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To Do: April 4–April 18, 2018

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read.


Art
1. See Kiss Off
Standout sensuality. 
This sexy and smart show, organized in part by the daringly original and prescient Francesco Bonami, rethinks the idea of the kiss in art. Just inside the door is a de Kooning drawing of a woman whom the artist had his wife kiss with lipstick to juice things up. This soaring visual temperature is maintained for two more floors. —Jerry Saltz
Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 East 77th Street, through April 14.

Movies
2. See Beirut
Changing the conversation. 
Jon Hamm proves he can carry a lead film role in Brad Anderson’s tightly plotted espionage thriller from a script by Tony Gilroy. He plays a fast-talking American diplomat in Beirut whose wife is killed in a 1972 terrorist explosion — and who is brought back ten years later, a bitter drunk, to help the CIA negotiate a hostage swap in the ravaged city. Hamm doesn’t have the outsize personality we associate with major movie stars, but he can think onscreen. He can make you watch him closely, trying to keep up with the wheels churning in his head. —David Edelstein
In theaters April 11.

Pop
3. Listen to Golden
Can’t get her out of our head.
Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue returns with her first studio album of new material since 2014’s Kiss Me Once. Judging by the prominent acoustic and electric guitars that drive the singles “Dancing” and “Stop Me From Falling” and Minogue’s promise to evoke “Dolly Parton standing on a dance floor,” the new album will infuse her trademark emotional synth-pop with country-music accents. —Craig Jenkins
Darenote Limited/BMG, April 6.

Theater
4. See King Lear
Howl, howl, howl, howl. 
The director Peter Brook called Shakespeare’s King Lear “a mountain whose summit has never been reached, the way up strewn with the shattered bodies of earlier visitors.” Now Sir Antony Sher (who played a devastating Falstaff in the King and Country cycle at BAM in 2016) attempts the monumental ascent in a production from the Royal Shakespeare Company, under the direction of Gregory Doran. —Sara Holdren
BAM, April 7 to 29.

Opera
5. See Cendrillon
Once upon a time … 
The Met finally gets around to mounting Massenet’s chintz-and-taffeta setting of the Cinderella tale in a production that is new to the company but not to its star, the prodigious mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. She sang the role in Laurent Pelly’s 2011 staging at the Royal Opera House in London (and in the resulting DVD), which is how the opera world knows to be excited for the reprise. —Justin Davidson
Metropolitan Opera, opens April 12.

Movies
6. See The Great Silence
Frosty vengeance.   
Sergio Corbucci’s sensationally grim 1968 spaghetti Western has never had a theatrical release in this country until now, and if you see it, you’ll understand why. In the wintry Dolomites (standing in for Utah), Jean-Louis Trintignant’s mute avenger goes up against Klaus Kinski’s breathtakingly cruel bounty hunter with the help of beauteous Vonetta McGee. I’ve hesitated about recommending this, but you should know about it — and be prepared for a holy bludgeoning. —D.E.
Film Forum, through April 5.

TV
7. Watch Paterno
Unpacking a poisoned legacy. 
Al Pacino’s late-career run of biographical dramas continues with this docudrama from Barry Levinson (Rain Man) about the Penn State scandal. Pacino stars as the title character, the longtime coach accused of helping to cover up decades of rapes and molestations by his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky (Jim Johnson). As in David Mamet’s Phil Spector, Pacino plays the role as a larger-than-life, borderline-grotesque man who seems to have absorbed all of society’s ugliness and self-deception. —Matt Zoller Seitz
HBO, April 7.

Art
8. See A Page From My Intimate Journal (Part I)
Don’t sleep on this one.
I’ve never seen a bad show at this artist-run for-profit gallery, which has, after barely a year in business, become one of the best spaces in the country. This group show brings together 46 artists who deal with beautifully coded private systems, Tantric geometric suggestions of sex, personally designed objects, and devices that provide pleasure and thought. It’s a Proustian journey into multitudinousness. —J.S.
Gordon Robichaux, 41 Union Square West, No. 925, through April 8.

Books
9. Go to PEN World Voices Festival
Read up. 
This year’s edition of the international literary festival is themed “Resist and Reimagine” and will feature more than 60 events with authors including Roxane Gay, Porochista Khakpour, and festival co-founder Salman Rushdie. Expect plenty of discussion about the role of art in Trump’s America and topical panels on everything from #MeToo to racialized voter suppression.
Various locations, April 16 to 22.

TV
10. Watch Lost in Space
Robinsons redux.   
The 1960s series about the Robinson family’s journey through outer space gets an upgrade for the year 2018, one that includes far better special effects and a tendency to put its characters in a more visceral sense of peril. After all these years, one thing has not changed: There is still danger, Will Robinson. But now there is also Parker Posey!
Netflix, April 13.

Pop
11. Listen to Moosebumps
Getting the band back together. 
Underground hip-hop legends Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, and DJ QBert reunite under the Dr. Octagon moniker for Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation, another trip into the outer-space sci-fi pulp drama that birthed the trio’s 1996 rap classic Dr. Octagonecologyst. —C.J.
Bulk Recordings/Caroline, April 6.

Books
12. Read Look Alive Out There
Entering the canon.
Posterity is a high bar for personal essays; not everyone can be Nora Ephron. With a third collection about — for example — intimidating travels, insufferable neighbors, and the pain and anxiety of freezing your eggs, Sloane Crosley seems poised to make the leap from hilarious storyteller to urban spirit guide for the single and driven. —Boris Kachka
MCD.

Theater
13. See Dance Nation
Strong commitment to sparkle motion.
Playwright Clare Barron (I’ll Never Love Again) is becoming well known for her playful, painful examinations of the messy, loving, yearning business of growing up. Her new show is a comedy with life-or-death stakes: those of the preteen dance world. Who will make it to the Boogie Down Grand Prix in Tampa Bay, Florida? And whom will they have to crush under their tiny, ballet-slippered feet along the way? —S.H.
Playwrights Horizons, April 13 through May 27.

Classical Music
14. See The Knights and Black Sea Hotel
Double feature. 
Two Brooklyn groups investigate the Mitteleuropa connection. First, the all-female trio Black Sea Hotel perform their biting a cappella versions of Balkan folk tunes. Then the borough’s preeminent orchestra, the Knights, wanders through Eastern Europe, landing on a new large-ensemble version of György Ligeti’s blistering harpsichord showpiece Hungarian Rock. —J.D.
BRIC House Ballroom, April 12.

Theater
15. See Mlima’s Tale
An elephant never forgets. 
Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, who recently examined the lives of a suffering working-class community in Sweat, turns her focus on the animal kingdom. Obie winner Jo Bonney directs this poignant story of the journey of an elephant trapped in the black-market ivory trade. —S.H.
Public Theater, through May 20.

TV
16. Watch Trading Spaces
Second time around.
This reboot picks up from where the series left off a decade ago. The premise: A pair of neighbors get free rein to redecorate a room in another neighbor’s home, but they have to stick to a set budget, usually around $2,000. The final reveal always brings shock … or anger.
TLC, April 7.

TV
17. Watch Ex on the Beach
Yowza. 
Rapper-actor Romeo hosts this new unscripted series with a tantalizing premise: Everyday people and stars from other reality series, including The Bachelor and Vanderpump Rules, go to a beautiful tropical island thinking they’re taking part in a typical dating-relationship show, only to be confronted with an ex-lover. Get ready for tears.      —M.Z.S.
MTV, April 19.

Classical Music
18. Hear Boston Symphony Orchestra
Dream casting.
If you could have Jonas Kaufmann sing one opera, you’d want it to be Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and if there’s one tenor you’d want to hear sing that work, it’s Kaufmann. Providing he doesn’t cancel (a habit of his), the tenor will try on the title role in a concert performance of the narcotic, erotic second act.          —J.D.
Carnegie Hall, April 12.

Theater
19. See Transfers
Outside the ivory tower.
Playwright Lucy Thurber and director Jackson Gay question the seemingly unbreachable walls of the higher-education system in this story of Cristofer and Clarence, two gifted students from the South Bronx who find themselves pitted against each other for a scholarship to an elite Northeastern college. —S.H.
MCC Theater, in previews for an April 5 opening. Through May 13.

Pop
20. See Waxahatchee and Hurray for the Riff Raff
Ladies first.
Alabama indie-rock outfit Waxahatchee and the New Orleans folk-rock band Hurray for the Riff Raff might seem like an awkward pairing. One group specializes in loud guitars and bruised emotions, and the other speaks to immigrants’ struggles through hushed acoustics. The thematic similarities should be apparent in this live show: Come see for yourself in a night of moving music from insightful women. —C.J.
Warsaw, April 13.

Books
21. Read Heads of the Colored People
Strong showing.
The focus on blackness in this debut collection of stories may be the least interesting thing about it. Or rather, what’s interesting is the use Nafissa Thompson-Spires makes of race — as a plot driver, irony engine, and comic goad — in the self-aware manner of Paul Beatty and others. —B.K.
37 Ink, April 10.

Cabaret
22. See Megan Hilty
Let her be your star.
The Broadway veteran and Smash anti-heroine takes another turn on Café Carlyle’s intimate stage. Plan on highlights from musical-theater greats named Stephen (Sondheim and Schwartz) and newer hits from the likes of Sara Bareilles and Jeanine Tesori.
Café Carlyle, April 17 through 28.

Theater
23. See Carousel
Better snag your tickets now.
There’s a deep bench of talent in the new revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical about a fateful romance between a carnival barker and a factory worker in a small Maine town. Joshua Henry, Tony-nominated for The Scottsboro Boys, and Jessie Mueller (Beautiful, Waitress) lead the cast, with veteran Jack O’Brien directing and New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck making his Broadway debut as choreographer. Renée Fleming, as cousin Nettie Fowler, is the icing on the cake.
Imperial Theatre, opens April 12.

Theater
24. See The Lucky Ones
Heading home.
The Bengsons, real-life couple and performing duo Abigail and Shaun, recently brought their iconic brand of soulful, semi-autobiographical musical theater to New York Theatre Workshop in the moving Hundred Days. Now, working with longtime collaborators Anne Kauffman (director) and Sarah Gancher (playwright), they premiere a new show about teenage passion, family traumas, grief, joy, and faith lost and found. —S.H.
The Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street, through April 21.

Classical Music
25. Hear New York Philharmonic
Future sounds. 
The orchestra’s calendar announces that Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, which is true, but so what? The real news is that he will also lead the world premiere of Metacosmos, by the Icelandic creator of magical sonic landscapes Anna Thorvaldsdottir. —J.D.
Geffen Hall, April 4 through 7.


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