Comedy
NY Laughs Fest
June 5-8 in and around Union Square, Manhattan; nylaughsfest.com.
Several past and present performers from “Saturday Night Live” are taking part in a new comedy festival this weekend, the highlight of which involves the longtime “Weekend Update” anchor Michael Che hosting what he’s calling “Che’Chella” at 10 p.m. on Saturday at Irving Plaza ($35 on Ticketmaster).
The festival kicks off on Thursday with a free outdoor show starting at 6 p.m. in Union Square and featuring Emil Wakim, a current “S.N.L.” cast member; and Chris Redd, a former cast member; as well as Sam Jay, Rachel Feinstein, Pete Lee and Shane Torres. There will be many shows to choose from all weekend at the Stand, like a free taping of Sean Donnelly and Dan St. Germain’s podcast “Burbs Bros” with their guest Michael Ian Black on Friday at 5 p.m. Back at Irving Plaza, you can catch up with Vinny Guadagnino from “Jersey Shore” on Saturday at 7 p.m. (from $30 at Ticketmaster), and on Sunday at 8 p.m., you can top off the weekend by watching Hank Azaria, Big Jay Oakerson and others front a rock band in “The Goddamn Comedy Jam” (from $25 on Ticketmaster). SEAN L. McCARTHY
Music
Pop & Rock
Gov Ball
June 6-8, noon-10 p.m., at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens; governorsballmusicfestival.com.
This weekend, Gov Ball — New York’s flagship summer music festival, celebrating its 15th anniversary — will draw flocks of revelers to Queens and unofficially inaugurate outdoor music season in the city.
As usual, the headliners are familiar names with mass appeal. They include Olivia Rodrigo, the reigning pop princess with a gift for both tear-streaked balladry and punk fireworks; the chimeric rapper Tyler, the Creator; and Hozier, the Irish troubadour who is experiencing a career resurgence a decade after he broke out with “Take Me to Church.”
But the top-billed artists are hardly the only draw. Mk.gee, the enigmatic and inventive singer-guitarist, is a must-see on Friday, and Saturday’s highlights include the incisive neo-soul artist Yaya Bey. On Sunday, soft, dreamy pop songs from the Japanese House and Clairo will help to wind down the weekend.
Single-day tickets for Friday and Sunday start at almost $152 on Ticketmaster (Saturday is sold out, though resale tickets are available). Three-day passes start at about $307. OLIVIA HORN
Classical
‘Zemlinskys Zimmer’ (‘Zemlinsky’s Room’)
June 5-8 at BAM Fisher Hall, 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn; bam.org.
Sex and murder may be opera’s bread and butter, but rarely do its violent delights have ecstatic ends. Not so in Alexander Zemlinsky’s “A Florentine Tragedy,” a 1917 one-act opera based on an unfinished play by Oscar Wilde. In it, a cuckolded merchant kills his rival, only to reunite with his unfaithful wife in a frenzied passion. With “Zemlinskys Zimmer,” this weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Little Opera Theater of New York relocates the opera from the Florentine Renaissance to fin-de-siècle Vienna, the composer’s own time and place.
Wilde’s tale of jealousy may have resonated with Zemlinsky. His first love, Alma Schindler, rejected him after having an affair with Gustav Mahler, whom she married. Mahler may have gotten both the girl and the fame, but Zemlinsky’s music, full of resplendent late-Romantic harmonies and sweeping emotional expression, deserves its own attention. Little Opera’s reframing gives ample opportunity for this consideration, adding a prologue and interlude that gives Bianca, the woman at the center of the love triangle, a chance to speak.
Showtimes are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $55.50 on BAM’s website. GABRIELLE FERRARI
Kids
Be Inspired! Celebrating Wave Hill at 60
June 5-8 at Wave Hill, 4900 Independence Avenue, the Bronx; wavehill.org.
You can see many pollinators at Wave Hill, the 28-acre public garden in the Bronx. Some of those inhabiting the space this weekend, however, are really going to stand out.
Mounted on tall poles, these are puppets from Processional Arts Workshop, a company taking part in Be Inspired!, a four-day festival honoring the garden’s 60th anniversary. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons only, the troupe will stage the Great Pollinator Ramble, carrying 10 huge, colorful designs throughout the landscape and inviting children to meet evocatively named creatures like a ruby-throated hummingbird, an Eastern calligrapher fly, a pure green sweat bee and a great spangled fritillary (a butterfly).
On Saturday, little visitors can make giant paper flowers to attract the pollinators. Or they can parade as birds and insects themselves: During the weekend, Winged Wonders, a family art project, will consist of making wearable wings and streamers.
Other festival attractions include a garden highlights tour (Friday only), close encounters with insects and invertebrates and weekend storytelling. A detailed schedule is on the website.
All activities are included in admission, which is free on Thursday, starts at $4 on Friday and $12 on Saturday and Sunday and is always free for children 5 and younger. LAUREL GRAEBER
Film
Monica Vitti: La Modernista
June 6-19 at Film at Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, Manhattan; filmlinc.org.
The embodiment of sophistication and alienation in 1960s Italy, Monica Vitti, the subject of Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective, remains best known for the films she made with Michelangelo Antonioni, who used her icy-blond beauty in the 1962 film “L’Eclisse” (showing on Saturday and on June 14 and 19) to complement and counterpoint his depiction of a society incapable of feeling passion for anything other than the stock market floor. Two years later, in “Red Desert” (on Sunday and on June 15 and 19), the director’s first color feature, the now-auburn-haired Vitti pops out against the backdrop of a polluted industrial landscape barely removed from science fiction.
The lineup highlights all five Antonioni films Vitti appeared in, including the seldom-screened “The Mystery of Oberwald” (on Sunday and June 13), from 1980. Vitti also turns up in the daisy-chain narrative of Luis Buñuel’s “The Phantom of Liberty” (on Sunday and June 17), from 1974, as a bourgeois wife who reacts viscerally when poring over photos — of architecture. BEN KENIGSBERG
Theater
Last Chance
‘Good Night, and Good Luck’
Through June 8 at the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; goodnightgoodluckbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
In his Broadway debut, George Clooney plays the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, exposing the demagogic Senator Joseph R. McCarthy on air in 1954, during his Communist-hunting campaign of terror. Adapted by Clooney and Grant Heslov from their lauded 2005 movie of the same name, and using clips of the real McCarthy, it’s a tale that pits truth against disinformation and those who sow it for their own political ends. David Cromer directs a cast that includes Will Dagger, one of Off Broadway’s finest, making his Broadway bow as Don Hewitt, Heslov’s role in the film. Read the review.
Last Chance
‘Othello’
Through June 8 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; othellobway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
Denzel Washington made a Broadway box-office hit out of “Julius Caesar” two decades ago. On the big screen, he has played Macbeth. Now he takes on Shakespeare’s Othello, the honorable general and smitten newlywed. Jake Gyllenhaal is his foil as the perfidious Iago, who goads Othello into unreasoning jealousy with lies about his beloved Desdemona (Molly Osborne). Directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony winner for his revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” which also starred Washington. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Gypsy’
Through Oct. 5 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 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.
Art
Critic’s Pick
‘Jack Whitten: The Messenger’
Through Aug. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.
How very lucky we are to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on MoMA’s sixth floor. The show encompasses some 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a final painting from just before he died in 2018. Over that span Whitten called every studio he worked in a “laboratory,” and every piece of art he made an “experiment.” And, indeed, much of what’s in the exhibition challenges ready definition. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Sargent and Paris’
Through Aug. 3, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.
This transporting show explores how the preternaturally astute portrait painter John Singer Sargent kicked off his career in France: with a lot of savoir-faire and a touch of the enfant terrible. A collaboration between the Met and the Musée d’Orsay, where the exhibition will appear in the fall, it follows Sargent from his arrival in the French capital as an 18-year-old in 1874 through his Salon triumphs of the early 1880s to the controversy around his arresting portrait “Madame X” of 1883-4. Read the review.
‘The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt’
Through Aug. 10 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; thejewishmuseum.org.
You might not instinctively pair Queen Esther with Rembrandt van Rijn, the Dutch master who invented realism in the 17th century. Yet this delectably wonky show explores a little-known chapter in art history when artists of the Dutch Golden Age made a cult of Esther’s exemplary story. The exhibition is likely to appeal to anyone who cares about painting. Rembrandt is represented by three paintings and a half dozen etchings, and the show also includes memorable works by his pupil Aert de Gelder and the two Jans (Steen and Lievens). It argues that the Dutch people found in the story of Esther a potent symbol of their own plight at a time when they were struggling for independence from the Spanish monarchy. Read the review.
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