What to do in new york on sunday

Looking for something to do in New York? Savor Benjamin Bernheim in Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” or treat the teenagers in your life to modern takes on enduring classics.

Comedy | Music | Kids | Dance | Theater | Art

Comedy

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The New York Arab American Comedy Festival

Nov. 17-19 at Gotham Comedy Club, 208 West 23rd Street, Manhattan; gothamcomedyclub.com.

Two years after Sept. 11, Maysoon Zayid, a comedian and activist for disability rights, and Dean Obeidallah, who has had his own talk show on SiriusXM since 2007, started a comedy festival to promote a more positive perception of Arab Americans. This year’s lineup furthers Zayid and Obeidallah’s original vision with a weekend full of stellar talent.

The festival kicks off on Thursday at 7 p.m. with “Lowkey Comedy Show,” featuring Dave Merheje, a co-star on Hulu’s “Ramy,” and Sammy Obeid, the co-host of Netflix’s “100 Humans.” On Friday at 7:30 p.m., for “Arab Comedy Bonanza,” Obeidallah will appear alongside comedians such as Fady Rizk, whose video for the song “Bas Kefaya Bas” earned more than one million views last year, and at 10 p.m., Mohanad Elshieky, a rising star, is among the performers in “Arab Comedy All-Stars.” On Saturday, Ismael Loutfi, another up-and-comer, will be in the lineup for “Legends of Arab Comedy” at 10:30 p.m., and Atheer Yacoub will host “World’s Funniest Arabs” at 8 p.m. (That performance has sold out, but fret not: Yacoub will be recording her first stand-up album on Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at New York Comedy Club.)

Tickets for each of the festival’s shows start at $25 and are available through Gotham’s website. SEAN L. McCARTHY

Music

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Pop & Rock

Girlpuppy

Nov. 18 at 8 p.m. at Purgatory, 675 Central Avenue, Brooklyn; dice.fm.

Unlike most pandemic projects, Becca Harvey’s lockdown-era recordings have blossomed into a full-fledged career. The Atlanta-based singer-songwriter, who records under the moniker Girlpuppy, put out her debut single, “For You” — a laid-back rock tune about longing — in April 2020. Since then, she has generated blog buzz and become part of the Gen Z indie vanguard — the sort of rising star who first heard Grizzly Bear on “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” soundtrack. Released last month, Harvey’s debut album, “When I’m Alone,” gracefully flits between earthy folk rock and gauzy dream pop, with lightly melancholic lyrics that touch on self-doubt and love’s pitfalls.

This month, Harvey has been on tour supporting the indie duo Hovvdy, but on Friday she will stop in New York to play a headlining show at Purgatory, a bar in Bushwick. Tickets are just under $27 at dice.fm. OLIVIA HORN

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Classical

‘Rigoletto’

Through Dec. 29 at Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; metopera.org.

A singer’s house debut can make an old production seem new again. And if you listen to the critics, that’s just what the arrival of the French tenor Benjamin Bernheim is doing for Barlett Sher’s production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” As the Duke of Mantua, a role he will perform through Dec. 8, Bernheim is making up for lost time stateside (after a prior planned engagement was scuttled during the pandemic).

In a recent review, The New York Times critic Oussama Zahr wrote that “the gravitational pull of Rigoletto’s moral calamity was no match for Bernheim’s Duke” — adding that it was all because of the “distinctive power, beauty and intelligence” of the tenor’s sound. On Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., audiences will have their own chance to sample Bernheim’s unusual dramatic approach to “La donna è mobile” — a well-known staple that gets a new gloss in his dramatic conception. Tickets start at $30 and are available at the Met’s website. SETH COLTER WALLS

Kids

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The Acting Company

Through Nov. 27 at the New Victory Theater, 209 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; newvictory.org.

All for one? Try all for two. The Acting Company, regulars at the New Victory Theater (“Julius Caesar,” “X: Or, Betty Shabazz vs. the Nation”), has returned with two productions, running in repertory. These shows are intended for adolescents who enjoy swordplay, intrigue and occasional tragedy.

On Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., the company’s “Romeo and Juliet,” directed by Leah C. Gardiner and set in the American South, asks whether the ardor of young love can surmount social and racial conflict (spoiler: not without a considerable body count). On Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m., and next weekend as well, it presents “The Three Musketeers,” the swashbuckling adventure from Alexandre Dumas’s door-stopper novel adapted and reimagined by the playwright Kirsten Childs and the director Kent Gash. Acknowledging Dumas’s mixed-race ancestry — his paternal grandmother was an enslaved woman in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, or present-day Haiti — this production casts Black actors in the principal roles and interpolates hip-hop and spoken word into the duels. Tickets start at $20 and are available at New Victory’s website. ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Dance

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‘Only Gold’

Through Nov. 27 at Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, 511 West 52nd Street, Manhattan; mcctheater.org.

Andy Blankenbuehler is a modern maven of theatrical storytelling, equally skilled with large swirling ensembles and intimate duets that reveal character and conflict. He has won three Tony Awards for best choreography for his collaborations with Lin-Manuel Miranda on “In the Heights” and “Hamilton” and for his work on “Bandstand,” a dance musical set in post-World War II America that he also directed.

Now he’s back in the dual role of director-choreographer with another nostalgic and dance-centric production called “Only Gold,” which is set in 1920s Paris and features songs from the English singer-songwriter Kate Nash. One of show’s big draws is its roster of extraordinary performers from the commercial and concert dance worlds. Among them is Gaby Diaz, a winner of “So You Think You Can Dance”; Ryan Steele, a veteran of Broadway shows like “Carousel” and “Newsies”; Karine Plantadit, a former principal dancer with Alvin Ailey; and Reed Luplau, who has danced with Lar Lubovitch and Stephen Petronio. For info on showtimes and to purchase tickets, which start at $49, go to MCC’s website. BRIAN SCHAEFER

Theater

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Critic’s Pick

‘A Strange Loop'

At the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; strangeloopmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

In Michael R. Jackson’s surreal and comic Pulitzer Prize winner, which won the 2022 Tony Award for best musical, a young, Black, queer artist working as a Broadway usher wrestles with the myriad thoughts in his head — about sex and acceptance, religion and identity — as he tries to write what he calls a self-referential musical. Starring an endearing Jaquel Spivey in his Broadway debut. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Hadestown’

At the Walter Kerr Theater, Manhattan; hadestown.com. Running time: 2 hrs. and 30 min.

Anaïs Mitchell’s jazz-folk musical about the mythic young lovers Eurydice and Orpheus won eight Tonys in 2019, including best musical, and picked up a cult following along the way. Rachel Chavkin’s splendidly designed production takes audiences on a glorious road to hell. Read the review.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Six’

At the Brooks Atkinson Theater, Manhattan; sixonbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

The half-dozen wives of Henry VIII recount their marriages pop-concert style — divorces, beheadings and all —in Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s upbeat musical, which has an all-female cast and an all-female band. It also now has a 2022 Tony Award for best original score, and another for Gabriella Slade’s instantly iconic costumes. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Into the Woods’

Through Jan. 8 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan; intothewoodsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Lear deBessonet’s buzzy revival of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale mash-up was a triumph at New York City Center Encores! this spring. Its cast teems with Broadway stars, including Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince. Fan favorite in the making: the winsome cow puppet Milky White. (Onstage at the St. James Theater. Limited run ends Oct. 16.) Read the review.

Art & Museums

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Critic’s Pick

‘Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe’

Through Jan. 1 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; brooklynmuseum.org.

If you’ve paid any attention to that roiling mass of talent variously known over the past century as folk, naïve, primitive, Art Brut, self-taught or outsider, chances are you’ve come across the infectious creations of Nellie Mae Rowe. They rivet the eye with bright, dense colors, ingenious patterns and thickets of line and buoyant, sometimes bulbous figures and animals. The full force of her achievement is revealed as never before in “Really Free,” the most extensive survey of her work yet realized. With over 100 of her paintings on paper, several sewn dolls (and one chewing gum sculpture) as well as two amazing reimaginings (not replicas) of her home and yard recently constructed for a hybrid documentary-feature, the show fills the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Altogether, it propels Rowe’s art into the upper echelons of the self-taught canon with the likes of Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor and James Castle, where female artists are rare. Read the review.

‘Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear’

Through Jan. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan; moma.org.

This is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year. It rambles across MoMA’s sixth floor and includes more than 400 photographs, displayed in asymmetric arrays of large and small prints. The majority are affixed to the wall with Scotch tape or bulldog clips — although, as with the soft lighting and easy cropping of Wolfgang Tillmans’s photography, this ostensibly “informal” hang is actually calculated to the quarter-inch. The show is candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England’

Through Jan. 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue; metmuseum.org.

Delayed two years by the pandemic, “The Tudors” is handsome, classical, full of prestigious loans, and maybe a little royalist for its own good. Portraits by mostly foreign artists, Hans Holbein first among them, chart England’s most mythologized dynasty from Henry VII, who won the crown at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, to Elizabeth I, whom we see transform from a marriageable young monarch to a white-faced virgin queen. More compelling than the paintings are the tapestries, furniture and metalwork of the same era: a massive bronze candelabrum commissioned by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, giant tapestries of religious strife that Henry VIII commissioned from Antwerp, and intricate cloaks and field armor embellished with the Tudor rose. Read the review.