Things to do in New York this Saturday

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 Hill in New York is an actual recreation of the iconic Wimbledon landmark on this side of the Atlantic. From July 8 through 10, about 1,000 New Yorkers each day will get to immerse themselves in the British experience by Brooklyn Bridge Park. What's more, the arrival of the site coincides with the British tournament's finals, so ticket holders will get to watch the last few matches as if they were on the other side of the world. Fun fact: Watching the Wimbledon championships on the Hill first became a tradition in the 1990s when the spot became the home of "Henmania," a tribute to former British number one player Tim Henman. The original Hill actually turns 25 this year. Event participants can also expect surprise live performances, on-premise activations, iconic hampers, Wimbledon-inspired gin cocktails served at the bar and the presence of actual tournament stewards. Each day will also feature a fun after-party complete with awesome DJs. Who even needs to fly to the United Kingdom anymore?

Shakespeare in the Park kicks off its 2022 season with a new production of blood-soaked history play Richard III, which imagines the final Plantagenet king as a Machiavellian villain who claws his way to power on the corpses of his family and friends. In this version, directed by Robert O'Hara (Slave Play), the title role will be played by Danai Gurira, known to mass audiences for her roles in The Walking Dead and Black Panther but also a formidable classical stage actor. (She was a superb Isabella in Shakespeare in the Park's 2011 Measure for Measure.) Click here to learn how to get free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park.

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

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Reducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form. As though it had cast a Shrinking Charm on itself, the formerly two-part epic is now a single show, albeit a long one: Almost three and a half hours of stage wizardry, set 20 years after the end of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part book series and tied to a complicated time-travel plot about the sons of Harry Potter and his childhood foe Draco Malfoy. (See below for a full review of the 2018 production.) Audiences who were put off by the previous version’s tricky schedule and double price should catch the magic now.  Despite its shrinking, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has kept most of its charm. The spectacular set pieces of John Tiffany’s production remain—the staircase ballet, the underwater swimming scene, the gorgeous flying wraiths—but about a third of the former text has been excised. Some of the changes are surgical trims, and others are more substantial. The older characters take the brunt of the cuts (Harry’s flashback nightmares, for example, are completely gone); there is less texture to the conflicts between the fathers and sons, and the plotting sometimes feels more rushed than before. But the changes have the salutary effect of focusing the story on its most interesting new creations: the resentful Albus Potter (James Romney) and the unpopular Scorpius Malfoy (Brady Dalton Richards), whose bond has been reconceived in a s

Award-winning graphic novelist Peter Kuper's intricate drawings of insects—bees, ants, cicadas, butterflies, silkworms, beetles, dragonflies, and more—show them "flying, crawling, and interacting with the various rooms of the Library’s 42nd Street building, where they will be showcased. "This bug’s-eye view of the building’s Beaux-Arts architectural details illuminates the iconic spaces in a completely original way." Kuper has been working on an upcoming graphic novel, INterSECTS, and had the chance to explore the building and its rooms while they were empty during the pandemic. It was there that he realized that the building would be a perfect vehicle for his concept. Viewers of his work can access commentary by experts online and via QR codes, such as Jessica Ware on dragonflies, Gene Kritsky on cicadas, Michael Engel on bees, Barrett Klein on scarab beetles, and Mark W. Moffett on ants with Mexico’s leading poet/novelist, Homero Aridjis, reading his poem "A Una Mariposa Monarcha."  The audio talks are accompanied by the insect-inspired music of David Rothenberg. All of this plus downloadable coloring book art will be available on January 7 at nypl.org/intersects. "There are roughly 10 quintillion insects on Earth," Kuper says. "They touch everything we do in our daily lives, our economy, our very survival. Yet most of us barely notice their existence except to swat them away. I have been fascinated with these amazing creatures my whole life, so to be able to do research at

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

Art from some of the top African-American artists in the comic book industry is now on view at the Society of Illustrators until October 29. The exhibit is co-curated by journalist and writer Karama Horne ("Marvel’s Protectors of Wakanda: A History and Training Manual of the Dora Milaje") and artist/writer Shawn Martinbrough ("How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling," "Thief of Thieves," and "Red Hood"), whose work will be featured along with over sixteen other talented artists. It'll showcase both independent and mainstream creators, such as Dawud Anyabwile, founder of the landmark Brotherman Comics, the longest-running, independently published American Black comic book and Eisner Award-winning, DC Comics and Marvel artist Denys Cowan, co-founder of Milestone Media. Also featured are Eisner Award-winning artists Afua Richardson ("Black Panther World of Wakanda," HBO’s Lovecraft Country), Alitha Martinez ("Batgirl," "World of Wakanda") and John Jennings (Octavia Butler’s "Parable of the Sower"), as well as veteran artists Larry Stroman ("Alien Legion," "X-Factor") and Darryl Banks ("Green Lantern") and more.

Most New Yorkers know that Fraunces Tavern is the site of General George Washington’s famous farewell to his officers at the end of the American Revolution, but most don't realize it was also home to the nation’s first executive governmental building that housed three offices of the Confederation Congress. It housed the Department of Foreign Affairs, Department of War and offices of the Board of Treasury from 1785 to 1788. To recreate what that was like, Fraunces Tavern has a new exhibit (open as of June 22) that recreates the Department of Foreign Affairs' office based on a cashbook that detailed the purchases for the department. The exhibit features about 60 objects, most of which are authentic to the period and many of which have never before been on public display, including tables, chairs, desks, maps, newspapers and other items. Its visitors will learn about the diplomatic, military and financial challenges that all three departments faced after the Revolutionary War and how those challenges affected the formation of the U.S. Constitution. "We are in the unique position of having access to a rare, surviving cashbook from the Department of Foreign Affairs," says Craig Hamilton Weaver, co-chairman of the Museum and Art Committee at Fraunces Tavern Museum. "We diligently researched each object in the cashbook and acquired authentic items to create an accurate setting that allows the visitor to step back into history. This is indeed a magnificent gift to the nation." Specif