Calendar of Events in New York

Saturday, May 18
• 
  Dance Parade
  Tompkins Square Park

  Watch out for the NYDP this Saturday—the New York Dance Police. During the seventh annual Dance Parade, these fun-loving “cops” will hand out tickets to those who aren’t dancing along the parade’s 20-block route. The parade celebrates the history and variety of dance, with dancers sashaying their way from Broadway and 21st Street to Tompkins Square Park,... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Brooklyn Lit Crawl
  Multiple venues

  The hardest part of the Brooklyn Lit Crawl—a night of readings, sing-alongs, impromptu writing exercises, and games at various locations around Smith Street—is coming to terms with the fact that you can’t attend all 18 great events. But here’s one way to go: Start at the offices of the literary magazine A Public Space, with readings by John Haskell, Brett Fletcher... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Anti-Flag+Hostage Calm+Code Orange Kids+Worlds Scariest Police Chases
  Studio at Webster Hall

  Pittsburg punk rockers Anti-Flag made waves from the late eighties on through the early aughts with politically-charged anthems and in-your-face iconography (their logo is a “gun star” composed of broken M16 rifles). The kind of band your parents would hate for their teenager to find, the foursome always seem to be protesting alongside whoever happens to be protesting, wielding... Read more about this event >>

• 
  The Killers
  Barclays Center

  From Hot Fuss on, the Killers have explored sounds in massively unique waves more than most bands dare to. The dance-y electropop of their debut somehow bled into the Americana vibe of Sam’s Town before traversing the Bowie space fantasy of Day & Age. In their 2012, appropriately titled Battle Born, they finally reached a destination where all of these elements could blissfully coexist.... Read more about this event >>

• 
  'Blkmarket Membership 7th Anniversary'
  Output

  Independent promoters Blkmarket Membership are hitting their seventh anniversary as an internationally known powerhouse, semi-famous for their commitment to holding marathon parties in semi-legal spaces. Their reputation and the accompanying safety net of success has resulted in booking policies that, although conservative, are still capable of providing thrills given the right space and an... Read more about this event >>

• 
  PUNK: Chaos to Couture
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  When Richard Hell started spiking his hair and holding his shredded T-shirts together with safety pins, later influencing the Sex Pistols, he certainly could never have guessed that one day his rebellious fashion statement would be on display in the stuffy Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it’s at PUNK: Chaos to Couture, the latest Costume Institute exhibition, where you’ll find him... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Jay DeFeo A Retrospective
  Whitney Museum Of American Art

  In 1958, the late artist Jay DeFeo went to work on a new project guided only by, what she called, “an idea that had a center to it.” Eight years and 2,300 pounds later, her enormous painting The Rose, one of her most famous works, was finished. After being forklifted out of her San Francisco studio through the window of her building, the work was shown only a few times until it... Read more about this event >>

• 
  New York African Film Festival
  Film Society of Lincoln Center - Walter Reade Theater

  For its 20th anniversary, the New York African Film Festival, which kicked off April 3, looks back at the contributions of the late Senegalese writer-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (a/k/a the father of African cinema) while also showcasing the work of contemporary African directors who have been influenced by the legend. Today at 2, see Christine Delorme’s documentary Ousmane... Read more about this event >>

• 
  The Assembled Parties
  Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

  OK, theatergoer: You’ve silenced your cellphone, unwrapped your candy, and shushed your seatmate. Nicely done. But how are your table manners? Well, get ready to put your napkin in your lap and seize your appetizer fork as you dine out on Richard Greenberg’s new show, The Assembled Parties. As with the earlier Three Days of Rain, this Manhattan Theatre Club show moves between... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)
  Public Theater

  No one really believed Richard Foreman when he said in 2009 that Idiot Savant would be his last play, did they? The 75-year-old avant-garde auteur is now back at the Public Theater with Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). As with any Foreman piece, don’t expect a straightforward story. His latest is described as an “enigmatic fairy tale” involving a mysterious... Read more about this event >>

• More Saturday Events >>

Sunday, May 19
• 
  Philip Glass & Van Dyke Parks
  Music Hall of Williamsburg

  Big Sur’s Henry Miller Memorial Library heads east to mark the nine years its writerly namesake lived at 992 Driggs in Williamsburg—“The ideal street for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard”—with a counterintuitively terrific double bill of Philip Glass and Van Dyke Parks (and “friends”). Parks, who claims to have peaked in the ’50s despite... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Liars
  Brooklyn Masonic Temple

  Rock anarchists Liars' greatest asset is their distractibility. In the years since they jumped on music fans' radar by jumping on the Brooklyn post-punk bandwagon (or did they?), they've experimented with no wave, queasy-sounding art rock, post-Zappa discord and most recently (on last year's WIXIW) glitchy and occasionally palatial-sounding off-kilter synth pop. Their adventuring has caught... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Angel Olsen+Magmana+Steve Gunn
  The Glasslands Gallery

  This Chicago-by-way-of-St.Louis folk singer lives up to the pairing in her name, both decidedly heavenly and remarkably plain. Simple as soil, Angel Olsen's songs are distinguished by her possessed, tortured, heavenly voice—at times a tool in her poetess repertoire, most often a force in it's own right. As most otherworldly things tend to, Olsen's voice evokes polarity among listeners,... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Here Lies Love
  Public Theater

  If the shoe-obsessed Filipina First Lady Imelda Marcos were able to attend David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s new musical about her life titled Here Lies Love, she’d probably wear fancy high heels for the occasion. But, for the rest of us, comfortable footwear will be more practical as the Public will be transformed into a dance club, where you will move with the actors as they play... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Please Come to the Show, Part I (1960-1980)
  Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

  The walls of our cubicles at the Voice are covered with art show announcements. Why? Because each one is a beautiful souvenir. The Museum of Modern Art totally gets us. David Senior, the MOMA’s bibliographer, has organized “Please Come to the Show, Part I (1960–1980),” an exhibition featuring an assortment of ephemera including press clippings, posters, printed... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Nice Work If You Can Get It
  Imperial Theatre

  Who doesn’t like a Gershwin tune? The producers of the new musical Nice Work If You Can Get It are betting no one. Taking all the favorite Gershwin classics (including “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me”), writer Joe DiPietro has written a completely new story for them. Set in a Long... Read more about this event >>

• 
  'The Scratcher Sessions'
  Scratcher

  The Voice staff's home away from home features solid singer-songwriter acts every Sunday. Solo acts and duos only; seek thy massive klezmer dance parties elsewhere. Read more about this event >>

• 
  The Gil Evans Project
  Jazz Standard

  Ryan Truesdell's disc of previously unrecorded Gil Evans arrangements floored most of those who heard it and was recently named "Record of the Year" by the Jazz Journalists Association. A scholar whose approach to music has lots of heart, the young conductor breathes new life into classic Gil works this week, from the bouncy Claude Thornhill charts to the airy designs that made Sketches Of... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Reasons to Be Happy
  Lucille Lortel Theatre

  Reasons to Be Happy may be the name of writer-director Neil LaBute’s latest play, but it seems that his characters are having a hard time coming up with any. Steph and Greg are thinking about getting back together after their bad break-up three years earlier, but there is a major catch: She’s married to someone else and he’s involved with her best friend, who also has a... Read more about this event >>

• More Sunday Events >>

Monday, May 20
• 
  My Dirty Dumb Eyes
  PowerHouse Arena

  Did you know that Mario Batali’s Crocs can double as pasta-makers? Or that Anna Wintour takes power naps in a Louis Vuitton trunk? Or that Martha Stewart hot-glues dildos to her oven knobs when she’s drunk? OK, OK, none of that is true (that we know of). Rather, these hilarious scenarios are what Brooklyn-based illustrator and cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt has dreamed up in her first... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Kevin Dozier
  Metropolitan Room

  One of the classiest singers on offer these days, Dozier has lifted his once appealingly diffident delivery into a stronger and punchier baritone. The excuse for this appearance is the release of his new Love’s Never Lost CD, on which the man shows good taste by muscularly crooning “If Ever I Would Leave You,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and Noel... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Bryant Park Juggling
  Bryant Park

  “The little trick of getting three objects to dance around in your hands has always managed to keep a small sense of magic,” says instruction book Juggling for the Complete Klutz. As we could all use some magic in our lives, get out today and have some fun with the Bryant Park Jugglers, who love teaching the ancient art (Egyptian tomb drawings indicate juggling goes back to 1700... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Bunty Berman Presents...
  Acorn Theatre

  The New Group has been enjoying a rather lackluster season, but what better show to shake a company out of its doldrums than a musical that borrows Bollywood’s razzle dazzle. The first-rate Ayub Khan Din’s new work tells of a flailing film studio and the producer struggling to keep the cameras running. Read more about this event >>

• 
  I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers
  Booth Theatre

  Bette Midler has a fine set of teeth, and she’ll use them to play hardheaded “superagent” Sue Mengers. As scripted by celebrated stage and screenwriter John Logan, this one-woman show demonstrates Mengers’s ruthless rise—from childhood poverty to Hollywood power-broking. Read more about this event >>

• 
  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
  Beacon Theatre

  You know who Tom Petty is. What you might not know is that he made appearances on both The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Having penned and performed countless breakthrough singles, Petty could have called it quits a long time ago if it weren’t for his dedication to proving rock & roll’s staying power. Catch the rock veteran and his Heartbreakers at Beacon Theatre for a dose of... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Matthew Barney
  The Morgan Library & Museum

  Artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney is famous for taking gooey, slimy, moldable materials to create his ambitious sculptures and for sometimes making a mess in the process (the street in front of the SFMOMA once got a warm petroleum jelly bath when the hose that was pumping 1,600 gallons of the stuff up to the fourth-floor gallery exploded). Expect things to be much cleaner at the Morgan... Read more about this event >>

• More Monday Events >>

Tuesday, May 21
• 
  Mademoiselle
  Bam Rose Cinemas

  In Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle, a stony-jawed Jeanne Moreau tenderly lifts the eggs from a bird’s nest, only to crush them in her fist—just because. And that’s not all. She also flings open floodgates, poisons the water supply, and indulges in large-scale arson. Based on Jean Genet’s short story, the 1966 noir concerns this mysterious sociopath who, like an... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Taylor Mac
  Joe's Pub

  The joyously flamboyant Brechtian who starred in the Foundry's Good Person of Szechwan (returning to the Public this fall, fwiw) has been workshopping pieces of his forthcoming "24-Hour History of Popular Music," with tonight dedicated to the sounds of the 1780s. Toss your tricorner hat up in the air and expect provocative analyses of the decade's hits, potentially embarrassing (yet... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Majical Cloudz+Gobby
  The Glasslands Gallery

  With a name like Majical Cloudz, you go in expecting horizon-leveling psychedelic hijinx, cocks on socks, general mayhem. Then you actually get a whiff of what Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto cook up in Montreal, and it's of a distinctly more intimate nature: high-impact atmospheric minimalism married to archly conversational vocals that exist somewhere between Stephen Merritt, Arab Strap, and... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Chuck Close Photo Maquettes
  Eykyn Maclean

  How does Chuck Close make his paintings look like photos? See for yourself at “Chuck Close Photo Maquettes,” a new exhibition that gives a behind-the-scenes look into his process with a display of more than 20 photo maquettes—primarily large-format Polaroids that he draws a precise grid on to assist in his re-creation of it on canvas. As you read Close’s scribbles... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Pippin
  Music Box Theatre

  They’ve got magic to do, just for you. Also tumbling, contortion, acrobatics, trapeze, and silk work. In Diane Paulus’s reimagining of Stephen Schwartz’s echt-‘70s musical, young Pippin (Matthew James Thomas) wanders around a medieval French landscape that looks a lot like a circus bigtop, with Patina Miller as ringmaster. Read more about this event >>

• More Tuesday Events >>

Wednesday, May 22
• 
  of Montreal+Wild Moccasins
  Music Hall of Williamsburg

  Once upon a time of Montreal was a psychedelic twee pop band with Beatles-inspired melodies. Over the years, however, frontman Kevin Barnes has repeatedly flipped the script both on the band’s sound—from whimsical vaudeville to coquettish glam funk—and his own identity—Skeletal Lamping saw Barnes as a black she-male named Georgie Fruit. Now pushing their 12th studio... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Lucien Smith
  Suzanne Geiss Company

  When Mayor Rudy Giuliani took office in 1994, artist Lucien Smith was just five years old. In his latest exhibition, “A Clean Sweep,” the now 24-year-old multimedia innovator and Cooper Union graduate goes in search of remnants of the gritty New York that were lost during the gentrification of the Giuliani era. The show is broken up into three parts: a group of free-standing... Read more about this event >>

• 
  The Big Knife
  American Airlines Theatre

  Charlie Castle in Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife would seem to have it all—a successful Hollywood acting career, a big house, and a beautiful wife. But all is not well. His wife (Marin Ireland) is threatening to leave him, the almighty studio bosses own him, and a starlet is poised to reveal his most damning secret to the world. Tony nominee Bobby Cannavale (The Mother- f**ker... Read more about this event >>

• 
  Matilda: The Musical
  Shubert Theatre

  Take a celebrated novel about a tiny tot with telekinesis. Add a cult songwriter and a famously dark playwright. And what do you get? Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s story, one of the most spiky, tender, and delightful children’s entertainments to come along in years—and it should appeal plenty to adults, too. Read more about this event >>

• 
  Noah Preminger
  Jazz Standard

  The young tenor titan gigged a lot before hitting the studio to cut the new Haymaker, and that preparation shows: There's an easy balance between Preminger's horn and guitarist Ben Monder's unusually fluid attack strategies, and it gives everything else extra poise and additional punch. On stage, they always lean forward. Read more about this event >>

• More Wednesday Events >>

Thursday, May 23
• 
  Friend Roulette+EULA+Matty Fasano
  The Mercury Lounge

  This Brooklyn six-piece make orchestral, sweeping compositions sound as simple as lullabies. Chamber pop riddled with baroque elements and unlikely rhythms, their sonics swing from ghostly croons straight into robotic bleeps. Throughout it all—strings, brass, two drummers and two vocalists—Friend Roulette gamble they can pull off the juxtapositions, and believe it or not, they manage it. Read more about this event >>

• 
  Medeski, Mali, Mercurio, & Moore
  Le Poisson Rouge

  Medeski Martin & Wood's sci-fi keyboard traditionalist John Medeski, 7 Walkers' gris-gris growler Papa Mali, and Galactic's rhythm section—Robert Mercurio (bass) and Stanton Moore (drums)—are the M&Ms. The promising New Orleans-oriented supergroup is heralding its debut gigs with the slogan "Melts in your mind, not in your hand," so expect the funk to get rather seriously outside. Read more about this event >>

• 
  El Anatsui
  Brooklyn Museum

  For years, the Nigerian artist El Anatsui was highly regarded for his abstract wood sculptures. But he didn’t really receive the acclaim he deserved in the mainstream until he showed his elegant metal tapestries made from flattened aluminum bottle tops at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Stitched together with copper wire, the impressive works from far away almost look like they're made of... Read more about this event >>

• 
  The Nance
  Lyceum Theatre

  Nathan Lane may number among the most talented of our stage entertainers, but not perhaps the most masculine. This makes him an ideal star for Douglas Carter Beane’s new play, about the world of 1930s burlesque and the men and women called upon to play gay in service of comedy. Jack O’Brien directs the vaudeville frolics. Read more about this event >>

• 
  Wayne Horvitz
  The Stone

  The wise keyboardist is also an inviting composer—the variety of groups he's led in the past three decades have all arrived with hip charts in front of them. This East Coast residency finds him grooming a throng of improvisers from his Seattle stomping ground, the Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble, and their YouTube calling cards suggest that they're able to make moments of melody and... Read more about this event >>

• More Thursday Events >>

Friday, May 24
• 
  Mariah Carey
  Central Park, Rumsey Playfield

  Is it that Mariah Carey's abnormally lucky, or that she's got a career mojo that just won't quit? Neither, I'd argue: Her career longevity is directly connected to her collaborative savvy, ability to nimbly surf pop trends, and the best cosmologists and stylists Daydream royalties can buy. Even with her trademark melisma succumbing to something huskier, Mimi's still capable of convincingly... Read more about this event >>

• More Friday Events >>