New York City Center

The bright New York City Ballet star Sara Mearns curates a show for City Center's Artists at the Center series that comprises a pair of world premieres. In the dance-theater piece Don’t Go Home, by choreographer Guillaume Côté and writer Jonathon Young, she is joined by NYCB's newest principal, Gilbert Bolden III. For a new work by Jamar Roberts, set to live music by Caroline Shaw, Means and Roberts are complemented onstage by Jeroboam Bozeman, Ghrai DeVore-Stokes and Anna Greenberg.  

The ballet company Dance Theatre of Harlem returns to City Center for four performances. The mixed bill on April 10 and 13 is a bevy of firsts: the world premiere of Jodie Gates's The Passage of Being; the New York premiere of The Cookout by Robert Garland, who is now in his second season as DTH's artistic director; and the company premieres of William Forsythe's The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude and George Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations. The April 12 performance swaps The Cookout for an older Garland work: the return of 1999 Return, a company favorite set to music by James Brown and Aretha Franklin. The gala program on April 11, commemorating the door-opening 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, comprises the Forsythe piece, excerpts from the Balanchine piece and from Garland's We Are Brown, and a speech by Janai Nelson, the President of the Legal Defense Fund.

The final installment of this year's Encores! season at City Center was meant to be Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party, but scheduling issues kicked it forward to next year. In its place, the musical-theater staged-concert revival series offers another look at the 1953 musical comedy Wonderful Town, which it first presented 25 years ago in a production that wound up transferring to Broadway three years later. The show features music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; the story, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov from short stories by Ruth McKenney, follows two sisters—played here by Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson—who move from Ohio to Greenwich Village to pursue their dreams and maybe find love along the way. Zhailon Levingston (Cats: The Jellical Ball) is the director and Mary-Mitchell Campbell is the music director.