Things to do in New York this week: Critics' picks

Find this week's best events, activities and things to do in NYC, as chosen by Time Out's critics

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  • Musicals
  • Midtown West
  • price 3 of 4
You’ll get a kick out of this holiday stalwart, which still features Santa, wooden soldiers and the dazzling Rockettes. In recent years, new music, more eye-catching costumes and advanced technology have been introduced to bring audience members closer to the performance. In the signature kick line that finds its way into most of the big dance numbers, the Rockettes’ 36 pairs of legs rise and fall like the batting of an eyelash, their perfect unison a testament to the disciplined human form. This is precision dancing on a massive scale—a Busby Berkeley number come to glorious life—and it takes your breath away. RECOMMENDED: How to get tickets to the Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes
  • Shopping
  • Markets and fairs
  • Midtown East
Perhaps one of the most conveniently located holiday markets is the Grand Central Holiday Fair. Running now through December 24, Vanderbilt Hall, the destination will highlight the work of 36 local food and craft vendors and small businesses known for their quality craftsmanship and products made within the state of New York or the U.S. Goods will range from home décor and jewelry to abstract art and perfumes. “Whether shoppers are looking for a thoughtful hostess present, a sentimental piece of jewelry for a cherished friend, or a cozy sweater for a loved one, this year’s fair promises an amazing selection of gifts, many of which cannot be found at other holiday markets across the city,” GCT officials said. This year, Uncommon Goods have a pop-up at the market on the bridge adjacent to the Main Concourse with a hand-picked selection of imaginative gifts for kids, handmade jewelry and ornaments, small batch syrups and confections, and creatively designed finds for grillmasters, sports fans, book lovers and more. There will also be Grand Central Terminal-branded gifts, from Yeti tumblers and Baggu totes to charming souvenirs such as jigsaw puzzles, luggage tags, and playing cards inside The Grand Gift Shop within the Holiday Fair. The Holiday Fair will operate seven days a week from 10am to 7pm Monday-Saturday; and 11am to 6pm on Sundays. The space will be closed for Thanksgiving. For more information regarding specific vendors and hours, click here.
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  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • price 4 of 4
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Hamilton
Hamilton
Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...
  • Drama
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • price 4 of 4
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Reducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form. As though it had cast a Shrinking Charm on itself, the formerly two-part epic is now a single show, albeit a long one: Almost three and a half hours of stage wizardry, set 20 years after the end of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part book series and tied to a complicated time-travel plot about the sons of Harry Potter and his childhood foe Draco Malfoy. (See below for a full review of the 2018 production.) Audiences who were put off by the previous version’s tricky schedule and double price should catch the magic now.  Despite its shrinking, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has kept most of its charm. The spectacular set pieces of John Tiffany’s production remain—the staircase ballet, the underwater swimming scene, the gorgeous flying wraiths—but about a third of the former text has been excised. Some of the changes are surgical trims, and others are more substantial. The older characters take the brunt of the cuts (Harry’s flashback nightmares, for example, are completely gone); there is less texture to the conflicts between the fathers and sons, and the plotting sometimes feels more rushed than before. But the changes have the salutary effect of focusing the story on its most interesting new creations: the resentful Albus Potter (James Romney) and the unpopular Scorpius Malfoy (Brady Dalton Richards), whose bond has been reconceived in...
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  • Drama
  • Midtown West
  • price 3 of 4
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The ancient Greeks, in the earliest extant plays in the Western canon, frequently drew on mythology in their treatment of human conflicts. So does the modern British playwright Jez Butterworth. In Jerusalem (2009), he took on the primal magic embedded in English identity; The Ferryman (2017) was suffused with Irish folklore. And although his captivating and poignant new drama, The Hills of California, takes place in the brackish British seaside town of Blackpool, it is centrally concerned with another regional mythos: the American Dream.  To depict the tangled Webb family, the play toggles between two decades. Much of it takes place in 1976, when three adult sisters reunite at the Sea View, a guest house owned by the family; their mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer on an upper floor, and a fourth sister—the eldest, Joan, who moved to the U.S. some 20 years earlier—hasn’t shown up. But Butterworth shifts periods, periodically, to show us the same characters in 1955, when Veronica (played by a magnetically steely Laura Donnelly) is trying her best to mold them into child stars in a singing sister act. Veronica’s showbiz model is the Andrews Sisters; the girls not only perform that trio’s close-harmony hits (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right”) but also reenact their publicity interviews at the kitchen table. The goal is to reach the American paradise extolled in another of the numbers Veronica chooses: a throwaway...
  • Drama
  • Midtown West
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  David Adjmi’s intimately epic behind-the-music drama Stereophonic has now moved to Broadway after a hit fall run at Playwrights Horizons. At the smaller venue, the audience felt almost immersed in the room where the show takes place: a wood-paneled 1970s recording studio—decked out by set designer David Zinn as a plush vision of brown, orange, mustard, sage and rust—where a rock band is trying to perfect what could be its definitive album. Some fans of the play have wondered if it could work as well on a larger stage, but that question has a happy answer: Daniel Aukin’s superb production navigates the change without missing a beat. The jam has been preserved. With the greater sense of distance provided at the Golden Theatre, Stereophonic feels more than ever like watching a wide-screen film from the heyday of Robert Altman, complete with excellent ensemble cast, overlapping dialogue and a generous running time: Adjmi divides the play into four acts, which take more than three hours to unfold. This length is essential in conveying the sprawl of a recording process that goes on far longer than anyone involved had planned, but the play itself never drags. As the band cracks up along artistic, romantic and pharmaceutical fault lines—fueled by a constant flow of booze, weed and coke, often late into the night—we follow along, riveted by the details and the music that emerges from them. There’s nary a false note.  Stereophonic | Photograph:...
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  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • price 3 of 4
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman “Keep it light, keep it tight, keep it fun, and then we’re done!” That’s the pithy advice that the indignant 16th-century housewife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) imparts to her neglectful husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), as a way to improve his play Romeo and Juliet, which she considers too much of a downer. It is also the guiding ethos of the new Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet, a quasi-Elizabethan romp through the chart-toppers of Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin. A diverting synthetic crossbreed of Moulin Rouge!, Something Rotten!, Mamma Mia! and Head Over Heels, this show delivers just what you’d expect. It is what it is: It gives you the hooks and it gets the ovations.  Martin is the preeminent pop hitmaker of the past 25 years, so & Juliet has a lot to draw from. The show’s 30 songs include multiple bops originally recorded by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, as well as tunes that Martin wrote—or, in all but two cases, co-wrote—for Pink, NSYNC, Kesha, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Jessie J, Céline Dion, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Ellie Goulding, Demi Lovato, Adam Lambert, the Weeknd and even Bon Jovi. (Notably absent are any of his collaborations with Taylor Swift.) “Roar,” “Domino,” “Since U Been Gone”: the hit list goes on and on. As a compilation disc performed live, it’s a feast for Millennials; its alternate title might well be Now That’s What I Call a Musical! & Julietl | Photograph: Matthew...
  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • price 3 of 4
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out. Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stops-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped...
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  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • price 3 of 4
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Theater review by Adam Feldman  Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging—that bring this old story to quivering life. In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) falls for Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a busboy with an otherworldly high-tenor voice who is working, like Roger in Rent, toward writing one perfect song. But dreams don’t pay the bills, so the desperate Eurydice—taunted by the Fates in three-part jazz harmony—opts to sell her soul to the underworld overlord Hades (Patrick Page, intoning jaded come-ons in his unique sub-sepulchral growl, like a malevolent Leonard Cohen). Soon she is forced, by contract, into the ranks of the leather-clad grunts of Hades’s filthy factory city; if not actually dead, she is “dead to the world anyway.” This Hades is a drawling capitalist patriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them...
  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • price 3 of 4
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Hell’s Kitchen, whose score is drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys, could easily have gone down in flames. Jukebox musicals often do; songs that sound great on the radio can’t always pull their weight onstage. But playwright Kristoffer Diaz, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have found the right recipe for this show—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients—and they've cooked up a heck of a block party.  Inspired by Keys’s life, Hell’s Kitchen has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon—in a stunningly assured debut—plays Ali, a beautiful but directionless mixed-race teenager growing up in midtown’s artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the 1990s, a period conjured winsomely and wittily by Dede Ayite’s costumes. The issues Ali faces are realistic ones: tensions with her protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean); disappointment with the charming musician father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), who yo-yos in and out of their lives; a crush on a thicc, slightly older street drummer, Knuck (Chris Lee); a desire to impress a stately pianist, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who lives in the building.  Hell’s Kitchen | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin The show’s chain of Keys songs is its most obvious selling point, but it could also have been a limitation. Musically, the tunes are not built for drama—they tend to sit in a leisurely R&B groove—and...
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