Comedy
Jamie Loftus
July 5 at 7:30 and 10 p.m. at Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn; unionhallny.com.
Competitive eating has its most mainstream moment every Fourth of July when ESPN broadcasts Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, where men and women alike race to devour as many franks as they can outside the franchise’s original restaurant near the Coney Island boardwalk in Brooklyn.
Who better to deconstruct this event than Jamie Loftus, the comedian, TV writer and podcaster who wrote the 2023 best seller “Raw Dog.” If that’s not enough, while writing her searing portrait of Americana, Loftus also workshopped the one-hander “Mrs. Joseph Chestnut, America USA,” in which she imagines herself as the wife of America’s most famous competitive eater.
So of course Loftus will be in Brooklyn this weekend, not only marking the paperback release of “Raw Dog” but also delivering her 2025 State of the Hot Dog address. The celebration will feature special guests, stand-up, a recap of Friday’s contest and hot-dog eating. The 7:30 p.m. performance has sold out online, so a late show has been added. Tickets are $15 in advance on Eventbrite, and $20 at the door. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Music
Pop & Rock
Felukah
July 5 at 7 p.m. at Public Records, 233 Butler Street, Brooklyn; publicrecords.nyc.
The singer, songwriter and rapper Felukah moved to New York from Cairo in 2017 to study creative writing. She published a handful of poetry chapbooks before her verses began to migrate from the page to the recording studio, and by the time her EP “Yansoon” — the Egyptian word for anise, which is a popular spice in the country’s cuisine — arrived the following year, she had begun merging her words with skeletal loops.
Felukah’s music has since evolved in the direction of warm, vibrational R&B with Middle Eastern flourishes, but retains a loose, homemade feel. The singer flits between soft, breathy melodies and hard-charging bars as easily as she does between English and Arabic. Her bilingual lyrics are wide-ranging, touching on romance, global conflict and the rootlessness of diasporic identity.
Tickets for Felukah’s show at Public Records are around $30 on dice.fm. OLIVIA HORN
Classical
New York Guitar Festival
July 3-4 at 7 p.m. at Bryant Park, Manhattan; newyorkguitarfestival.org.
While some of the city’s classical music institutions have absconded upstate to seek cooler climes at summer festivals, New Yorkers in town for the holiday weekend still have plenty of music to choose from.
The New York Guitar Festival will close out its 26th season with two concerts in Bryant Park. On Thursday and Friday nights, audiences can sample from a veritable buffet of genres that all highlight the global scope of the instrument. Thursday night’s show will offer an international lineup topped by the flamenco scion Pedro Cortes, who brings a laser-focused intensity to the music’s already-overflowing passion. The theme for Friday’s performance will be American blues, capped off by a set from Louis Cato. Some might know him as the bandleader on the “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” but his talents as a player might become more readily apparent in this setting. While the programming is not strictly classical, the virtuosity on display will surely satisfy audiences seeking musical fireworks.
The concerts are free. GABRIELLE FERRARI
Kids
Fourth of July Celebration
July 4, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., at the New York Historical, 170 Central Park West, Manhattan; nyhistory.org.
With its parades, concerts and fireworks, the Fourth of July has always engaged the eye and the ear. But the holiday also appeals to the palate, and the New York Historical will explore those associations on Friday, along with another summer subject: travel.
Focusing on its new exhibition “Dining in Transit,” the museum will invite children to make vanilla and black currant ice cream with an old-fashioned hand crank, using recipes from a 1911 cookbook on view, “Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus.” Its author, Rufus Estes, who was born into slavery, worked as a railway chef for the Pullman Company from 1883 to 1897.
Another creative chef, George Speck Crum, is often credited with the 1850s invention of the potato chip — it was then fried in lard — in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Young visitors can sample that early variety as well as contemporary chips made with oil.
At 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 and 1:30 p.m., the museum will also host festive singalongs, featuring train-themed songs like “Down at the Station” and “The Ballad of Casey Jones.” And don’t leave without adding a wish for America to the museum’s wall of birthday messages.
Holiday admission is free for those 17 and younger; adult tickets start at $13. LAUREL GRAEBER
Film
‘Inherent Vice’ on 70mm
July 4-10 at Film at Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, Manhattan; filmlinc.org.
Though it might seem counterintuitive, Paul Thomas Anderson’s freewheeling 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice” could well be the perfect viewing for the Fourth of July: a beachy film noir set in 1970 in Southern California that, over the course of its zanily convoluted plot, takes in a giant cross section of Americana. Amid the pot smoke, the film touches on issues of gentrification, political radicalism, new-age religion and a last stand in the cultural skirmish between the hippies and the Nixonian stiffs. The cast alone — headed by Joaquin Phoenix as the chronically befuddled and paranoid private eye Doc Sportello — is enough to make you feel like you’re hallucinating.
Partly in preparation for Anderson’s forthcoming “One Battle After Another,” which opens on Sept. 26, Film at Lincoln Center is showing “Inherent Vice” all week in a 70-millimeter print created from a blow-up of the original 35-millimeter material. That means the image will be especially rich and detailed — all the better to show off the kaleidoscopic colors of Robert Elswit’s cinematography. BEN KENIGSBERG
Theater
‘Call Me Izzy’
Through Aug. 17 at Studio 54, Manhattan; callmeizzyplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
After Jean Smart’s Broadway debut in 1981, she took a nearly two-decade break, during which fame arrived with the sitcom “Designing Women.” In 2000, she delivered a Tony-nominated turn in “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” but she hasn’t been back on Broadway until now, in the midst of her career’s rather glorious resurgence. The winner of three recent Emmy Awards for the Max series “Hacks,” Smart is starring solo this time, as a Southern poet living in a trailer with her abusive husband and hiding her writing from him. Sarna Lapine (“Sunday in the Park With George”) directs the world premiere of Jamie Wax’s play. Read the review.
‘John Proctor Is the Villain’
Through Aug. 31 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan; johnproctoristhevillain.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
In Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” a skewering of McCarthyism set amid the witch trials of 17th-century Massachusetts, John Proctor is meant to be the hero. This #MeToo play by Kimberly Belflower turns that presumption on its head, with a group of contemporary high school girls who detect similarities between Miller’s putative good guy and the men in their own world. Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) stars through July 13; Danya Taymor, a Tony winner for “The Outsiders,” directs. 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 an odd-couple friendship in this wistfully romantic charmer and Tony Award winner by Will Aronson and Hue Park, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen. Michael Arden (“Parade”) directs. Read the review.
Art
‘Jesse Krimes: Corrections’
Through July 13 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.
This show cannily combines mug shots of suspected anarchists in 1890s Paris with a handful of Jesse Krimes’s pieces: “Purgatory” (2009), which Krimes created by repurposing decks of poker cards with the faces of accused lawbreakers, during a year of pretrial solitary confinement; “Apokaluptein: 16389067” (2010-13), which comprises images from The New York Times transferred to bedsheets using hair gel and here displayed in its entirety for the first time; and “Naxos” (2023-24), made from 10,000 pebbles collected by inmates from around the country. 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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