Things to do in New York this Friday

The annual Flamenco Festival returns to showcase a wide range of variations on the Spanish form at a dozen New York venues. The heart of the programming is at City Center, where this year's lineup includes: Alfonso Losa and Patricia Guerrero (Mar 6) in the NYC premiere of Alter Ego, joined by vocalists Sandra Carrasco and Ismael “El Bola” and guitarist Jose Manuel Martinez “El Peli"; Compañía Manuel Liñán (Mar 7) in the NYC premiere of Muerta de Amor (Dead in Love), featuring seven dancers and five musicians; and Compañía Eva Yerbabuena (Mar 8–9) in Yerbagüena (Oscuro Brillante), in which one of Flamenco's most celebrated figures draws from what she's learned in her 40-year career to combine and contrast old and new forms of the art. The festival also includes music, dance and film events at locations including Joe's Pub, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Le Poisson Rouge and Instituto Cervantes. Information and ticketing for all shows can be found on Flamenco Festival's Spanish-language website.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a...

Theater review by Raven SnookThe path to greatness is paved with blood, sushi and tears in Sumo, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s hearty new play about Japan’s spiritually infused national pastime. The relatively diminutive Akio (a winning Scott Keiji Takeda) is a lowly newcomer at an elite Tokyo training facility. He’s stuck doing menial work and desperate to get a shot in the sumo ring himself, but he faces hefty competition from other wrestlers in the stable—particularly the disdainful highest-ranked fighter, Mitsuo (a quietly intimidating David Shih), who abuses and dismisses him. Anyone who's ever seen a sports movie knows what comes next. That seems to be by design: Dring transports a traditional hero's-journey plot to a setting that is rarely seen in American theatre, which gives it some freshness without taking it too far afield from the familiar. The ferocious sumo matches—fight-directed by James Yaegashi and Chelsea Pace, and choreographed to Shih-Wei Wu's live taiko drumming—get your blood pumping. Paul Whitaker's lighting is appropriately dramatic; Hana S. Kim's eye-popping projections set the scene and fill in cultural gaps, as do three Shinto priests who serve as narrators. Sumo | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus None of the actors have the sheer mass of authentic sumo greats, but they pull more than their weight. Director Ralph B. Peña elicits substantial performances from the entire cast of the production, which is presented jointly by Ma-Yi Theater Company and the...

Queens Botanical Garden has a beautiful light show you’ll want to see this year called “Luminosa: A Festival of Lights.” With over 1 million LED lights, this illuminated trail imitates a lush garden with giant lanterns—including 40 stunning lamp scenes crafted by 150 artisans using 120 tons of steel and 150,000 feet of silk—and brings it to life with acrobatic performers, stone-carving, an artisan market and ambient music.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

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). 

If you were alive in the late 1990s, you probably remember the ubiquitous 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club, which reunited elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and songs of a Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. This original musical by Marco Ramirez—directed by Saheem Ali and choreographed gorgeously by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck—brings their story to Broadway, in slightly fictionalized form, after a highly enjoyable debut at the Atlantic last year. As winter pokes its frigid fingers into New York City, this lively celebration of Cuban music offers an irresistable tropical getaway.

Hundreds of items have been pulled from the New York Public Library's expansive and centuries-spanning archive to be put on display—many of them for the first time—in a permanent exhibition called "The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures." Inside the NYPL's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and its beautiful Gottesman Hall, are more than 250 unique and rare items culled from its research centers: the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Library for the Performing Arts and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The exhibit, which opens to the public on Friday, September 24, spans 4,000 years of history and includes a wide range of history-making pieces, including the only surviving letter from Christoper Columbus announcing his "discovery" of the Americas to King Ferdinand’s court and the first Gutenberg Bible brought over to the Americas. We visited the stunning collection this week to find the top 10 must-see items at the NYPL Treasures exhibit so when you go, you can make sure to see them for yourself: 1. Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence Photograph: Max Touhey / NYPL Only six manuscript versions of the Declaration of Independence are known to survive in the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson made this copy for a friend shortly after the July 4th, 1776, ratification of the Declaration, which announced to the world the American colonies’ political separation from Great Britain. He underlined...

Hot on the heels of her turn in The Barbarians, Chloe Claudel hits the Tank with an original piece that combines elements of the 1975 classic The Dead Class—a post-traumatic encounter with devastation by the Polish avant-garde artist and theater maker Tadeusz Kantor—with fragments of memories, memoirs, photographs and voice mails, as well as original text by Eliya Smith and live music by Sasha Yakub. Claudel also co-directs the piece with Mitchell Polonsky for the Goat Exchange. Along with Claudel, the cast comprises Marcus Amaglo, Luke Bosco, Juliana Sass and two downtown pillars (and Gatz alums), Jim Fletcher and Pete Simpson. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How is she? Ever since May, when it was confirmed that Audra McDonald would star in the latest revival of Gypsy, Broadway fans have speculated about how Audra would be as Mama Rose—or, more nervously, whether Audra could be Mama Rose, the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters themselves. The casting seemed inevitable: the pinnacle role for a woman in musical theater, essayed by the most accomplished musical-theater actress of her generation. It’s Audra’s turn. Yet to some, the casting also seemed unlikely: Rose has traditionally been played by big belters, from Ethel Merman in 1959 through Patti LuPone in 2008, not dramatic sopranos like McDonald. So let’s get that question out of the way up front. How is Audra as Rose? She’s a revelation.  So, too, is the rest of George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent and beautifully mounted production, which comes as a happy surprise. Gypsy is a model musical in every regard, from Arthur Laurents’s airtight book, inspired by the memoirs of striptease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, to Jule Styne’s thrilling music, which grabs you at the overture and doesn’t let go, to Stephen Sondheim’s dazzlingly witty and insightful lyrics. But this is the show’s fifth Broadway revival, and its third in the 21st century alone. One might reasonably wonder what is left to reveal in a show as well-known as this one. But like the monster some people believe...