These are our top picks for the weekend of March 8th-10th. For more event listings and reviews, check out Goings On About Town.
Art
The Iranian-American sculptor, Conceptualist, and political philosopher Siah Armajani is the subject of a fascinating retrospective at the Met Breuer: paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, charts, computer printouts, a video, a slide show, and more. Armajani, who is seventy-nine and based in Minneapolis, is preposterously under-recognized. One reason is the uncategorizable salad of his sculptural styles, harvested from Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, American vernacular architecture, and sheer fantasy. All in all, he recalls no predecessor except, perhaps, Buckminster Fuller, minus Fuller’s grandiose self-promotion.
— Peter Schjeldahl
For more art reviews, click here, and for our Spring Art Preview, click here.
Night Life
The night club the Shelter, founded by the d.j. Timmy Regisford, in 1991, is one of New York’s great house-music institutions, flying the flag for soulful, vocal-driven tracks that flaunt the genre’s disco, Latin, and African roots. In Regisford’s hands, house remains remarkably playful. Louie Vega, his co-headliner for this Sunday night event at Schimanski, has an even more impressive C.V.: in the nineties, he was half of the duo Masters at Work, which defined the New York house sound, and his recent recordings include such standouts as the sly, lithe 2015 single “Elevator (Going Up).”—Michaelangelo Matos
For more night-life listings, click here, and for our Spring Night-Life Preview, click here.
Food & Drink: Tables for Two
Ramen normally comprises five components: hot broth, noodles, tare (seasoning), oil, and toppings. At Niche, the ramen is what’s known as mazemen, a relatively new style that omits most or all of the broth. You can find mazemen at other New York restaurants, including Ivan Ramen and Yuji Ramen, but, until now, the city has not had a kitchen devoted to it.—Hannah Goldfield
For more restaurant reviews, click here.
The Theatre
In “Alice by Heart,” it’s 1941, and eight orphans have taken refuge in a London Tube station, as the Luftwaffe blankets the city in incendiary bombs. Among them is a boy named Alfred (Colton Ryan), who is gravely ill with a tubercular cough. His dearest friend, Alice (Molly Gordon), comforts him by reading aloud from their favorite novel, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Between air raids, the pair enter the psychedelic world of the book, dreamily conjured through eighteen bewitching musical numbers by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. What begins as an exercise in palliative escapism germinates into a sage allegory of the utility of literature as a guide for our darkest tribulations.—David Kortava
For more theatre reviews, click here, and for our Spring Theatre Preview, click here.
Movies
“An Elephant Sitting Still,” completed in 2017 and only now being released in the United States, is one of the finest cinematic achievements of recent years. It’s the director Hu Bo’s only feature; he committed suicide soon after finishing it, at the age of twenty-nine. The vast, fierce movie—nearly four hours long and centered on a tale of theft, violence, and revenge among high-school students in a crumbling industrial town in China—is as much a vision of a society in despair as it is an artistic creation of the first order. Hu’s dramatic imagination is as ample as his political sensibility. The movie opens this Friday at Film Society of Lincoln Center.—Richard Brody
For more movie reviews, click here, and for our Spring Movies Preview, click here.
Classical Music
Now that Yannick Nézet-Séguin is the music director of both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, he is exploring the potential for synchronicity between the two institutions. His audience at Carnegie Hall on Friday will have the chance to reconsider the musical merits of Nico Muhly’s opera “Marnie”—which had its U.S. première at the Met, in the fall—through a new symphonic suite divorced from the show’s soigné costumes and limp plotting. Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 and Mendelssohn’s mercurial Piano Concerto No. 1 (with the soloist Jan Lisiecki) round out the program.—Oussama Zahr
For more classical-music listings, click here, and for our Spring Classical-Music Preview, click here.
Dance
For more than a decade, Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith—both standout performers in works by other choreographers—have been creating duets of uncommon intimacy and understated drama for themselves. Often, they perform naked, but even when clothed they are exposed. Often, they touch and entangle, but even when separate they are unquestionably connected. “Body Comes Apart,” the pair’s partly improvised latest effort, at New York Live Arts tonight through Saturday, situates them in a set of knitting and mirrors by Liliana Dirks-Goodman. Ideas about how women are viewed, something present in all the pair’s works, are here handled more explicitly, verbally, and satirically.—Brian Seibert
For more dance listings, click here, and for our Spring Dance Preview, click here.