Things to do on a Sunday in New York

Folks flock to this annual floral-filled exhibition at Macy’s Herald Square, where jaw-dropping arrangements are on display for two weeks. The theme for this year's installment is "Homegrown," part of the nationwide celebration of America's 250th birthday, "expressed through flowers, fiber and timeless handicrafts," per Macy's. From Thursday, April 23 through Sunday, May 10, explore greenhouse-inspired installations, breathtaking bloom-filled planters, decorative stained-glass garden panels, sculptural fabric birds, yarn-wrapped trees and more in the immersive spring spectacle. 

Sex and mortality share the spotlight (as usual) at Manhattan's Museum of Sex with The Life Force: Portraits from the Amparo & Manuel Foundation, running through November 30. The Mexico City–based Amparo & Manuel Foundation makes its U.S. debut with 45 works spanning painting, sculpture and photography, exploring desire, vulnerability and resilience. Expect big names (pieces by Tracey Emin, Lisa Yuskavage, Hernan Bas, Oh de Laval and Sarah Lucas will be on view, among others) as well as intimate moments and bodies under pressure in a show that insists intimacy is its own form of resistance.

“Give yourself over to absolute pleasure,” urges the absurdly named Dr. Frank-N-Furter as the silly, sexy cult musical The Rocky Horror Show nears its frenzied climax. Roundabout Theatre Company’s exuberant Broadway revival of the show, directed by Sam Pinkleton and featuring a killer cast led by international heartthrob Luke Evans as Frank, makes roughly the same invitation. It’s an awfully hard one to resist. 

Art-house cinema meets big existential questions at Metrograph with the series "New Museum Presents: New Humans." Tied to the New Museum’s sprawling inaugural exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, each screening—including Shengze Zhu’s Present. Perfect (2019) and René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973), among others—will be paired with artists from the museum exhibit to probe what it means to be human in a tech-saturated age. Expect cult favorites, artist intros and a heady mix of AI anxiety and cinematic deep cuts.

Spare a thought for whoever has to give this wildly obscenity-strewn biopic a rating. Not since Ken Loach’s cheery whisky heist caper The Angel’s Share got hit with a 15 certificate for dropping one too many ‘aggressive “c*nts”’ has there been such a disparity between intent and delivery in a screenplay. Here, writer-director Kirk Jones presides over a Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) story with a potty mouth but not a mean-spirited bone in its body. It’s a ‘PG’ yarn with an ‘18’ gob.

Unlike, say, Rain Man, which sidelined and misrepresented the neurodiversity at its centre, the ’90s-set I Swear ushers you right into the tormented headspace of young Scotsman John Davidson as he copes with a neurological condition that leaves him with uncontrollable tics and sees him ostracised from an uncomprehending society, and even his own family.

Writer-director Jones (Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned) comes from a comedy background, and rather than succumb to kitchen-sink glumness, he keeps the tone warm and hopeful. The supporting cast is pretty stellar too, with Shirley Henderson perfect as Davidson’s brittle mother, and Maxine Peake the film’s second heartbeat as the surrogate mum who takes him in. Mullan is a treat, too, as the long-suffering caretaker who hires Davidson and learns to live with his new colleague’s outbursts (‘I spunked in your tea!’).

Florals for spring? Groundbreaking! But why reinvent the wheel when you can enjoy some gorgeous flowers at Hudson Yards with Fleurs de Villes: Flora? The garden-party-meets-runway installation of fresh floral mannequins comes courtesy of more than 15 New York–based female designers, who transformed blooms into high-fashion silhouettes. It’s part spectacle and part stroll, with themed partnerships popping up like crocuses throughout the Hudson Yards shops from Friday, April 24, through Sunday, May 3.

If your afternoon plans needed a little more drama, Louis Vuitton just gave you an excuse to linger over tea a bit longer. The brand’s Fifth Avenue café has rolled out a newly reimagined afternoon tea service—and it’s as polished as you would expect from a label that monograms everything.

Set on the fourth floor of the midtown flagship at 6 East 57th Street, Le Café Louis Vuitton has always embraced what it calls “luxury snacking,” a menu of familiar dishes, reworked with French technique. The new tea service builds on that idea, but pushes it further into full-on occasion territory.

There are two options, both designed by the café’s culinary team, which is led by Executive Chef Kylian Goussot and Executive Pastry Chef Mary George. The first, “A Sweet Escape” ($100 per person), is essentially a dessert showcase: six miniature pastries arranged with surgical precision, plus a standout Marble Gâteau layered with chocolate, vanilla, rum syrup and glossy dark chocolate glaze. There’s also a hazelnut ganache with praline and fleur de sel and a vanilla-forward confection that leans into caramelized milk and custard textures.

If you want something savory to balance things out, “The Exquisite Journey” ($135) adds five small bites to the mix. That includes a truffle-laced croque-monsieur, a tuna taco topped with caviar and ponzu and a vegetable dish with coconut and ginger that tastes like something you might find on a fancy spa’s lunch menu.

MoMA PS1 just opened "Greater New York 2026," its sprawling, building-wide exhibition that doubles as a snapshot of what artists across the city are actually making right now. Running through August 17, the show features 53 artists and collectives working across pretty much every medium you can think of.

This isn’t the type of show you can power through in 45 minutes, though. It takes over the entire museum with more than 150 works, including large-scale installations, new commissions, performances and pieces that, in many cases, have never been shown publicly before. There’s painting next to animation next to scenography next to something you’re not entirely sure how to categorize and that’s entirely the point.

Artists included in the show range from emerging names to more established figures, with a noticeable emphasis on early- and mid-career voices. Many have direct ties to Queens and the surrounding area, connecting the show to neighborhoods just outside the museum’s doors.

As for what it’s all about: don’t expect a single theme spelled out on a wall label. Instead, the exhibition loosely tracks the pressures shaping life in New York today—everything from surveillance and rapidly evolving tech to infrastructure strain and collective resistance.

A revival of Cats, at least in theory, might well give you paws. After a then-record 18-year run on Broadway—with a tagline, “NOW AND FOREVER,” that began to sound a bit like a threat—Andrew Lloyd Webber's synthtastic 1980s musical finally hung up its leotards and yak-hair wigs in 2000. Its comeback efforts since then have been less than overwhelming: a taxidermic 2016 revival, a widely mocked 2019 film. It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat. But now along comes a thrilling reconception that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights. After an already-legendary Off Broadway debut at the Perelman Arts Center in 2024, this production—under the chosen name Cats: The Jellicle Ball–has now re-inhabited Broadway, where it remains a categorical triumph. 

Is Cats good or bad? That’s a question without an answer. Cats is beyond good and bad. Cats is Cats. Cats is about cats competing to be sent into the ionosphere. Cats is about cats who sing light verse from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, an exercise in high silliness that sits at the classy end of an anthropomorphic-cat comedy genre that includes, at lower stations, New Yorker cartoons and I Can Has Cheezburger? memes. Cats is about Andrew Lloyd Webber writing a lot more melodies than he often does (to fit the requirements of Eliot’s meter) and producing many bangers right out of his hat. Cats is about human dancers performing feline, weirdly sexy moves. At its best, it’s ridiculous and kind of magical. At its worst, it’s just ridiculous. 

Step back in time at Before New York: A Traveling Pop-Up Exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, where the city’s original landscape becomes the focus. This immersive display from ecologist Dr. Eric W. Sanderson and colleagues reconstructs the area as it was on September 12, 1609, just before Henry Hudson landed. Before New York explores the region’s original ecosystems and Indigenous histories, inviting visitors to imagine Manhattan as it once was: lush, wild and teeming with life. It’s a fascinating, thought-provoking complement to the Garden’s living collections and environmental mission.