‘Your Love, Our Musical’
Feb. 14 at 10 p.m. at the Second City, 64 North Ninth Street, Brooklyn; secondcity.com.
For Valentine’s Day, romance is the dominant theme at comedy clubs this weekend. A prime example is “Your Love, Our Musical,” featuring New York City’s top improvisers who use the real-life courtships of couples in the audience as fodder for their ad-libbed tunes. Tickets are from $49 on Second City’s website.
Other options on Friday night include “Why Are You Single? A Game Show With Marie Faustin” (8 p.m., Bell House; $20); “Young Hot Sluts,” a live dating show hosted by Carly Ann Filbin (8 p.m., Littlefield; $20); and “The Naked Comedy Show,” which Billy Procida will preside over, as advertised, in the buff (8 and 10 p.m., Bushwick Comedy Club; $39).
On Saturday, you can stay in and stream the sold-out show “Ask a F — boy: V-Day Debrief,” in which female stand-ups tell dating horror stories to a panel of male comics (9:30 p.m., on Caveat’s website; $10), or catch Lane Moore swiping through dating profiles in a “Tinder Live” livestream (9 p.m. on the Moment platform; $20). SEAN L. McCARTHY
Pop & Rock
Toro y Moi and Panda Bear
Feb. 14 at 8 p.m. at Terminal 5, 610 West 56th Street, Manhattan; terminal5nyc.com.
To followers of the indie blogosphere in the early 2010s, Chaz Bear was known as a progenitor of chillwave — the atmospheric, nostalgia-heavy microgenre of electronica whose fingerprints are all over the “vibey” mood music that proliferates in today’s streaming economy. Bear, who records under the moniker Toro y Moi, has since sidestepped the “chillwave” label with a succession of wide-ranging albums. He’s leaned into more traditional pop and R&B, and tried his hand at guitar-forward indie rock. Toro y Moi’s “Hole Erth,” released in September, is yet another genre experiment: On it, Bear lays claim to the emo and rap-rock sounds of his youth, which have recently been retooled by a new generation of Internet-native artists.
On Valentine’s Day, Bear is linking up with another bear — Panda Bear, of Animal Collective — for show in Midtown. Tickets are $56 on AXS. OLIVIA HORN
Classical
‘Stimmung Is for Lovers’
Feb. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Chapel, 1160 Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan; ekmeles.com.
Valentine’s Day is a perfect time to set the mood and get in tune. Luckily, the German word Stimmung — also the title of a notable Karlheinz Stockhausen composition from 1968 — covers those bases, translating to “mood,” “tuning” and more besides.
This Friday at St. Paul’s Chapel on Columbia University’s campus, the experimental vocal ensemble Ekmeles presents “Stimmung Is for Lovers,” reviving a concert it performed last Valentine’s Day. Six vocalists, each singing into a microphone, build Stockhausen’s “Stimmung” from a barely audible low drone to a roiling stew of sound to a single fluctuating chord over the course of an hour.
Configurations of syllables and harmonies shift as “magic names” and snippets of poetry emerge and are slowly assimilated into the overall texture. It’s a mesmerizing work, capturing the flush of late 1960s experimentalism. With its overtones on overtones, embedded odes to love and endless searching for harmonic accord, what could be more romantic?
To attend, scroll down and click on “Free admission, registration required” on Ekmeles’s calendar to access the form. GABRIELLE FERRARI
Kids Week
Feb. 15-22, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., at the Intrepid Museum, 46th Street and the Hudson River, Manhattan; intrepidmuseum.org.
The Intrepid Museum, formerly the U.S.S. Intrepid, transported military forces as an aircraft carrier for decades before becoming a harborside center for science and culture. This weekend, the museum will welcome a woman who has also been around the world, but in an even more famous vehicle: the International Space Station.
She is the astronaut Jeanette J. Epps, who on Sunday will deliver two talks about her experiences as a flight engineer for the SpaceX Crew-8 mission last year. At 1 p.m., she will treat young visitors to a slide show of her nearly eight-month expedition. At 3 p.m., the former astronaut Mike Massimino will interview her for the Astro Live Series, which will be simultaneously streamed on the museum’s social media platforms: YouTube, Facebook and X.
Epps’s appearances are part of NASA Explore Days (Saturday through Monday), which include interactive demonstrations, a look at astronaut food and panels on aerospace careers. This three-day celebration begins the museum’s annual Kids Week, during which young visitors can enjoy daily offerings like robotics, author talks, theater, circus arts and live-animal presentations. (A full schedule is online.)
All activities are included with museum admission, which starts at $28 and is free for children 4 and younger. LAUREL GRAEBER
Wild at Heart: Willem Dafoe
Through Feb. 26 at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.
This retrospective on Willem Dafoe, titled “Wild at Heart,” takes its name from David Lynch’s 1990 feature, in which Dafoe plays a repulsive, dentally challenged villain called Bobby Peru (“just like the country”). But Anthology means these words to be understood literally: Dafoe is an actor with an almost feral presence and an easily underestimated range; his career quite explicitly runs the gamut from “The Last Temptation of Christ” (showing on Saturday and Tuesday) to “Antichrist” (on Monday).
In Paul Schrader’s “Light Sleeper” (on Friday, Sunday and Feb. 20), Dafoe plays a drug dealer whose monastic existence is presented as a contemporary correlative to the curate’s life in Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest.” Dafoe, who has been turning up in person throughout the series, will appear for a Q&A at Sunday’s screening. The theater’s showing of “Wild at Heart” on Sunday night is already sold out. BEN KENIGSBERG
Last Chance
‘Eureka Day’
Through Feb. 16 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
In Jonathan Spector’s sharp social satire, a mumps outbreak at an ultra-precious private elementary school in Northern California exposes the rift between vaccine advocates and skeptics, challenging the board’s unctuous commitment to valuing each community member’s perspective equally. Anna D. Shapiro (“August: Osage County”) directs an ensemble cast that includes Jessica Hecht, Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz. Read the review.
Critic’s pick
‘English’
Through March 2 at the Todd Haimes Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
The winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Sanaz Toossi’s quiet comedy is set in an Iranian classroom, where a group of adults is learning English from a teacher who once lived abroad, and dreaming of inhabiting different lives. Knud Adams, who staged the exquisite Off Broadway production in 2022, directs the original cast. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Gypsy’
At the Majestic Theater, Manhattan; gypsybway.com. Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes.
Grabbing the baton first handed off by Ethel Merman, Audra McDonald plays the formidable Momma Rose in the fifth Broadway revival of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s exalted 1959 musical about a vaudeville stage mother and her daughters: June, the favorite child, and Louise, who becomes the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Directed by George C. Wolfe, with choreography by Camille A. Brown, the cast includes Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Jordan Tyson and Lesli Margherita. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Hell’s Kitchen’
At the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; hellskitchen.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Alicia Keys’s own coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical, which won two Tonys. Studded with Keys’s songs, including “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” it’s the story of a 17-year-old girl (Maleah Joi Moon, last year’s winner for best actress) in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, growing into an artist. Directed by Michael Greif, the show has a book by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Read the review.
last Chance
‘Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now’
Through Feb. 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.
This unusual and audacious exhibition spotlights a propensity in American culture hiding in plain sight: the attachment, among Black artists, musicians and intellectuals, to ancient Egyptian culture, myth and spirituality. Rambling across a century and a half, with nearly 200 artworks, it explores the colonial roots of modern Egyptology, the Pharaonic motifs of the Harlem Renaissance, the Egyptian iconography of Black Power and other movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and sphinxes and pyramids in the work of everyone from Kara Walker to Richard Pryor. Read the review.
last Chance
‘Vital Signs: Artists and the Body’
Through Feb. 22 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.
Featuring a cross-racial and international selection of women and gender-nonconforming artists, nearly all from the museum’s collection, this survey offers fresh acquisitions such as twee body-horror ceramics (a woman merged with a book titled “Historia del Hombre,” or a cob studded with toothy lumps) by Tecla Tofano. Lynda Benglis is here with a classic condiment-hued latex “pour,” an almost obligatory nod to 1960s feminist critiques of Abstract Expressionism excess. And there are happy surprises, like Mako Idemitsu’s video “Inner Man,” in which a mustachioed nude frolics over footage of a woman in a pale kimono. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930’
Through March 9 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue; guggenheim.org.
Sprawling, mood-lifting and masterpiece-studded, this exhibition confers a thrilling sharpness on a movement that has long been a blur. This first in-depth look at Orphism brings together about 80 works by 26 artists that mostly date to the enchanted years preceding World War I, an upbeat time when inventions ranging from incandescent lightbulbs to the first cars and airplanes were leading artists to rethink their mission. You may think that Picasso and Braque had already answered the question adequately through their Cubist canvases. But no, not to the Orphists, who sought to infuse the dun-hued planes of cubism with rapturous color. Read the review.