Things to do in New York this Friday

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Halfway through Redwood, a new musical conceived by Idina Menzel and director Tina Landau, Menzel—playing Jesse, a woman on the run from her own grief—is suspended on a platform midair, belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. Unavoidably, this recalls her performance of the Act I finale of Wicked, in which Menzel’s original Elphaba was also midair and belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. This time, however, gravity wins. Even as Menzel's Jesse climbs to new physical heights, the lumbering Redwood brings her down.  Jesse is a capable, cosmopolitan Jewish woman paralyzed by sadness about the recent death of her college-age son (Zachary Noah Piser). Her desperation literally drives her up a tree: She leaves New York City—where, of course, she owns an art gallery—and motors to California, where she persuades a pair of environmentalists, Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), to let her join them in scaling an enormous redwood for science. Can “nature’s remedy” help this neurotic city gal find her bearings? Naturally, it can. Redwood | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The arc of Jesse’s healing is long—nearly two hours without intermission—and it bends toward banality. The subject matter cries out for inventive nuance, but Landau’s book charts a familiar route to exactly where you know it’s going, with rest stops for mostly blah songs (music by Kate Diaz, lyrics...

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.

The neocircus cabaret show AirOtic Soirée, which combines acrobatics and aerial artistry with scanty costumes and erotic themes, concocts a special show for the Valentine's season. Canoodle with your date as impossibly lithe bodies work themselves into positions you dare not imagine trying yourself. For an extra $110–$120 you can augment the experience with dinner and drinks (or a bottle of Prosecco to share).

[Note: Queen of Hearts returns in February for an encore run, with Lindsay Rose in the title role.] Lewis Carroll's trippy Alice in Wonderland books have inspired many theatrical spectacles, but Company XIV's seductive Queen of Hearts is a singular sexcess: a transporting fusion of haute burlesque, circus, dance and song. Your fall down the glamorous rabbit hole begins upon entering the troupe's louche Bushwick lair, where scantily clad server-performers slink about in flattering red lighting. A cursory knowledge of the source material will help you make sense of the show’s three-act cavalcade of Alice-inspired routines, as our blue-haired heroine embarks on an NC-17 coming-of-age journey under the guidance of the White Rabbit. As usual, Company XIV impresario Austin McCormick has assembled an array of alluring and highly skilled artists, who look smashing in Zane Pihlstrom's lace-and-crystal-encrusted costumes. A contortionist emerges in an S/M-vinyl cocoon and transforms into a beauteous butterfly; mustachioed twins, as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, perform a cheeky spin on the Marx Brothers' mirror trick. As the title royal, voluptuous vocalist Storm Marrero rules over all in her stunning 11-o'clock number. With its soundtrack of pop songs, attractive ensemble cast and immersive aesthetics—plus chocolate and specialty cocktails—Queen of Hearts feels like Moulin Rouge! for actual bohemians. Hell, it even has a cancan. Like Alice, you may resist returning to reality when...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman “Why do we learn language?” asks Marjan (Marjan Neshat) to the English class she teaches in Iran. There are practical reasons, to be sure; several of her students need to pass the standardized international Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) so they can travel abroad. But for Marjan, who once spent nine years living in the U.K., the answer goes deeper than that. We learn language, she says, "to speak our souls": “To speak. And to… [motions to her ear] listen. To the insides of others.” That’s the guiding philosophy of Sanaz Toossi’s ear-opening English, which premiered at the Atlantic in 2022. Now, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it has migrated to Broadway under the sponsorship of the Roundabout, with its identity entirely intact. Director Knud Adams and his original cast of five re-create the magic of the original production without a stammer, stumble or waver.  English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus If Toossi’s thoughtful and searching play has things to teach us—about character, culture, postcolonial identity—it does so through immersion. We first see Marjan’s classroom from the outside, through a window. But Marsha Ginsberg’s boxed set soon rotates to invite us inside; it keeps turning throughout the play to give us new angles, and Toossi does the same. Like any grammar, English has rules and structures that it carefully maintains, but enough exceptions and variations to provide character and texture. It unfolds...

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...

In this two-person thriller by Rajiv Joseph (Guards at the Taj), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal at the turn of the 21st century veers by accident into a secret world of State Department intrigue. Abubakr Ali, Mia Barron costar in the show's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, which commissioned it; May Adrales directs.

Singer-songwriter Dina Fanai's mythopoetic original musical, which draws inspiration from the Sufi mysticism of Rumi and the analytic acuity of Joseph Campbell, returns for an encore run after a successful workshop in January, directed once more by Dodd Loomis. Jenna Rubaii plays the title heroine on journey of spirtitual discovery; the large supporting cast is led by Broadway ringers Constantine Maroulis (Rock of Ages) and Maya Days (Aida), and also includes Madeline Serrano and Fanai herself.

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...