Comedy
Taylor Tomlinson
July 31-Aug. 2 at the Beacon Theater, 2124 Broadway, Manhattan; msg.com/beacon-theatre.
When Taylor Tomlinson announced earlier this year that she would be stepping away from her role as host of CBS’s “After Midnight,” the comedian likely didn’t imagine that the network would pull the plug on the entirety of its late-night lineup with its recent announcement that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” would end its run in May.
So expect Tomlinson’s new shows on her “Save Me Tour” to be even buzzier than before. With the three hourlong specials she has already made for Netflix — “Quarter-Life Crisis” in 2020, “Look at You” in 2022 and “Have It All” in 2024 — and her renewed focus on stand-up, Tomlinson is clearly bullish on the future of streaming and touring.
The demand to see her perform at the Beacon was enough to warrant the addition of a fourth show. A handful of tickets are left for Thursday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Friday at 7; some remain for Saturday’s matinee at 4. They start at $39.75 on Ticketmaster. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Music
Pop & Rock
ENNY
Aug. 3 at 7 p.m. at S.O.B.’s, 204 Varick Street, Manhattan; sobs.com.
The British M.C. ENNY takes inspiration from all over: The woozy, soulful loops she raps over bear the influence of the Detroit-born producer J Dilla, and she channels homegrown grime when she slips into a rapid-fire, piercing flow. It was by studying her most immediate surroundings, though, that ENNY broke through. A tender portrait of the women in her Southeast London community, her 2020 song “Peng Black Girls” (“peng” is British slang for “beautiful”) was widely circulated after the singer Jorja Smith hopped on a remix. The surprise hit introduced ENNY as a thoughtful, observant storyteller and a rigorous lyricist — a reputation that has endured through the release of two subsequent EPs, “Under 25” from 2021 and “We Go Again” from 2023.
ENNY’s first-ever set of shows in North America kicks off this weekend with a headlining performance at S.O.B.’s, before she goes on to support Smith for several tour stops. Tickets for Sunday’s show are about $33 on dice.fm. OLIVIA HORN
Classical
From Paris to Patagonia
Aug. 1-2 at 7:30 p.m. at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; lincolncenter.org.
This weekend, Karen Kamensek conducts the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center in a wry and sensuous program that begins with Divertissement for Chamber Orchestra by Jacques Ibert and ends with Symphony No. 1 in C Major by Georges Bizet. Ibert’s work is ripe with comedic allusions and rhythmic play, while Bizet’s foreshadows a career that would culminate in “Carmen” (he wrote the symphony at 17).
Audience interest may peak for the central pieces of the lineup, which feature the soprano Gabriella Reyes joining the ensemble for two song cycles. Benjamin Britten’s “Les Illuminations” casts the surreal poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in Britten’s incisive modern idiom, expanding into hazy sensuality and returning to the phrase: “I alone hold the key to this savage parade.” A welcome complement to the Britten selection, Osvaldo Golijov’s Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra are at once lucid and tender, with a fascinating combination of texts by Sally Potter (the director of the film “Orlando”), Rosalía de Castro and Emily Dickinson.
Tickets are choose-what-you-pay, with a suggested price of $35. GABRIELLE FERRARI
Kids
Cat Video Fest 2025
Aug. 2-10 in select theaters in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island; catvideofest.com.
They purr, they prowl, they pounce. And, of course, they knock things over. But some have more unusual talents, like singing, playing notes on a keyboard or guitar, opening a locked door, soaring like Superman and even switching on a treadmill and then running on it.
The feline stars of the annual Cat Video Fest perform these behaviors and more, and young animal lovers can watch their antics this weekend — and, in some cases, next weekend — in theaters around New York City. (More screenings will take place nationwide and internationally through Nov. 8; a full schedule is online.)
Founded by Will Braden, the filmmaker, and presented by Oscilloscope Laboratories since 2019, the 75-minute fest is frequently hilarious but has a serious purpose: At each showing, some of the ticket proceeds go to local cat shelters or rescue organizations. So far, the project has raised over $300,000 for these charities.
This year’s material ranges from a piece by the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge to a brief gem by the contemporary comic Ryan Kelly, whose resolve not to adopt from a cat cafe is, well, severely undermined.
Tickets start at about $10 and vary according to the theater. LAUREL GRAEBER
Film
Silent Movie Week 2025
Through Aug. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.
A century on, the possibilities for silent-era discoveries still seem endless, as this MoMA program of recent restorations shows. On Saturday, the museum will screen Karel Lamac’s effervescent “Miss Saxophone,” from 1928, with Anny Ondra (Hitchcock’s “The Manxman” and “Blackmail”) as a rebellious daughter of Viennese high society who in a ruse becomes the swingiest student at a prim British dance academy. Karl Grune’s “The Street” (on Monday), from 1923, is a sort of Weimar “After Hours.” Eugen Klöpfer plays a bored husband lured out of his apartment by the city’s promise of excitement, fun and women, only to find a waking nightmare.
Frank Borzage’s “Street Angel” (on Sunday), a MoMA favorite from 1928, reunites Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell a year after “7th Heaven.” Gaynor stars as a desperate Neapolitan hiding from a workhouse sentence; Farrell is a painter who sees her inner beauty. 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.
Critic’s Pick
‘Gypsy’
Through Aug. 17 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.
‘Purpose’
Through Aug. 31 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; purposeonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.
Fresh off his Tony win for “Appropriate,” the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins lands a best play Tony for this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the members of a famous, albeit fictional, Black political dynasty in Chicago, reckoning with history, morality and legacy as they gather for a celebration. Phylicia Rashad directs this Steppenwolf Theater production, whose cast includes Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, Harry Lennix, Alana Arenas and another back-to-back Tony winner, Kara Young. 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 last year, 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
last chance
‘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.
Last Chance
‘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 1883-84. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Amy Sherald: American Sublime’
Through Aug. 10 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; whitney.org.
This compact and rousing retrospective of 42 paintings brings us the work of an artist who is not primarily a recorder of first ladies or famous faces. Rather, Sherald is a painter of one-frame short stories, of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize. She can be preachy, but her paintings are saved from sentimentality by an unerring sense of geometric design and a taste for spare, simplified, super-flat planes. Read the review.
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