‘Show and Tell With Liza Treyger’
Feb. 7 at 10 p.m. at Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn; unionhallny.com.
Hot off the heels of the debut of “Night Owl,” her hourlong comedy special on Netflix, Liza Treyger is presenting this showcase in which her funny friends joke about their most cherished possessions.
Treyger, who was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, has made a name for herself in the New York City comedy scene over the past decade through her blunt appraisals of herself and society’s sexual politics. This reputation earned her an appearance on Netflix’s “Survival of the Thickest” and a consultant gig on “The Eric Andre Show.” She recently had a supporting role on an episode of the Amazon Prime Video series “Harlem.”
Taking part in Treyger’s “Show and Tell” on Friday are Tommy McNamara, Drew Anderson, Marie Faustin and Molly Kearney. Tickets are $15 on Eventbrite. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Pop & Rock
Why Bonnie
Feb. 7 at 8 p.m. at Night Club 101, 101 Avenue A, Manhattan; dice.fm.
When the singer and songwriter Blair Howerton was coming up in the music scene in Austin, Texas, her band, Why Bonnie, made soft-spoken bedroom pop that suggested a spiritual kinship with New York D.I.Y. acts like Frankie Cosmos. But once Howerton relocated to Brooklyn in 2019, her musical compass turned back toward the West, and her home state became a main character in her music. Why Bonnie’s 2022 debut, “90 in November,” is shot through with nostalgia for childhood vacations, stifling heat and open highways, articulated in songs that dust alt-rock with a light layer of twang. On “Wish on the Bone,” the band’s follow-up from last year, the references to Texas are less overt, but the music retains an easy pace and the sense of an infinite horizon.
On Friday, Why Bonnie will perform in the East Village at Night Club 101, which occupies the former home of the legendary Pyramid Club. Tickets are just under $23 on dice.fm. OLIVIA HORN
Bill Frisell, 73, is perhaps the most influential jazz guitarist of his generation, continuing to blend a classic jazz touch with folk influences, rollicking bebop abstractions, the occasional 1960s pop cover, and his own tuneful sense of quirk. He remains predictably unpredictable.
On “Orchestras,” his ambitious 2024 Blue Note double LP, his work with large ensembles sounds, at times, like light filtering through leaves, a dip in the headwaters of American music, or the moment when a midcentury spy film starts to spin out of control. Another of his releases from 2024, “Breaking the Shell” (Red Hook Records), is a boldly searching collaboration with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes, who is featured playing the pipe organ at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village.
These shows at Roulette will find Frisell again embracing the fresh and the familiar. Over the decades, he has played with all of the ringers in this new band — Jenny Scheinman, Hank Roberts, Rudy Royston, Thomas Morgan and Eyvind Kang — but never in this promising configuration.
Tickets are $45 in advance on Roulette’s website and $50 at the door. The concerts will also be livestreamed on the club’s YouTube channel. ALAN SCHERSTUHL
‘Clara Schumann’s World of Music!’
Feb. 8-9 at 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. at Assembly Hall at Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue, Manhattan; littleorchestra.org.
The Mozarts, the Mendelssohns and the Schumanns were all musical families. What some listeners may not realize, however, is how impressive some female members of those households were.
In “Clara Schumann’s World of Music!,” part of the Little Orchestra Society’s L.O.S. Kids series for ages 3 to 10, children will encounter an accomplished composer and pianist who made great contributions to the classical canon.
In Craig Shemin’s script for the program, Clara Schumann (1819-96) is an energetic and spirited figure who enjoys interacting with children. (She had eight with her husband, Robert Schumann.) Portrayed by Elena Brace, Clara will converse about her life and era with the concert’s host, the wacky Prof. Melody Treblemaker (Gracie Lee Brown).
The music, conducted by David Alan Miller, will include not only excerpts from Clara’s work — the March in E flat and her Piano Concerto — but also from pieces by Fanny Mendelssohn (sister to Felix), the pioneering Florence Price and the contemporary composer Joan Tower. Audience members, who can learn a dance and help conduct, will even hear some melodies written by men.
Tickets start at $18. LAUREL GRAEBER
Urban Bush Women
Through Feb. 7 at 7 p.m. and Feb. 8 at 2 p.m. at Perelman Performing Arts Center, 251 Fulton Street, Manhattan; pacnyc.org.
When the choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar was a child in Kansas City, Mo., she danced in community revues called floor shows, which included live bands and a mix of entertainment. That eclectic structure, the variety of performance styles, and memories of joyous Black socializing inspired Zollar’s latest work, “SCAT! … The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar.” This dance-forward musical will be performed this weekend by her acclaimed ensemble Urban Bush Women, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
The Al and Dot in the title are Zollar’s parents, and the show loosely follows their love story set against the backdrop of the Great Migration in the United States, when many Black Southerners moved to urban areas in the North and the West. Along with the exuberant physical storytelling that is Urban Bush Women’s hallmark, “SCAT!” also features an original score by the trombonist Craig Harris, played by a live jazz band with vocalists.
Tickets start at $34 on the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s website. BRIAN SCHAEFER
Film
Snubbed Forever: Great Actors, No Nominations
Feb. 1-March 9 at the Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Avenue, Queens; movingimage.us.
Complaints that certain actors missed out on Oscar nominations last week inevitably seem small when measured against the careers in this series, which honors performers who never received — or, at least, have yet to receive — a single nomination. First up is John Cazale, who starred in only five movies before his death at 42, but all of them are enduring classics of the 1970s, including the first two “Godfather” films and “The Deer Hunter.” The museum is highlighting his nervy work as Al Pacino’s bank-robbing partner in “Dog Day Afternoon” (showing on Saturday and Sunday), a tightly wound role easy to overlook beside Pacino’s loudmouth virtuosity.
It’s hard to believe that the academy has completely ignored John Turturro and John Goodman, who play neighbors at a seedy Los Angeles hotel in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” (on Saturday and Sunday): Goodman is the supposed embodiment of “the common man,” a group Turturro’s self-important playwright presumes to write about. Next weekend, the museum will salute Mia Farrow (“Rosemary’s Baby,” on Feb. 7 and 8), Maureen O’Hara (“The Quiet Man,” on Feb. 8 and 9) and Joseph Cotten (“The Magnificent Ambersons,” on Feb. 8 and 9). BEN KENIGSBERG
Critic’s pick
‘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.
‘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
‘Edges of Ailey’
Through Feb. 9 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; whitney.org.
A major institutional tribute to the American choreographer and performer Alvin Ailey (1931-89), this show is also a relatively rare example of a traditionally object-intensive art museum giving full-scale treatment to the ephemeral medium of dance. But if you anticipated, as I did, that this would mean a display of documentary photographs, some archival materials (costumes, stage designs), and — best — extensive examples of dance on film, you’ve got a surprise in store. 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.
‘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.
