Act might finally pass.  Valdovinos’s story really is inspirational, and it might have inspired a successful musical. But ¡Americano! feels more like a long campaign ad. The righteousness of the message can’t overcome undistinguished melodies and awkward lyrics (“How coul

The Museum of Sex always has something exciting going on behind closed doors. "Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival" is back and better than ever with its 4-D immersive “Tunnel of Love” ride, the Love & Lust Deity Derby game, an erotic fortune-telling machine (modeled as RuPaul), a kissing booth, the Glory Stall game, an immersive "Stardust Lane - the Erogenous Kaleidoscope," an erotic mechanical bull and a lit-up climbing structure, "The Climbx," and more. Then when it's time to take the edge off, visitors can slide down a spiral slide into the Museum’s psychedelic carnival bar, Lollipop Lounge, for cocktails. 

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)'s "Flower Craft" will showcase works of six botanical artists who have been inspired by nature’s "ephemerality and its inimitable palettes" and have interpreted nature in a sculptural form. Each week a new botanical artist will be featured in the Flower Craft gallery as will a curated selection of vessels made in a range of mediums. The exhibition also coincides with MAD’s first-ever "bee residency," two newly installed beehives on the Museum roof. The hives are now homes for "Queen Aileen," named for the founder of MAD, Aileen Osborn Webb, and "Queen Toshiko Takaezu," named for the famed female ceramic artist and dedicated supporter of MAD. Additionally, MAD will be holding flower craft studio classes with artists through May and June and the Museum’s free art-making and discussion workshop will take place on select Thursdays from 4–6 pm in the Flower Craft gallery. A Flower Power Pass may be purchased online and will offer discounted admission to the Museum for $45 (a $108 value) during the run of the exhibition for visitors to experience Flower Craft in its entirety. The Store at MAD will offer fresh bouquets by celebrated New York City florists Anthony Brownie, Kat Flower, Petal, and Julia Testa, as well as floral inspired, handmade products from a global roster of artists. 

The Final Frontier will be just a train ride away at The Paley Center for Media with its new immersive exhibition, "The Visionary Universe of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," opening on Wednesday, April 27. The exhibit celebrates the latest series in the Star Trek franchise, Strange New Worlds from Paramount+ and the other acclaimed series in the Star Trek universe from across the decades. Through May 29, fans and visitors will be able to take photos in the captain's chair, see costumes and props from several series (Vulcan uniforms, set pieces including the USS Enterprise), sit in for special screenings and bring kids to weekend events featuring Paramount+’s hit animated original kids’ series Star Trek: Prodigy and much more. The Paley Center will be holding a preview screening of Episodes 1 and 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on May 1 at 1pm and daily screenings of premiere episodes on the big screen from various Star Trek TV series, including "The Cage," the 1965 pilot episode from the original Star Trek series. Screenings begin at 12:10pm daily.

Immersive art exhibit Arcadia Earth has reopened after being closed due to the pandemic, and it looks better than ever! The exhibit aims to inspire visitors artistically and ethically, as it uses 15 rooms to spotlight the environmental challenges that our planet is facing (such as overfishing, food waste, and climate change). This exhibit will not only leave visitors in awe, but it will help support Oceanic Global, an organization devoted to raising awareness around our aquatic ecosystems. In addition, a tree will also be planted for every ticket sold, making it a perfect gift for your eco-conscious friends!

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

Saheem Ali directs the New York premiere of James Ijames tragicomic riff on Hamlet, which transforms Shakespeare's mopey Dane into a queer Black college kid. The play just won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, so snap up tickets while you can. Marcel Spears plays the lead role, Juicy, with a supporting cast that comprises Nikki Crawford, Chris Herbie Holland, Billy Eugene Jones, Adrianna Mitchell, Calvin Leon Smith and Benja Kay Thomas.

Theater review by Caroline McGinn Yup, you heard it. New York’s hottest ticket is a middle-aged white man rapping. That man is James McAvoy: booted and buzzcut like a Glaswegian squaddie and stripped to the waist. For nearly three hours he spits fire, spraying lyrical pearls at his enemies, nailing rap battles and chucking his battered heart beneath the feet of the woman he loves, Roxane. McAvoy is Cyrano: winner in words, loser in love—and he’s hot as hell. Writer Martin Crimp and director Jamie Lloyd have pulled off something improbably brilliant to get him here: taking Edmond Rostand’s frilly old French verse drama about a mournful musketeer with a massive nose and reinventing it as, basically, Hamilton for Europeans. Writers are fighters and the word is everything in this firecracker show about passion, rejection, and the crazy genius of the spoken word. The rapiers, intrigue and censorship of Cardinal Richelieu’s Paris, circa 1640, are modernized as razor-sharp banter about love, sex, and (nudge, wink) cultural appropriation. Duels, like the one where Cyrano massacres a crap actor for massacring Hamlet, are fought as rap battles or slam contests. And it all happens around a mic on a stage that’s mostly blank and white like an unwritten page.  Director Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour have had the sense to get out of the way and strip everything back, to let the words and actors shine. And they dazzle. The Big Mac is backed up by a chorus of massively talented actors and