January Festivals Bring the Weird, Wonderful Shows
SOURCE:New Yorker|BY:Helen Shaw, Sheldon Pearce, Jane Bua, Brian Seibert, Jillian Steinhauer, Richard Brody, Taran Dugal, Justin Chang
Also: “Tartuffe” mania, the guitar stylings of William Tyler and Yasmin Williams, Justin Chang’s movies for a new year, and more.
I wait all year for January to roll around again—it’s New York’s hottest time of the year, theatrically speaking, when the city fields as much experimental work in one month as it does in the other eleven combined. Several of my favorite festivals happen simultaneously, including the much-loved and long-lived Under the Radar, which this year spreads its umbrella over thirty-two productions.
Marianne Rendón in Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s “Friday Night Rat Catchers.”Photograph by Maria Baranova
Anne Gridley’s “Watch Me Walk,” directed by Eric Ting, will be at Soho Rep (at its current digs in Playwrights Horizons); Elevator Repair Service premières its version of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at the Public, applying its deconstructionist fervor to the postmodern masterpiece; and Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein bring back their “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” after a run at New York Live Arts. This last show contains a beautiful, tragicomic solo for Engelstein, in which she becomes a sort of slow-motion avalanche, dancing as rock after rock drops out of her coat onto the floor.
Under the Radar also provides a vital connection with international work, at venues such as the Irish Arts Center, which will host the Dublin-based company Brokentalkers, and PAC NYC, which welcomes “The Visitors,” a “first contact” drama from Moogahlin Performing Arts and the Sydney Theatre Company. At the same time, the catalogue groans under the weight of all the local talent working at the cutting edge of the form. Tina Satter, the HawtPlates, and Eric Berryman all have pieces on display.
The Prototype festival includes my most-anticipated work in the month’s lineup, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s reconstruction of the “post rock” opera “What to Wear,” at BAM, which was originally a 2006 collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the much-missed avant-garde director Richard Foreman. And the Exponential Festival, which contains the fringiest offerings in the January slate, will be in a number of Brooklyn spaces, with pieces like the Goat Exchange’s “Time Passes,” which incorporates text from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” and—this seems almost too obvious, given the weather—“Jaws.” I think that show might sum up my excitement for the whole micro-season. You jump into the ocean, hoping for the best, but also a little scared. Wild things are waiting in the water.—Helen Shaw
The Nashville guitarist William Tyler has spent his career outlining the reaches of ambient country, with instrumental epics that meander into a vast expanse, tinkering with folk, pop rock, and Americana. After stints in the bands Lambchop and Silver Jews, Tyler ventured into psychedelia as a soloist in 2010, with rustic music that feels infinite. He joins the Virginian guitar virtuoso Yasmin Williams to perform a set as part of Winter Jazzfest’s Brooklyn Marathon. Together these dextrous artists showcase not just the boundlessness of the finger-style playing but its power over the imagination.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Jan. 10.)
Classical
If you watched Richard Linklater’s new film “Blue Moon” and found yourself wondering whether Lorenz Hart was right to hate “Oklahoma!,” or if his bitterness over his breakup with Richard Rodgers simply clouded his ability to enjoy it, there’s a way to find out. This January, treat yourself to clarity—and toe-tapping—at Carnegie Hall, where the Orchestra of St. Luke’s presents “Oklahoma! In Concert.” Starring such musical-theatre pros as Emmett O’Hanlon, Micaela Diamond, Jasmine Amy Rogers, and “S.N.L.” alum Ana Gasteyer, the concert will do away with the corn-y set dressing and focus on the music. Hart may have questioned whether that’s a good thing, but you can be the judge.—Jane Bua (Carnegie Hall; Jan. 12.)
Dance
Pam Tanowitz’s “Pastoral.”Photograph by Maria Baranova
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 is called the “Pastoral” Symphony because of its evocations of birdsong, brooks, and heavy weather. In “Pastoral,” a delightful collaboration among the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, the composer Caroline Shaw, and the painter Sarah Crowner, Shaw cleverly samples and remixes Beethoven’s score using a live woodwind trio, archival tracks, and field recordings of crickets. Floral paintings by Crowner cover curtains and flats with which the graceful dancers wittily and poetically rearrange space, as Tanowitz’s choreography swirls in complex patterns. This “Pastoral” is as much about the contemplation of art, and the making of it, as it is about nature.—Brian Seibert (Rose Theatre; Jan. 11-13.)
Off Broadway
In Molière’s seventeenth-century satire “Tartuffe,” the titular religious grifter (Matthew Broderick, keeping his powder too dry) buffaloes a wealthy man, Orgon (David Cross), who doesn’t notice that his spiritual counsellor has designs on his wife, Elmire (Amber Gray). Lucas Hnath’s sometimes-amusing new adaptation, directed by Sarah Benson, does contain certain vigorous touches: the outraged flouncing of Orgon’s son, Damis (Ryan J. Haddad), for example. But Enver Chakartash’s furbelowed, ballooning costumes set a tone of sumptuous buoyancy that the ensemble as a whole rarely finds, despite the efforts of several excellent clowns; Hnath’s awkward new verse keeps weighing them down, and there’s rather more comic inertia here than farce.—Helen Shaw (Reviewed in our issue of 12/29/25 & 1/5/26.) (New York Theatre Workshop; through Jan. 24.)
As the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta’s star has risen, what she did during her life has sometimes been overshadowed by the dramatic circumstances of her death. (In 1985, at the age of thirty-six, she fell out a window in her apartment; her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with and acquitted of murder.) This exhibition goes “Back to the Source,” to borrow its subtitle, reëstablishing the haunting and visceral terrain of Mendieta’s work. The focus is her “Silueta” series, from the nineteen-seventies, for which she photographed outlines of figures that she made in the earth. They showcase a rooted, searching spirituality and her gift for turning absence into presence, as in the exhibition’s only sculpture, “Ñañigo Burial” (1976), which reads as a kind of premonitory memorial: forty-seven black candles melting down into a topographic silhouette of Mendieta’s body.—Jillian Steinhauer (Marian Goodman; through Jan. 17.)
Movies
MOMA’s annual series “To Save and Project” gathers noteworthy restorations and rediscoveries from around the world. This year it unearths a set of short films made between 1908 and 1913 by D. W. Griffith, including a giddily eccentric comedy, “Those Awful Hats,” set in a movie theatre where action is taken against viewers who refuse to remove their elaborate headwear. The supreme stylist of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau, directed an audacious silent version of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” in 1925. Murnau turns the comedy, about a faux-pious fraudster, into a seething melodrama—and a cautionary film-within-a-film; MOMA presents it in both the U.S. version and the longer, recently restored German one.—Richard Brody (MOMA; Jan. 8-Feb. 2.)
Bar Tab
Taran Dugal swings with a ten-piece jazz band.
The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.
What to Watch
The movie critic Justin Chang shares five films to help start the new year off right.
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in “Holiday,” from 1938.Photograph from Everett
“Holiday” (1938)
One of three pictures that the director George Cukor made with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, this witty, melancholy masterwork builds to one of the greatest New Year’s Eve-party sequences ever captured on film—a simply magical interlude, in which two characters, who have fallen in love before our eyes, see their dreams realized and perhaps dashed in the same instance. Few films leave you with a more hopeful sense of life and love’s possibilities, but fewer still are also more achingly aware of how fragile—and elusive—those possibilities are.
“Breathless” (1960)
Jean-Luc Godard’s sixty-five-year-old début feature, presently being saluted in Richard Linklater’s terrific making-of comedy, “Nouvelle Vague,” remains one of the freshest starts in movie history. To see it again (and again) is to feel an intoxicating sense of creative rejuvenation in every cut and frame.
“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974)
Ellen Burstyn justly won an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s wonderful drama, about a recently widowed mother who, determined to seize a new life from the jaws of tragedy, moves West with her son and sets out to revive a long-ago-aborted singing career. See it especially for the great Diane Ladd, whose death in November made 2025 that much harder to bear.
“Into Great Silence” (2007)
Every new year calls for an altitude adjustment. In 2002 and 2003, the German director Philip Gröning spent months filming at the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery located high up in the French Alps, and emerged with one of the most genuinely awe-inspiring nonfiction films of that year, or any year—a cleansing, rigorously patient immersion in the daily and even hourly rhythms of Carthusian monks, whose vows of silence incline the viewer toward their own state of contemplative rapture. “Into Great Silence” isn’t available for streaming in the U.S., so, barring a revival screening near you, you’ll have to purchase a DVD to watch it, which is fitting for a film that encourages patience and the avoidance of shortcuts.
“Brittany Runs a Marathon” (2019)
I have run a few half-marathons in my life, but have never (and never will) run a full one. But whenever my inspiration flags and laziness makes me loath to jog for even a mile, I flash back fondly on Paul Downs Colaizzo’s winning comedy of self-care. Jillian Bell is terrific in the title role of a New Yorker who, as the movie begins, can barely make it to the next corner—and, by the end, has defied everyone’s expectations, her own most of all.
