Harrison Greenbaum
Through March 22 at 7 p.m. at Asylum NYC, 123 East 24th Street, Manhattan; asylumnyc.com.
Harrison Greenbaum regularly tells jokes at the Comedy Cellar, but he is also a successful magician who has toured the globe.
Starting in 2022, Greenbaum spent nearly two years as a starring act in Cirque du Soleil’s New York City-themed “Mad Apple” in Las Vegas. Before that, he hosted “The Unbelievable: The World’s Greatest Entertainers,” a production that made the rounds in Australia in 2017 and ’18 put on by the touring group the Illusionists. A winner of the Andy Kaufman Award in 2010, Greenbaum has also racked up TV credits on “Conan,” “Last Comic Standing” and “America’s Got Talent.”
Now back in New York, Greenbaum is blending comedy and magic in his sleight-of-hand one-hander “What Just Happened?,” which is every other Saturday night at Asylum NYC through March. Tickets start at $30 on the club’s website. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Pop & Rock
Floating Points
Feb. 21 at 6 and 11 p.m. at Knockdown Center, 52-19 Flushing Avenue, Queens; knockdown.center.
In the decade and a half that Sam Shepherd has been recording music as Floating Points, the chameleonic producer, composer and D.J. has shuttled between the rave and the symphony. A product of London’s late-2000s club scene, Shepherd gained a following with simmering, expansive dance music that hinted at his affinity for jazz. Experimental projects like 2017’s “Reflections: Mojave Desert” — recorded outdoors, using geologic formations as acoustic enhancements — and performances where he improvised live on modular synth showed his range and cerebral side. The defining work of his career so far, though, is a collaborative album with the jazz titan Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, released in 2021. That record, “Promises,” was Sanders’s last before his death, and a testament to Shepherd’s gifts as a collaborator and sonic world builder.
The expansiveness of Shepherd’s vision is evident in his live performances — vivid multimedia productions that engage the mind as well as the body. Tickets for his 6 p.m. show on Friday are about $44 on dice.fm; the later show is sold out, but there is a wait list. OLIVIA HORN
Jazz
Esperanza Spalding
Through March 2 at 8 and 10:30 p.m. at the Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, Manhattan; bluenotejazz.com.
Few musicians have navigated the transition from wunderkind to established artist as deftly as Esperanza Spalding. The five-time Grammy winner stirs souls and lifts spirits through her singing and bass playing, while always honoring her jazz roots in the dream-kissed music she composes and collaborates on.
Spalding grounds elliptical tunes and lush electroacoustic production in an irresistible sense of groove and exploration — in her singing, her playing and her incisive chatty asides — of what she once called in song “The Longing Down Below.” During this two-week residency, she will survey her career, including the music from “Milton + Esperanza,” her Grammy-nominated album with the Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento from 2024. No matter who may turn up to these sets, they have the potential to dazzle with the feelings she conjures with her band, which at the Blue Note features Morgan Guerin, Eric Doob and Matthew Stevens. Her return to an intimate club setting is yet another reason to line up for tickets.
They start at $50 on the Blue Note’s website. ALAN SCHERSTUHL
Kids
Black History Month Family Singalong
Feb. 21 at 4 p.m. at the Concert Hall, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, 58 Seventh Avenue; bkcm.org.
The 1900 hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is often described as the Black national anthem. On Friday, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music will invite children to lift their own voices and sing it, along with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and other works.
The occasion is the conservatory’s Black History Month Family Singalong, which will show young music lovers — the recommended age range is 2 to 6 — how African American composers and arrangers reinterpreted familiar tunes and concepts, giving them a new cultural resonance. In addition to pairing these songs honoring liberty, the event will illustrate how John Coltrane turned Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” into jazz, while the Supremes made it a Motown ballad.
Hosted by Uton Onyejekwe, a member of the school’s faculty and its director of diversity, equity and inclusion, the festivities will feature Lafayette Harris Jr., another conservatory instructor, on piano. The program will include projections of the song lyrics and clips from television shows and films. It will reveal, for instance, how the composer Charlie Smalls transformed “The Wizard of Oz” into “The Wiz,” a musical that celebrates Blackness.
Families can then ease on down the road home with a dance party.
Suggested admission is $8. LAUREL GRAEBER
Dance on Camera Festival
Feb. 21-24 at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, Manhattan; dancefilms.org.
Dance is often championed as an ephemeral art form, best experienced live. But for more than 50 years, Dance on Camera has made a persuasive case that it can also be uniquely explored and appreciated onscreen. The festival’s 53rd edition, in partnership with Symphony Space, is presenting 28 films from 13 countries, including full-length documentaries and artful shorts.
The festival opens on Friday with “Resilient Man,” which follows the dancer Steven McRae’s return to the stage following an injury, and closes on Monday with a 20th anniversary screening of “Mad Hot Ballroom,” the beloved documentary about dance in the New York public schools. In between are a look inside an influential dance festival in Belgrade (Saturday at 3 p.m.) and a film about the flamenco dancer María Pagés (Sunday at 2:15 p.m.). The debut of “Caribbean Nights,” an unfinished, never-released film from 1953 featuring the illustrious dancer Carmen de Lavallade, accompanies the presentation of this year’s Dance in Focus Award to honor her long, influential career (Saturday at 6 p.m.).
General admission tickets are $17 and festival passes are $99 at symphonyspace.org. BRIAN SCHAEFER
Film
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
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
‘Maybe Happy Ending’
At the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; maybehappyending.com. Running time: 1 hours 45 minutes.
Robot neighbors in Seoul, nearing obsolescence, tumble into odd-couple friendship in this wistfully romantic charmer of a musical comedy by Will Aronson and Hue Park, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen. Michael Arden (“Parade”) directs. Read the review.
‘The Outsiders’
At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; outsidersmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
Rival gangs in a musical who aren’t the Sharks and the Jets? Here they’re the Greasers and the Socs, driven by class enmity just as they were in S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film. Set in a version of Tulsa, Okla., where guys have names like Ponyboy and Sodapop, this new adaptation is the show with the rainstorm rumble you’ve heard about. It won four Tonys, including best musical and best direction, by Danya Taymor. With a book by Adam Rapp with Justin Levine, it has music and lyrics by Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) and Levine. 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.
‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy’
Through March 16 at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Manhattan; theshed.org.
This reconstruction of a fair held in Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987 — complete with carnival rides decorated by artists such as Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, which are unfortunately cordoned off — reserves its greatest pleasures for visitors with more art-historical tastes. Crammed with informative wall texts, this event — or is it an exhibition? — documents, but barely recreates, a long-lost cultural experiment that “blurred the lines between art and play.” Thirty-seven years later, at the Shed, those lines stay largely well defined. Most everything stays ensconced on the “art” side. The whole thing feels weirdly peaceful, hardly the midway I expected. Read the review.