Greenwich Village events: Concerts, parties, readings and more

Vinny DePonto reunites with the team behind his 2013 show Charlatan, co-writer Josh Koenigsberg and directeor Andrew Neisler, for an ambitious new theatrical magic act that revolves largely around audience participation. DePonto is an engaging crowd worker, and he has devised several clever variations on the standard mentalist repertoire, so the show is a pleasant diversion. But a conceptual throughline about dementia feels underdeveloped, while its corresponding physical set is overdone: a high-concept space that at first evokes a 1970s office and then morphs into walls of metal deposit boxes that represent where memories are stored. What should be impressive reveals sometimes get lost in elaborate set-ups, which is too bad: A mind trick is a terrible thing to waste.—Adam Feldman

A jittery young man named Milo labors to give a eulogy for his late friend, with help from audience volunteers, in an unusual solo-with-assistance show written by Brendan George and conceived by Peter Charney. After a 2023 debut at 59E59, the piece now returns for a more site-specific rotating run at churches and meeting places: the LGBT Community Center on Thursdays, Park Slope's Old First Reformed Church on Fridays, the Lower East Side's Studio Exhibit on Saturday and the West Village's Westbeth Community Center on Sundays. Downtown theater and nightlife publicist Ron Lasko directs this incarnation of the show; Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook, Ryan Boloix and Richard Diamond alternate as Milo. 

Sarina Freda takes you on a long, strange trip in a comedic solo show devoted to what she learned on an especially harrowing experience on LSD in 2021. Co-creator and co-writer Tom Costello directs the production, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year. (Tickets are $25 but spectators also have the option to purchase $45 "Pay It Forward" tickets or $100 "True Cost" ones.) 

Ephraim Birney and Joel Meyers play two gay Jewish men trapped together by inclement weather after an anonymous Grindr hookup—and fumbling to forge a deeper connection—in a new two-hander by Danny Brown. Noah Eisenberg directs for Out of the Box Theatrics (in conjunction with his own Ice Berg Productions). 

The excellent Andrew Scott, who has played the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock and the titular sociopath on Ripley but will always be Fleabag's Hot Priest in our hearts, assumes every role in this solo version of Anton Chekhov's 1897 masterwork Uncle Vanya, a bitterly comic meditation on the wages of self-sacrifice. The piece—which Scott co-created with adaptor Simon Stephens, director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize—was received ecstatically in London in 2023. Now it comes to the West Village's venerable Lucille Lortel Theatre for an eight-week run. 

Writer-performer J.S. Streible synthesizes his experience growing up as a biracial man among the white mountain folk of rural Appalachia—some very rich, soime dirt poor—in a solo collection of original songs, poems and short tall tales. Inspired by Southern and West African storytelling traditions, the show desscribes itself as "the world’s first Neo-Appalachian, Afrolachian, Southern Pop Revusical."