 Talibans Open Show of Power in pakistan - YouTube Talibans Open Show of Power in pakistan - YouTubeHere is the open parade of taliban terrorists in pakistans north west town.. Debate Between. |  The 48 Laws of Power and Becoming a Master. The 48 Laws of Power and Becoming a Master.His new book, Mastery, will be released on November 13, 2012... but he has that kind if. |  Syria News | UN Ambassador Power Addresses. Syria News | UN Ambassador Power Addresses.Wall Street Journal. Jaguar Launches New Concept Car | Jaguar C-X17 SUV | Frankfurt. |  We Cant Kill Our Way Out Of This Mess - Third. We Cant Kill Our Way Out Of This Mess - Third.Want more from The New York Times?. Share your thoughtsOpening.. never once. |
 Milton Friedman - Greed - YouTube Milton Friedman - Greed - YouTubeI think its a safe bet you werent on the Debate Team in high school.. Einstein was a. |  9/11 Paul Wolfowitz Interview PBS News Hour With. 9/11 Paul Wolfowitz Interview PBS News Hour With.The pre-meditation established by the Project for a New American Century ( PNAC).. at the end. |  Default and The Constitution - Myths and Realities Of. Default and The Constitution - Myths and Realities Of.Currency War: Rouble COLLAPSE!. Boehner Wont Allow Debt Default As Wall Street. |  Newt Appears on Hannity after FOX/WSJ Debate. Newt Appears on Hannity after FOX/WSJ Debate.Just after tonights debate, Newt is interviewed by Hannity. They discuss the statement by. |
 Election 2012 | Presidential Debate Moments | The. Election 2012 | Presidential Debate Moments | The.Election 2012 | Presidential Debate Moments | The New York Times.. Stop smoking, refuse. |  Putin: What we see now is full-scale civil war in. Putin: What we see now is full-scale civil war in.Then learn Russian and move to St Petersburg, open a business.. putin speaks truth, best. |  Head to Head - Has capitalism failed the world. Head to Head - Has capitalism failed the world.It seems that mistakes made in Wall Street and the City of London are paid for. in. |  Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy? - YouTube Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy? - YouTubehttp://www.ted.com Nuclear power: the energy crisis has even. In this first-ever TED debate. |
 Inside Syria - Can foreign powers determine Syrias. Inside Syria - Can foreign powers determine Syrias.. met in Geneva to discuss a new proposal for Syria brokered by the UN and Arab. Although. |  Vice Presidential Debate 2012: Paul Ryan: Nobody. Vice Presidential Debate 2012: Paul Ryan: Nobody.Share your thoughtsOpening... Its very sad: every President since Carter has been a war. |  The Iraq War: Tony Blairs Speech 10 Years Later. The Iraq War: Tony Blairs Speech 10 Years Later.March 19 marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.. Wall Street Journal. | Is there a war on fossil fuels going on? Will it reduce. Is there a war on fossil fuels going on? Will it reduce.According to this Wall Street Journal interview with Charlie Drevna, American Fuel. Coupled. |
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 Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |  The President Has Exceeded His Constitutional Authority by Waging. The President Has Exceeded His Constitutional Authority by Waging. long-term military |  Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |  Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |
 House Passes Keystone XL Bill; Obama Veto Expected | London Report. House Passes Keystone XL Bill; Obama Veto Expected | London Report. Islamic State war powers |  Window dedicated to St Margaret, New Fish Street, in St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Window dedicated to St Margaret, New Fish Street, in St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |  Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |  Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |
 John Yoo: Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President - WSJ John Yoo: Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President - WSJ ENLARGE |  White House asking authorization for military to fight IS - Yahoo News White House asking authorization for military to fight IS - Yahoo News Granting Obama War Powers |  PJ-CA034_TURNIN_D_20150210170431.jpg PJ-CA034_TURNIN_D_20150210170431.jpg PJ-CA034_TURNIN_D_20150210170431.jpg |  Window dedicated to St Michael, Crooked Lane, in St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Window dedicated to St Michael, Crooked Lane, in St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |
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 How the Club Med Bidding War Was Waged - WSJ How the Club Med Bidding War Was Waged - WSJ Club Med, which was created in |  Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Memorials, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |  021115moneyapplea_167x94.jpg 021115moneyapplea_167x94.jpg 021115moneyapplea_167x94.jpg |  BN-GX038_botwt0_C_20150210134050.jpg BN-GX038_botwt0_C_20150210134050.jpg BN-GX038_botwt0_C_20150210134050.jpg |
 Window dedicated to St Magnus, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London Window dedicated to St Magnus, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, City of London |  BN-GX643_0211WA_G_20150211161233.jpg BN-GX643_0211WA_G_20150211161233.jpg BN-GX643_0211WA_G_20150211161233.jpg |  BN-GX065_Stern__D_20150210141821.jpg BN-GX065_Stern__D_20150210141821.jpg BN-GX065_Stern__D_20150210141821.jpg |  The Rachel Maddow Show on msnbc The Rachel Maddow Show on msnbc War powers request today? and |
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100 things you should know about Australia
When the centre of the stock market world, New Yorks Wall Street, crashed in October 1929, it created a time of extreme hardship in Australia that would last, for many people, until the end of the World War II in 1945. At its peak, unemployment in.
The United States and Libya: Turbulent History and.
Libya is moving into new phase of a more substantial civil war, with wider regional repercussions.. Such an approach was a cornerstone in restoring world confidence in the US; particularly in the Arab World (The Wall Street Journal). The US.. Haass, Richard, ���The US Should Keep Out of Libya,��� The Wall Street Journal. Hendrickson, Ryan C., ���Libya and American war powers: war making decisions in the United States���, Global Change, Peace and Security, 2013, Vol.
The Making of a Climate Refugee
In an email, Priestley, who has since retired, wrote that he was astonished that the Wall Street Journal covered the case, as did Australian TV and many others. ���A week after the hearing I received an email from an old high school friend who has lived.
The Horrors of Peace for the US Elite: Bashing Isolationism.
Yet during the recent debate over Syria, the absence of popular enthusiasm for opening up another active front evoked expressions of concern in Washington that Americans were once more turning their backs on the world. As he was proclaiming the imperative of punishing the government of. to launch a new campaign. For Bret Stephens, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, the problem was the Republican Party. Where had the hawks gone? The Syria debate��.
Challenges and Responses to Conflictual Politics
You have written that the new Afghan ���government and its success will be measured mainly along three criteria���: its ability to create a ���distinctly more effective working administration���; real, ���tangible moves towards ending the war��� and a political.
Obama, War Powers, and Yoo | Robert J. Spitzer
Yoo was right when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 25 that Obama flip-flopped when the then-senator said in 2007 that presidents lacked the constitutional power to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or. That, at least, is a legitimate debate.. Since they cannot abide governmental action not wrapped in the shroud of originalism, they must invent a new originalism to justify their political agenda.
The New Establishment 2009 | Vanity Fair
Like the economy, V.F.s annual ranking of the top 100 Information Age powers has been truly shaken up, with new blood emerging. Whos in? Whos out? Whos top dog?. THE HITS KEEP COMING: Goldman faced another round of criticism in late August after The Wall Street Journal revealed that the banks analysts supply stock tips to their biggest spending clients, leaving their smaller investors in the dark. ON THE RECORD: ���We regret that we participated in the market euphoria��.
FROM WASHINGTON.; Charles Sumner on the Barbarism of Slavery. The Social Tendencies of the Institution Argued. Bitter Reply of a South Carolina Senator. The House on Post-office Business and Public Printing. FROM WASHINGTON.
FROM WASHINGTON.; Charles Sumner on the Barbarism of Slavery. The Social Tendencies of the Institution Argued. Bitter Reply of a South Carolina Senator. The House on Post-office Business and Public Printing. FROM WASHINGTON.
Whats the Best Way to Blow Your Nose?
When a cold strikes, nose blowing is often the easiest and fastest way to relieve symptoms. But people who blow with hurricane force can prolong their suffering. One expert, Neil Schachter, medical director of the Respiratory Care Department at New.
A presidential debate on the Constitution | Bearing Drift
In todays Wall Street Journal, Seth Lipsky suggests that one way to combat this dumbing-down, at least among the political class, is to hold a televised debate on the Constitution. More specifically, he wants the. There is so much to debate about the Constitution���war powers, gay marriage, birthright citizenship, the gold standard, the role of the vice president, campaign funding. One could go on.. Open debate would be a grand idea, Norm. Wish folks would have��.
Who Benefits if the Embargo Is Lifted?
President Obama appeared to be trying to prove his own revolutionary bona fides when he announced on Wednesday new diplomatic relations with the military dictatorship and plans to make it easier for Americans to travel to the island and engage .
Calendar of Events
Opens wide. 13 Dancing on the Valentine X: A Redux Lazer Kitty, Katie Kate, Thunderpussy, and others play the music of David Bowie, Duran Duran, The Cure, New Order, etc. Neumos, neumos.com. 13 Shannon Galpin The activist shares from her memoir.
Amazon Loses The Drone Delivery Race
Warplanes pounded the ISIS capital on New Years Day���part of an operation, well-placed locals say, to save a captured pilot. On January 1, there was a particularly. According to The Wall Street Journal, Foley and Sotloff had been moved as little as.
WWI: The War of the Century | Open Source with.
The MIT historian of great powers and author of The Causes of War. Isabel Hull. The Wall Street Journal counts one hundred things that came out of the Great War: from Pilates to prosthetics to mass production (and 97 more).. Those who first used the telephone at the beginning of this century felt that now one could be at two places at once, while the new speed of travel with its constantly changing landscape threatened to destroy the stability of nature herself.
War comes home | geographical imaginations
It was published last year to considerable acclaim, and last August the Wall Street Journals Saturday Essay featured what was, in effect, Balkos three-minute version.. One is Steve Grahams Cities under siege: the new military urbanism (2010), which starts from new constellations of military violence, and the other is Mark Neocleouss War power, police power (2014), which starts from a wider conception of policing than has figured in the present discussion.
Why Saudis Decided Not to Prop Up Oil
Mr. Dossarys October message signaled a direct challenge to North American energy firms that the Arab monarchy believes have fueled a supply glut by using new shale-oil technologies, said the people familiar with the session. Saudi officials became.
The Soaring Dollar Debate: Good, Bad, Ugly
You go to New York and its all foreigners buying the top-end real estate; same thing in Florida. China is the.. Petro dollar. Not important for Washington, the world will be glad to get dollars because the US will be an island of perceived safety in a world that the Americans are quite intentionally leading to war... Gold gets safe haven bids but COMEX has stopping power ��� GoldSilverWorlds. 2/10 Indias trade ministry seeks cut in gold import tax ��� Wall Street Journal
The Listings: March 30 - April 5
Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional listings, show times and tickets: nytimes.com/theater. Previews and Openings THE ACCOMPLICES In previews; opens on April 9. The New Group presents a play by Bernard Weinraub, a former reporter for The New York Times. Based on historical events, it is about an activist who seeks American help during World War II to rescue European Jews from the Nazis (2:00). Acorn Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. ALL THE WRONG REASONS: A TRUE STORY OF NEO-NAZIS, DRUG SMUGGLING AND UNDYING LOVE In previews; opens on April 15. John Fugelsang is the son of an ex-nun and a former Franciscan brother. He tells his story in this solo show. New York Theater Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 460-5475. BLACKBIRD In previews; opens on April 10. Jeff Daniels stars in the United States premiere of this provocative play about a man coming to terms with a troubling relationship from his past. Joe Mantello directs (1:30). Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage I, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212. FROST/NIXON Previews start tomorrow. Opens on April 22. As Nixon, a hunched Frank Langella grumbles his way through this acclaimed London transfer about the famous post-Watergate interview (1:40). Jacobs Theater, 242 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. INHERIT THE WIND In previews; opens on April 12. This revival of the classic courtroom drama based on the famous monkey trial stars a lineup of heavy-hitters: Brian Dennehy, Christopher Plummer, Denis OHare and Byron Jennings (2:00). Lyceum Theater, 149 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. LEGALLY BLONDE Previews start on Tuesday. Opens on April 29. Laura Bell Bundy plays the smiling, ditsy sorority girl who takes Harvard Law by storm in this musical adaptation. Jerry Mitchell directs (2:20). Palace Theater, 1564 Broadway, at 47th Street, (212) 307-4100. A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN In previews; opens on April 9. Kevin Spacey and Eve Best star in the London transfer of this Eugene ONeill classic. Howard Davies directs (3:00). Brooks Atkinson Theater, 256 West 47th Street, (212) 307-4100. REARVIEWMIRROR Previews start tomorrow. Opens on Thursday. Inspired by The Bacchae, Eric Winicks new play is set in an outdoor rock festival (1:20). 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, (212) 279-4200. Broadway A CHORUS LINE If you want to know why this show was such a big deal when it opened 31 years ago, you need only experience the thrilling first five minutes of this revival. Otherwise, this archivally exact production, directed by Bob Avian, feels like a vintage car that has been taken out of the garage, polished up and sent on the road once again (2:00). Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Ben Brantley) * THE COAST OF UTOPIA Lincoln Center Theaters brave, gorgeous, sprawling and ultimately exhilarating production of Tom Stoppards trilogy about intellectuals errant in 19th-century Russia. A testament to the seductive powers of narrative theater, directed with hot and cool canniness by Jack OBrien and featuring a starry cast (Brian F. OByrne, Jennifer Ehle, Martha Plimpton, Josh Hamilton and Ethan Hawke, among others) in a tasty assortment of roles. Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * COMPANY Fire, beckoning and dangerous, flickers beneath the frost of John Doyles elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furths era-defining musical from 1970, starring a compellingly understated Raúl Esparza. Like Mr. Doyles Sweeney Todd, this production finds new clarity of feeling in Sondheim by melding the roles of performers and musicians (2:20). Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) CURTAINS This musical comedy about a musical-comedy murder -- featuring songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and a book by Rupert Holmes -- lies on the stage like a promisingly gaudy string of firecrackers, waiting in vain for a match. The good news is that David Hyde Pierce, playing a diffident Boston detective, steps into full-fledged Broadway stardom. Scott Ellis directs a talent-packed cast that includes Debra Monk and Karen Ziemba. (2:45). Al Hirschfeld Theater, 302 West 45th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE DROWSY CHAPERONE (Tony Awards, best book of a musical and best original score, 2006) This small and ingratiating spoof of 1920s stage frolics, as imagined by an obsessive show queen, may not be a masterpiece. But in a dry season for musicals, it has theatergoers responding as if they were withering houseplants finally being watered after long neglect. (1:40). Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway, at 45th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) * GREY GARDENS Christine Ebersole is absolutely glorious as the middle-aged, time-warped debutante called Little Edie Beale in this uneven musical adaptation of the notorious 1975 documentary of the same title. She and the wonderful Mary Louise Wilson (as her bedridden mother), in the performances of their careers, make Grey Gardens an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss (2:40). Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) HOWARD KATZ The subject of Patrick Marbers comedy of unhappiness about a rabid talent agent, starring a baleful Alfred Molina and directed by Doug Hughes, is nothing more nor less than your standard-issue midlife crisis. This familiar topic gets the better of all the talented people here trying to make it seem fresh (1:30). Laura Pels Theater, 111 West 46th Street, (212) 719-1300. (Brantley) * JOURNEYS END A splendid revival of R. C. Sherriffs 1928 drama of life in the trenches during World War I. Acutely staged (by David Grindley) and acted by a fine ensemble led by Hugh Dancy and Boyd Gaines, this production offers an exemplary presentation of that theatrical rarity, an uncompromising, clear-eyed play about war and the experience of day-to-day combat. An essential ticket (2:40). Belasco Theater, 111 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) MARY POPPINS This handsome, homily-packed, mechanically ingenious and rather tedious musical, adapted from the P. L. Travers stories and the 1964 film, is ultimately less concerned with inexplicable magic than with practical psychology. Ashley Brown, who sings prettily as the family-mending nanny, looks like Joan Crawford trying to be nice and sounds like Dr. Phil. (2:30). New Amsterdam Theater, 214 West 42nd Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) LES MISÉRABLES This premature revival, a slightly scaled-down version of the well-groomed behemoth that closed only three years ago, appears to be functioning in a state of mild sedation. Appealingly sung and freshly orchestrated, this fast-moving adaptation of Victor Hugos novel isnt sloppy or blurry. But its pulse rate stays well below normal (2:55). Broadhurst Theater, 235 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * PRELUDE TO A KISS Craig Lucass broken-hearted romantic comedy from 1990 receives a first-rate remounting, courtesy of the Roundabout Theater Company. Alan Tudyk and Annie Parisse play a young couple whose marriage founders shortly after the bride receives a kiss from an elderly stranger (John Mahoney). The kiss awakens all three to an unsettling awareness of loves frailty and, paradoxically, of its durability too (2:00). American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street, (212) 719-1300. (Charles Isherwood) * SPRING AWAKENING Duncan Sheik and Steven Saters bold adaptation of the Frank Wedekind play is the freshest and most exciting new musical Broadway has seen in some time. Set in 19th-century Germany but with a ravishing rock score, it exposes the splintered emotional lives of adolescents just discovering the joys and sorrows of sex. Performed with brio by a great cast, with supple direction by Michael Mayer and inventive choreography by Bill T. Jones (2:00). Eugene ONeill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) * TALK RADIO The most lacerating portrait of a human meltdown this side of a Francis Bacon painting. Playing an abrasive radio talk show host with a God complex, the astounding Liev Schreiber seems to fill the air as inescapably as weather in Robert Fallss gut-grabbing revival of Eric Bogosians 1987 play (1:40). Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) TARZAN This writhing green blob with music, adapted by Disney Theatrical Productions from the 1999 animated film, has the feeling of a superdeluxe day care center, equipped with lots of bungee cords and karaoke synthesizers, where children can swing when they get tired of singing, and vice versa. The soda-pop score is by Phil Collins (2:30). Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 West 46th Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) * TRANSLATIONS The estimable Irish director Garry Hynes (a Tony winner for Martin McDonaghs Beauty Queen of Leenane) has assembled an ensemble of an extraordinarily high caliber and consistency for the third major New York production of Brian Friels 1980 play. Set in Ireland in 1833, as the local tongue is being supplanted by the language of the English occupying forces, the play explores the seriocomic truth that language can divide as easily as it unites, and can never hope to translate the rich music in our souls with the delicacy we yearn for. A top-flight Broadway revival (2:15). Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) Off Broadway BE A high-energy, low-content Israeli show blends music, dance and sex appeal in the latest attempt to tap into the Stomp market (1:30). Union Square Theater, 100 East 17th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Jason Zinoman) BLINDNESS Joe Tantalos adaptation of José Saramagos best-selling novel, about an unnamed city struck with an inexplicable epidemic of white blindness, is set in a cell-like space surrounded by white scrim. This setting and the mostly strong acting drive home the fearful basic circumstances. Unfortunately, the script also streamlines Mr. Saramagos reflective story to the point of draining it of moral complexity (1:30). 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, (212) 279-4200. (Jonathan Kalb) CHICKEN Michael Batisticks new play about cock fighting and emasculation could benefit from subtler metaphors but manages to touch us gently even as it deploys a heavy hammer. E J Carroll, Michael Imperioli and his Sopranos castmate Sharon Angela give fine performances as struggling urban nobodies (1:45). Studio Dante, 257 West 29th Street, Chelsea, (212) 868-4444. (Ginia Bellafante) DEFENDER OF THE FAITH This grim tale by Stuart Carolan of low-level I.R.A. agitators trying to identify the informer in their midst features some visceral performances and a set by Charles Corcoran that makes excellent use of the Irish Reps small stage. If only the cause itself didnt feel so small in these days of global terrorism (1:30). Irish Repertory Theater, 132 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 727-2737. (Neil Genzlinger) * DYING CITY Christopher Shinns crafty and unsettling play about grief and violence, set in the shadow of the Iraq war. Directed by James Macdonald and fiercely acted by Pablo Schreiber and Rebecca Brooksher, this quiet production turns passive aggression into a theatrical dynamic. (1:30). Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-7600. (Brantley) THE FANTASTICKS A revival -- well, more like a resuscitation -- of the Little Musical That Wouldnt Die. This sweet-as-ever production of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidts commedia-dellarte-style confection is most notable for Mr. Joness touching performance (under the pseudonym Thomas Bruce) as the Old Actor, a role he created when the show opened in 1960. Mr. Jones also directs (2:05). Snapple Theater Center, 210 West 50th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) FUGUE Mary Smith is found wandering the streets of Chicago, suffering from amnesia. A young psychiatrist, who has his own demons, is consulted, and the process of treatment and Marys memories in flashback are the action of Fugue, Lee Thunas unrewarding play, directed by the Tony-winning actress Judith Ivey (2:15). Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street, between Barrow and Bedford Streets, West Village, (212) 239-6200. (Honor Moore) * IN THE HEIGHTS Lin-Manuel Mirandas joyous songs paint a vibrant portrait of daily life in Washington Heights in this flawed but enjoyable show. Essentially a valentine to the barrio -- conflict of a violent or desperate kind is banished from the picture -- the musical contains a host of vibrant, funny performances and brings the zesty sound of Latin pop to the stage. (2:10). 37 Arts, 450 West 37th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Isherwood) * JACK GOES BOATING Bob Glaudinis gentle comedy about pothead losers in love is a reminder of how engrossing uneventful lives can be in the hands of the right actors. Peter DuBois directs the easygoing ensemble, brilliantly led by Philip Seymour Hoffman (2:00). Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555. (Brantley) * KING HEDLEY II The Signature Theater Company concludes its season dedicated to August Wilson with a gritty, strongly cast revival of this play set in a violence-ravaged Pittsburgh in the 1980s. Russell Hornsby gives a galvanizing performance in the title role, as a man struggling to live down the errors of his past and plant the seeds for a promising new life (2:45). Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 244-7529. (Isherwood) LOS ANGELES Julian Sheppards play about a gamin lost in a Hollywood of aimlessness and empty sex is as thin as the slip dress she keeps wearing and, presumably, taking off (1:20). Flea Theater, 41 White Street, between Broadway and Church Street, TriBeCa, (212) 352-3101. (Bellafante) MY MOTHERS ITALIAN, MY FATHERS JEWISH AND IM IN THERAPY Steve Solomon does skillful impersonations in his one-man show, but some of his jokes are as old as the hills (1:30). Little Shubert Theater, 422 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Anita Gates) OUR LEADING LADY Kate Mulgrew stars as Laura Keene, who was starring in Our American Cousin the night Lincoln was shot, in Charles Buschs uneven new comedy. An occasionally lively but mostly lumpen tribute to the glamour and grit of the theatrical life of a past era (2:00). Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212. (Isherwood) PROMETHEUS BOUND With a splendid performance by David Oyelowo, this is a smart revival of Aeschylus 2,500-year-old play, rich in poetic imagery. It still has things to say about the abuse of power by an autocratic ruler who vindictively runs roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him (1:20). Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101. (Wilborn Hampton) ROOM SERVICE The Peccadillo Theater Company puts a charge into this comedy from the 1930s, thanks to a brisk pace by the director, Dan Wackerman, and a dozen dandy performances (2:00). SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, South Village, (212) 691-1555. (Genzlinger) SOME MEN Terrence McNallys hit-and-miss comedy about gay life is a parade of cleanly drawn types, zippy one-liners and sentimental set pieces, woven into a pageant of the ages à la Cavalcade, Noel Cowards generations-spanning tribute to the British stiff upper lip. Trip Cullman directs the agile, appealing cast (2:00). Second Stage, 307 West 43rd Street, Clinton, (212) 246-4422. (Brantley) * SPALDING GRAY: STORIES LEFT TO TELL A disarming collage of selections from the monologues and journals of Mr. Gray, the ultimate stand-up solipsist, who died in 2004. Directed by Lucy Sexton, and read by five performers, none of whom resemble Mr. Gray, with an affection that shrewdly stops short of hero worship (1:30). Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) TALL GRASS Brian Harriss three short plays, black farces all, are not nearly as slight as any sound-bite synopsis would have them seem. Here Mr. Harris, a former stock analyst, explores the alliances formed between love and brutality in scenarios in which the tension builds to culminating shock (1:30). The Beckett Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Bellafante) TEA AND SYMPATHY The specter of the Ted Haggard scandal hangs over the Keen Companys revival of Robert Andersons 1953 play about life in a psychologically stifling boys boarding school. Girded by Jonathan Silversteins skillful, understated direction, the play attains an unexpected timeliness as it evolves into a story about the dangers of sexual repression (2:00). Clurman Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Bellafante) * WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! Richard Foremans latest film-theater hybrid is a memorial service, of sorts, for the intuitive self, killed by a surface-worshiping world. It is also a dazzling exercise in reality shifting that is as invigorating as it is mournful (1:05). Ontological Theater at St. Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101. (Brantley) WIDOWERS HOUSES An adaptation of George Bernard Shaws play, updated to 1990s Harlem, tests the limits of credibility (1:40). Kirk Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Zinoman) Off Off Broadway THE EXILES Theodora Skipitaress rendering, with life-size puppets, music and video, of the story of Orestes, adapted from Euripides but inspired by Sartre. A short and rather slight play that continues the mining of the Trojan War for contemporary equivalents by the conceiver and director of last seasons Trilogy (1:00). La MaMa Annex, 74A East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 475-7710. (Moore) JACKIE WITH A Z: Delectably outrageous (1:30). Joes Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555. (Lawrence Van Gelder) MEN OF STEEL This darkly comic twist on superheroes is a loony, guilty pleasure (2:00). Center Stage, 48 West 21st Street, Chelsea, (212) 352-3101. (Zinoman) Long-Running Shows ALTAR BOYZ This sweetly satirical show about a Christian pop group made up of five potential Teen People cover boys is an enjoyable, silly diversion (1:30). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) AVENUE Q R-rated puppets give lively life lessons (2:10). Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Cartoon made flesh, sort of (2:30). Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46th Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) CHICAGO Irrefutable proof that crime pays (2:25). Ambassador Theater, 219 West 49th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE COLOR PURPLE Singing CliffsNotes for Alice Walkers Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (2:40). Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway, at 53rd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) FORBIDDEN BROADWAY: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT Often more entertaining than the real thing (1:45). 47th Street Theater, 304 West 47th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) HAIRSPRAY Fizzy pop, cute kids, large man in a housedress (2:30). Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52nd Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) JERSEY BOYS The biomusical that walks like a man (2:30). August Wilson Theater, 245 West 52nd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE LION KING Disney on safari, where the big bucks roam (2:45). Minskoff Theater, 200 West 45th Street at Broadway, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) MAMMA MIA! The jukebox that devoured Broadway (2:20). Cadillac Winter Garden Theater, 1634 Broadway, at 50th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Who was that masked man, anyway? (2:30). Majestic Theater, 247 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE PRODUCERS The ne plus ultra of showbiz scams (2:45). St. James Theater, 246 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) RENT East Village angst and love songs to die for (2:45). Nederlander Theater, 208 West 41st Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) SPAMALOT A singing scrapbook for Monty Python fans (2:20). Shubert Theater, 225 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE A Chorus Line with pimples (1:45). Circle in the Square, 254 West 50th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) WICKED Oz revisited, with political corrections (2:45). Gershwin Theater, 222 West 51st Street, Manhattan, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) Last Chance AT LEAST ITS PINK Bridget Everett and her big, bad attitude co-star in this mini-musical about sex and unsatisfying jobs in the city. Directed by Michael Patrick King (of Sex and the City, as it happens), who is also the co-author, and with songs written by Ms. Everett and Kenny Mellman, the piano-playing half of Kiki & Herb. Raucous and rude, its a bit like a one-woman episode of Jerry Springer (1:20). Ars Nova, 511 West 54th Street, Clinton, (212) 868-4444; closes on Sunday. (Isherwood) THE DIRECTOR A likable if naïve young woman, who is seduced by an unnamed, unseen and presumably unscrupulous film director, seeks other of his victims and tape records their experiences for no clear purpose in a play that has no clear idea of what it wants to say (1:30). Flea Theater, 41 White Street, between Broadway and Church Street, TriBeCa, (212) 352-3101; closes tomorrow. (Hampton) MY TRIP TO AL-QAEDA Lawrence Wright, author of a deeply researched book about the rise of Islamic terrorism, conducts a theatrical seminar about the events leading to the horror of 9/11. He combines a linear narrative of the development of Al Qaeda with reminiscences about the experience of writing the book. Absorbing, and chilling too (1:30). Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street, at Broome Street, SoHo, (212) 352-3101; closes on Sunday. (Isherwood) THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE A joyful treat (1:30). JCC in Manhattan, Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street, (212) 279-4200; closes on Sunday. (Van Gelder) * THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND TWELFTH NIGHT In these boisterous and inventive productions, from the London-based all-male Propeller Company, the poetry may be pretty, but the comedy definitely is not. The director Edward Hall uncovers the baleful underbelly in Shakespearean slapstick, memorably demonstrating that boys will be brutes. (Each is 2:40.) Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100; closes on Sunday. (Brantley) THE WAITING ROOM An amusing play about some uncomfortable truths a group of friends and relatives faces while sitting in a hospital waiting room. While it has its share of laughs, it has things to say about the importance of family, even those members you might wish were not a part of it (2:00). 45th Street Theater, 354 West 45th Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200; closes on Sunday. (Hampton) Movies Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, show times and tickets: nytimes.com/movies. * AIR GUITAR NATION (R, 82 minutes) Alexandra Lipsitzs breezy competition documentary follows pantomiming would-be rockers as they compete for the right to represent their country in a global championship based in Oulou, Finland. The movement, such as it is, aims to unite a war-torn planet in musical fantasy and to rawwwwwwk! -- but not necessarily in that order. Stylistically, its nothing special, but the films droll humor and wild performances are hard to resist. (Matt Zoller Seitz) * BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON (R, 92 minutes) Scott Glossermans mockumentary about a celebrity-seeking serial killer is sustained by rapier-sharp observations and a firmer grasp of tone than that in many more generously financed projects. Appealing more to the brain than to the gut, the movie subtly prods at the sick dance between the news media and über-criminals without belaboring its point or lowering its tone. If Christopher Guest ever turned his attention to psycho killers instead of folk singers and dog breeders, this is exactly the sort of movie he would make. (Jeannette Catsoulis) * BOY CULTURE (No rating, 88 minutes) Q. Allan Brockas absorbing drama follows an emotionally repressed gay hustler (Derek Magyar) as he rebels against the obsessions of his culture -- grooming, cruising, working out -- and a powerful attraction to his roommate. Only when he takes on a reclusive and much older client is he forced to pay attention to a story other than his own. (Catsoulis) COLOR ME KUBRICK (No rating, 90 minutes) If it doesnt add up to more than a fitfully amusing collection of comic sketches, the fictional portrait of Alan Conway, a real-life British con man who hustled his way across England by impersonating the reclusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame. (Stephen Holden) DEAD SILENCE (R, 90 minutes) In this new film from the makers of the Saw series, a young man (Ryan Kwanten) whose wife was murdered by a demonic ventriloquists dummy returns to his hometown to unravel the roots of a century-old curse. The films playfully self-aware touches (like a grand old theater named the Guignol) distract from its leaden pacing, three too many final twists and various behavioral idiocies. (Seitz) EXTERMINATING ANGELS (No rating, 100 minutes, in French) The French director Jean-Claude Brisseaus film is a piece of highbrow smut about a French filmmaker directing a piece of highbrow smut. A must for fans of highbrow smut. No complaints here. (A. O. Scott) FIRST SNOW (R, 101 minutes) Guy Pearce, in his Memento mode, is a fast-talking salesman in this moody little thriller, which asks metaphysical questions about fate, death and fortunetelling. (Holden) THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (R, 89 minutes) Wes Cravens 1977 film, The Hills Have Eyes, in which suburbanites battled mutant cannibals, was a pulpy parable of the thin line separating civilization from savagery. Last years remake was basically the same movie with glossier production values and a less satirical, more bludgeoning approach to violence. This follow-up, in which National Guard trainees are trapped on a former atomic test site and are stalked by flesh-eating freaks headquartered in a warrenlike mountain hideout, is essentially a catalog of transgressive images, lighted and edited like a heavy-metal video. (Seitz) * THE HOST (R, 119 minutes, in Korean) A loopy, feverishly imaginative genre hybrid -- part carnival of horrors, part family melodrama -- about the demons that haunt us from without and within. The talented South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho directs his monster and humans with equal flair. (Manohla Dargis) I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE (R, 94 minutes) An unusually smart and brisk comedy of marital frustration and sexual temptation, based on Eric Rohmers Chloe in the Afternoon, with Chris Rock (who directed and is co-author of the script) as a Manhattan investment banker distracted by the charms of a bombshell played by the wonderful Kerry Washington. (Scott) * INTO GREAT SILENCE (No rating, 162 minutes, in English and Latin) Philip Grönings documentary about the lives of Carthusian monks living in a valley in the French Alps is slow, quiet and utterly spellbinding for the way it conveys the experience of spiritual devotion in simple, lovely images. (Scott) * JOURNEY FROM THE FALL (No rating, 135 minutes, in Vietnamese and English) The writer and director Ham Trans film is a sprawling tearjerker about a war-splintered South Vietnamese family trying to survive the aftermath of the United States withdrawal, then seek a new life in America. Set amid the chaos of late-70s Vietnam, when the victorious North set about re-educating the shattered South, Journey recounts one familys endurance in a sturdy, old-movie style, with sweeping camerawork, a monumental and occasionally intrusive orchestral score, gorgeous yet forbidding natural vistas and enough shocking tragedies, brazen escapes and crowd-pleasing acts of defiance to fuel several action-adventure pictures. (Seitz) THE LAST MIMZY (PG, 94 minutes) This overstuffed yet warmhearted sci-fi drama follows a pair of wide-eyed siblings as they solve the riddle of a box from the future. Despite leaden direction (by the New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye) and a story crammed with pseudoscientific flotsam -- including palm reading, levitation and telepathy -- this wholesome entertainment doesnt talk down. Nevertheless, a film gazing this far into the future shouldnt be quite so unwilling to look beyond the frame. (Catsoulis) * OFFSIDE (PG, 93 minutes, in Persian) The Iranian director Jafar Panahi follows a group of young woman into a Tehran soccer stadium, where they have come to see their nations team compete for a spot in the World Cup. Instead they are arrested -- women are forbidden to attend sporting events in Iran -- and their predicament yields comedy as well as a trenchant critique of gender politics in the Islamic Republic. (Scott) THE PAGE TURNER (No rating, 85 minutes, in French) A pretty young thing slithers into the bosom of a bourgeois family like an asp in this shivery little thriller from the French filmmaker Denis Dercourt. Not Chabrol, but not bad, either. (Dargis) * PRIDE (PG, 104 minutes) The Zimbabwean-born filmmaker Sunu Goneras directorial debut, Pride, about a swim coach (Terrence Howard, star of Hustle & Flow) leading an urban recreational centers swim team to a championship, about 1971, is a silk ascot wrapped around an ear of corn. But when sinewy young idealists glide through water to the tune of Ill Take You There, the heart still swells. (Seitz) THE PRISONER OR: HOW I PLANNED TO KILL TONY BLAIR (PG-13, 72 minutes) In 2003 an Iraqi journalist, Yunis Khatayer Abbas, was roused from his Baghdad bed by American soldiers and eventually hauled off to Abu Ghraib. Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein tell his story through newsy video images, talking-head interviews, comic-book-style illustrations and a sympathetic lens. (Dargis) REIGN OVER ME (R, 124 minutes) Mike Binders comic drama of post-9/11 grief is wildly uneven -- by turns insightful and grindingly mawkish. Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler are two college buddies who reunite, somewhat improbably, some years after the attacks that robbed one of them of his family. The actors rise above the material, particularly in the longer, looser scenes that allow their contrasting temperaments -- Mr. Cheadles tense understatement and Mr. Sandlers shaggy emoting -- to find a workable syncopation. (Scott) SHOOTER (R, 126 minutes) Muscles bulge, and heads explode in this thoroughly reprehensible, satisfyingly violent entertainment about men and guns and things that go boom. Antoine Fuqua directs, and Mark Wahlberg entertains, with and without his shirt. (Dargis) 300 (R, 116 minutes) Greeks versus Persians in the big rumble at Thermopylae, via Frank Millers graphic novel. As dumb as they get. (Scott) TMNT (PG, 90 minutes) Spawned by sludge and grandiosely named after Renaissance artists, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been rechristened TMNT and redrawn by an army of computer-generated-imagery specialists. A strange blend of the futuristic and the ancient, this fourth outing finds them hunting 3,000-year-old monsters. But while the turtles may look prettier, they are no smarter; our superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof. (Catsoulis) * THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (No rating, 127 minutes) Stringent, serious history from Ken Loach, in which the Irish uprising and Civil War of the early 1920s test the loyalties and consciences of two brothers, played by Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delany. (Scott) * ZODIAC (R, 158 minutes) David Finchers magnificently obsessive new film tracks the story of the serial killer who left dead bodies up and down California in the 1960s and possibly the 70s, and that of the men who tried to stop him. Set when the Age of Aquarius disappeared into the black hole of the Manson family murders, Zodiac is part police procedural, part monster movie, a funereal entertainment that is a testament to this cinematic savants gifts. (Dargis) Film Series NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS (Tonight through Thursday) Now in its second and final week, this 36th annual installment of a festival devoted to emerging filmmakers and sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art continues at MoMA and the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Highlights this week: The Great World of Sound (tonight at MoMA, tomorrow and Sunday at Walter Reade), Craig Zobels satire about the industry that has grown up to feed contestants to reality shows like American Idol; Day Night Day Night, a new film by the New York filmmaker Julia Loktev (Moment of Impact) that follows a nameless girl around Manhattan as she prepares for her mission as a suicide bomber (tonight at Walter Reade, tomorrow at MoMA); The Other Half, a Chinese film directed by Ying Liang, in which an ambitious young businesswomans life is complicated by her aggressively antisocial boyfriend (tomorrow at Walter Reade, Sunday at MoMA). Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, (212) 708-9400, moma.org; Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 875-5600, filmlinc.org; $12. (Dave Kehr) SEVERANCE (Monday) For their Bizarro Mondays program at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village, the editors of the horror fan magazine Fangoria this week have chosen Christopher Smiths 2006 Severance, a British film that seems to have been conceived as a cross between The Office and Hostel. A group of disgruntled employees of an international arms company are invited for a weekend retreat at a lodge in the Balkans, but fall into the sadistic hands of a group of crazed, sadistic veterans of the recent conflicts. Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village, (212) 591-0434, twoboots.com/pioneer; $10. (Kehr) JACQUES TATI RETROSPECTIVE (Tuesday) Two of the more rarely screened films of this brilliant French comic filmmaker. First is the recently rediscovered and restored color version of Tatis first feature, the 1949 Jour de Fête, in which a provincial postman (Tati) tries to apply American efficiency methods; its followed by Trafic, the 1971 film that Tati made partly to recover the huge financial losses of his masterpiece Playtime. For Tati, its relatively conventional, but still quite an innovative and entertaining work. French Institute-Alliance Française, Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan, (212) 355-6100, fiaf.org; $9. (Kehr) UGETSU (Tonight through Sunday) This yearlong program of 35-millimeter prints from the Janus Films collection continues with noontime screenings of Kenji Mizoguchis eerie 1953 ghost story of a peasant potter whose path through the civil wars of 16th-century Japan leads him to the estate of a mysterious noblewoman, who is not what she seems. After Roshomon, this was one of the first Japanese films to gain a reputation in the West, and it remains a transcendent masterpiece. IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at West Third Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 924-7771, ifccenter.com; $11. (Kehr) Pop Full reviews of recent concerts: nytimes.com/music. CHRISTINA AGUILERA, PUSSYCAT DOLLS, DANITY KANE (Thursday) Frau Farbissina of the Austin Powers movies said it best: Send in the Fembots! Ms. Aguilera may have the most virtuosic voice of her generation of bubble gum pop stars, but as she showed with her endless, melismatic protraction of James Browns Its a Mans Mans Mans World at the Grammys last month, she can sometimes seem like a singing robot gone berserk. Her tour includes a hit burlesque girl group (the Pussycat Dolls) and an imitation hit burlesque girl group (Danity Kane). At 7:30 p.m., Continental Airlines Arena, East Rutherford, N.J., (201) 935-3900, meadowlands.com; $57 and $97. (Ben Sisario) HOSSEIN ALIZADEH AND THE Hamavayan Ensemble (Tomorrow) One of the most celebrated Iranian classical musicians, Mr. Alizadeh is a former conductor and soloist with the Iranian National Orchestra of Radio and Television. Here he plays shurangiz and setar, two kinds of lute, and leads the Hamavayan Ensemble in improvisations and his own compositions. At 8:30 p.m., Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $30 to $42. (Jon Pareles) * ALLMAN BROTHERS (Tonight, tomorrow, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights) The best spring ritual on the Upper West Side is the arrival of this archetypal Southern rock band for its annual series of concerts at the Beacon Theater. In addition to the long, long guitar solos by Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks, highlights usually include lots of guest stars. At 8, 2124 Broadway, at 74th Street, (212) 307-7171, beacontheatrenyc.com; $54.99 to $94.99. (Sisario) ANTI-SOCIAL MUSIC (Wednesday) The final frontier for weird rock is classical music. Anti-Social Music, a collective of 11 New York musicians who play in various pop and new-music bands -- including some big ones, like the Hold Steady -- is one of a handful of groups that go boldly into this realm, playing works for strings, woodwinds and the like. Skeptics, note: it can get pretty rowdy. With Capital M. At 8 p.m., Tonic, 107 Norfolk Street, near Delancey Street, Lower East Side, (212) 358-7501, tonicnyc.com; $10. (Sisario) BLACK DICE (Wednesday) Noise, noise, glorious New York noise. Black Dice, from Brooklyn, is a big player in the international avant-rock scene, and has remained vital by staying truly experimental: whether playing spacey, hokey psychedelia or alien-invasion squalls of feedback, the band throws itself deeply into its every unpredictable turn. With Ocrilim and No Age. At 8 p.m., Studio B, 259 Banker Street, between Meserole Avenue and Calyer Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (718) 389-1880, clubstudiob.com or toddpnyc.com; $8. (Sisario) * BLOC PARTY, ALBERT HAMMOND JR. (Tonight and tomorrow night) With spiky but melodic guitars and agitated dance beats, Bloc Party revives the nervous punk-funk of bands like Gang of Four. Its latest, A Weekend in the City (Vice), is a concept album about life in London after the 2005 transit bombings. Albert Hammond Jr., the rhythm guitarist of the Strokes, has a new solo record, Yours to Keep (Scratchie/New Line), whose sunshine shows that crisp guitar classicism need not exist solely in the dark behind Manhattans velvet ropes. With Sebastien Grainger. At 8, United Palace Theater, 4140 Broadway, at 175th Street, Washington Heights, (212) 307-7171, bowerypresents.com; sold out. Mr. Hammond also plays on Monday night at 7 at the Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2111, boweryballroom.com; sold out. (Sisario) BLOOD BROTHERS (Monday) Proving once again rocks inexhaustible lesson that loudness equals liberation, the Blood Brothers, from Seattle, are a five-man weapon of frantic noise and surrealist poetry. (Set fire to the face on fire.) With Celebration and Chinese Stars. At 8 p.m., Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place, at 15th Street, Manhattan, (212) 777-6800, irvingplaza.com; $17. (Sisario) THE BOOKS (Tonight) Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong of the Books make beguiling electronic collages out of disembodied vocal samples, a few notes from a banjo and unclassifiable sounds that fade in and out like traffic. Part of the pleasure of listening is trying to figure out just why all this chaos works so wonderfully and wittily. At 7, Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3676, whitney.org; free with museum admission. (Sisario) Barbara Carroll (Sunday and Monday) Elegant, witty and touching, this classically trained jazz pianist and singer, now 82, is in her prime: the female counterpart of Bobby Short. Sunday at 2 p.m., Monday at 8 p.m., Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, Manhattan, (212) 419-9331, algonquinhotel.com; $58 on Sunday, with brunch at noon; $40 on Monday, with a $20 minimum. (Stephen Holden) * TOUMANI DIABATÉS SYMMETRIC ORCHESTRA (Tonight) Mr. Diabaté, the Malian kora master, plays regular gigs back home in Bamako with this 30-odd-piece big band, mixing ancient songs with salsa-infused funk. Last year he made an excellent album with this group, Boulevard de lIndépendance (World Circuit/Nonesuch), and he leads it in its New York debut tonight at 10, Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $30 to $42. (Sisario) DIPLO, BONDE DO ROLE (Tonight) Diplo, born Wesley Pentz -- his stage name is taken from diplodocus, a dinosaur -- is the influential and eclectic D.J. who has worked with the Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A., and is half of Hollertronix, a mixtape team from Philadelphia. He has been borrowing from Brazilian baile funk for years, and the first release on his new record label, Mad Descent, is by the Brazilian group Bonde do Role. At 10, Studio B, 259 Banker Street, between Meserole Avenue and Calyer Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (718) 389-1880, clubstudiob.com; $12. (Sisario) DR. DOG, ODEATH (Thursday) Dr. Dog, from Philadelphia, takes a jam-band approach to high-energy rhapsodies that recall Abbey Road-era Beatles. The New York band ODeath draws from the bluntness and spiritual purity of Appalachian folk, the menace of punk and the rowdy theatricality of Tom Waits, jumbling sacred and profane. With Doublehorse. At 8 p.m., Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2111, boweryballroom.com; $13 in advance, $15 at the door. (Sisario) DOWN (Tomorrow) This metal supergroup from New Orleans, featuring Phil Anselmo of Pantera and Pepper Keenan of Corrosion of Conformity, is on a brief tour in advance of a new album with songs about Hurricane Katrina and the killing of Mr. Anselmos former guitarist in Pantera, Darrell (Dimebag) Abbott. At 8 p.m., Roseland Ballroom, 239 West 52nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 777-6800, roselandballroom.com; $31. (Sisario) HEAVEN AND HELL (Tonight) Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio in place of Ozzy Osbourne. Again. Which means its effectively 1980 and not very exciting. Again. At 8, Radio City Music Hall, (212) 307-7171, radiocity.com; $54 to $74. (Sisario) HELLA, DIRTY PROJECTORS (Tonight and tomorrow night) Its impossible to find the center of a Hella song, which explodes in multidirectional streaks of percussion and squawky guitar like a Jackson Pollock painting. Long a guitar-drum duo, the group recently expanded to five members. Dirty Projectors, led by Dave Longstreth, builds elaborate glitch operas with stark pluckings of guitar and strings, and precise, ecstatic harmonies, all arranged slightly out of whack. Tonight at 9, Europa, 98-104 Meserole Avenue, at Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (718) 383-5723, europaclub.com; $12. Tomorrow at 7, Maxwells, 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken, N.J., (201) 653-1703, maxwellsnj.com; $12. (Sisario) JET (Thursday) Determined to boil rock down to its AC/DC-meets-Guns-N-Roses essence, this Australian band dismisses anything that distracts from that goal -- including innovation. With the Virgins. At 7 p.m., Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, (212) 533-2111, bowerypresents.com; $28 in advance, $30 at the door. (Sisario) CHRIS KNIGHT (Thursday) Cold-eyed drifters, crooked yet sentimental cops, and prostitutes who kill their johns are characters in the brutal, deadpan songs of Chris Knight, a country singer from Kentucky whose oeuvre resembles Bruce Springsteens album Nebraska set in the South. At 8 p.m., Tap Bar at the Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, TriBeCa, (212) 219-3132, knittingfactory.com; $15. (Sisario) LAND OF TALK (Tuesday through Thursday) Riding a wave of blog buzz, this young Montreal band, recalling Dinosaur Jr. and P J Harvey with tangles of grungy guitar and opaque but affecting lyrics, makes a sweep through the clubs. Tuesday at 8 p.m., Union Hall, 702 Union Street, at Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 638-4400, unionhallny.com; $10. Wednesday at 8:30 p.m., Maxwells, 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken, N.J., (201) 653-1703, maxwellsnj.com; $8. Thursday at 10:30 p.m., Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, (212) 260-4700, mercuryloungenyc.com; $10. (Sisario) * LCD SOUNDSYSTEM (Tonight and tomorrow night) Tim Murphys perfect, punk-edged disco in LCD Soundsystem -- sharp and sexy but unapologetically silly, retro but smartly innovative -- has roots across the dance-rock map but is unmistakably a product of New York. (Those of you who still think were from England/Were not, he sings with nasal congestion and typical wryness on North American Scum.) The group celebrates a brilliant new album, Sound of Silver (Capitol), with two shows at the Bowery Ballroom. At 9, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2111, boweryballroom.com; sold out. (Sisario) Marilyn Maye (Tomorrow and Sunday) This too-seldom-seen jazz belter, now in her mid-70s, folds Anita ODay-style swing and chesty Margaret Whiting-like belting into a musical jelly roll with a bittersweet Judy Garland filling. Tomorrow at 7 and 10:30 p.m., Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m., Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 206-0440, metropolitanroom.com; $25 cover, two-drink minimum. (Holden) PAGE McCONNELL (Wednesday) This former keyboardist of Phish offers a preview of his first solo album, to be released next month. At 8 p.m., Gramercy Theater, 127 East 23rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 307-7171; sold out. (Sisario) THE MUSIC OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (Thursday) Like the Bob Dylan tribute at Lincoln Center a few months ago, this concert, a benefit for the Music for Youth Foundation, gathers a starry group: Steve Earle, Jewel, M. Ward, Josh Ritter, Joseph Arthur, Badly Drawn Boy, Juliana Hatfield, the Holmes Brothers, Elysian Fields, Uri Caine, Odetta and Ronnie Spector, among others. Mr. Dylan didnt show up at his tribute. Will Bruce Springsteen? At 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $40 to $150. (Sisario) LES NUBIANS (Sunday) The French tried but failed to smooth out African music completely. Les Nubians, two sisters from Cameroon, harmonize in cosmopolitan rhythm-and-blues that Erykah Badu fans would appreciate; they move among smooth soul crooning à la Sade, rapping in French and hints of both American funk and Cameroonian traditions. At 8 and 10 p.m., S.O.B.s, 204 Varick Street, at Houston Street, South Village, (212) 243-4940, sobs.com; $26 in advance, $28 at the door (sold out at 8). (Pareles) PERE UBU (Tuesday) In the mid-70s, while bands like the Dead Boys and the Ramones were perfecting the narrow sonic attack that came to be known as punk, Pere Ubu, from Cleveland, was playing a dissonant, urgent and deeply idiosyncratic variation centered on the sung-spoken vocals of David Thomas. With Golden Error and Beat the Devil. At 7:30 p.m., Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, TriBeCa, (212) 219-3132, knittingfactory.com; $15 in advance, $17 at the door. (Sisario) SIN-É (Tonight through Sunday) Its never easy to see a good New York rock club go down, but its especially painful when it happens to the same place twice. In the late 1980s and early 90s, Sin-é, on St. Marks Place in the East Village, was a cozy coffeehouse frequented by singer-songwriters like Jeff Buckley; its new home on the Lower East Side will be shutting down after Sunday night. Tonight is the singer-songwriter Citizen Cope, whose bluesy drawl is delivered over leisurely hip-hop rhythms. Tomorrow night is a standard Sin-é lineup, with four indie-rock bands presented by their record label, Eyeball: Kiss Kiss, New London Fire, the Velocet and the Anthem Sound. Sunday is the country-rocker Bow Thayer. Tonight at 8 and 11, tomorrow night at 8 and Sunday night at 10, 150 Attorney Street, at Stanton Street, (212) 388-0077, sin-e.com; $20 tonight (sold out at 11), $10 tomorrow, $12 on Sunday. (Sisario) * SONS AND DAUGHTERS (Wednesday) With bleak scrapings of guitar, smoldering rhythms and lyrics of unforgiving fate delivered by the petite but wicked Adele Bethel, this Glasgow band has perfected its own kind of chilling murder ballad. With 1990s, and Nicole Atkins and the Sea. At 7 p.m., Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2111, boweryballroom.com; $15. (Sisario) DOC WATSON (Tonight) One of the great repositories of American folk music, the guitarist and singer Doc Watson, from Deep Gap, N.C., plays bluegrass, country and blues in an elegant but understated style. On this tour he is joined by the storyteller David Holt. At 8, B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 997-4144, bbkingblues.com; $37. (Sisario) Jazz Full reviews of recent jazz concerts: nytimes.com/music. J. D. ALLEN TRIO (Thursday) J. D. Allen, an assertive and harmonically adventurous tenor saxophonist, enjoys strong support from Gregg August on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Louis 649, 649 East Ninth Street, East Village, (212) 673-1190, louis649.com; no cover, $7 minimum. (Nate Chinen) DARCY JAMES ARGUES SECRET SOCIETY (Thursday) As the name implies, this big band is calibrated for maximum intrigue, with a sound equally suggestive of Steve Reich minimalism, harmonically advanced indie rock and orchestral jazz in the Bob Brookmeyer descent. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, at Spring Street, South Village, (212) 242-1063, jazzgallery.org; cover, $12; $10 for members. (Chinen) BALLIN THE JACK (Thursday) This midsize ensemble, led by the clarinetist and saxophonist Matt Darriau, has lately been tackling music from Marx Brothers movie soundtracks, complete with Groucho-esque vocals from the alto saxophonist Roy Nathanson. At 8 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $8. (Chinen) BRAZILIAN VOYAGE TRIO (Tonight and tomorrow night) A collective that neatly announces its intentions, with Helio Alves on piano, Nilson Matta on bass and Anthony Pinciotti on percussion. At 8 and 9:45, Kitano Hotel, 66 Park Avenue, at 38th Street, (212) 885-7119, kitano.com; cover, $25, with a $15 minimum. (Chinen) * THE BIRTH OF COOL (Tonight and tomorrow night) The pianist Bill Charlap presides over this backwards glance at the cool-jazz era, with help from well-chosen guests. Among them are the saxophonists Frank Wess, Jerry Dodgion and Mark Turner; the trumpeters Warren Vaché and Joe Magnarelli; the guitarist Gene Bertoncini; and the singer Mary Stallings. At 7:30 and 9:30, Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, (212) 721-6500, jalc.org; $67.50. (Chinen) * ANTHONY BRAXTON (Tonight through Sunday night) Mr. Braxton, a sphinxlike eminence in the avant-garde, has an extravagant new box set that chronicles an engagement here last year. Once again he wields an array of reed instruments and an ensemble stocked with smart acolytes like the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. At 8:30 and 10:30, with a midnight set tonight and tomorrow, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $30, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) ROB BROWN TRIO (Tomorrow) Rob Brown, an alto saxophonist associated with a rough-hewn style of free improvisation, leads a working trio with the cellist Daniel Levin and the drummer Satoshi Takeishi. At 8 p.m., the Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) FREDDIE BRYANT AND KALEIDoSCOPE (Tonight and tomorrow night) The guitarist Freddie Bryant brings a range of Latin influences to this project, featuring the saxophonist Joel Frahm, the bassist Joe Martin and the percussionists Scott Feiner and Gilad. At 8 and 10, Sweet Rhythm, 88 Seventh Avenue South, at Bleecker Street, West Village, (212) 255-3626, sweetrhythmny.com; cover, $25, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) * CRYPTONIGHTS (Tonight through Sunday night) This weeklong showcase of artists on the Cryptogramophone label concludes stylishly, with an exploratory sextet led by the guitarist Nels Cline (tonight) and a spaciously funky quartet led by Bennie Maupin, a veteran saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist (tomorrow and Sunday). At 7:30 and 9:30, with an 11:30 set tonight and tomorrow night, Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $30; $25 tonight. (Chinen) WAYNE ESCOFFERY QUARTET (Tonight and tomorrow night) Wayne Escoffery, a charismatic tenor saxophonist, celebrates the release of Veneration: Live at Smoke (Savant) in the proper setting, and with a close facsimile of the same crew: the vibraphonist Joe Locke, the bassist Hans Glawischnig and the drummer Jonathan Blake. At 8, 10 and 11:30, Smoke, 2751 Broadway, at 106th Street, (212) 864-6662, smokejazz.com; cover, $25. (Chinen) SCOTT FEINERS PANDEIRO JAZZ (Monday) Scott Feiner treats the pandeiro, a tambourinelike Brazilian hand drum, as an expressive jazz instrument; he sets out to prove his point in this band with the saxophonist Joel Frahm, the guitarist Freddie Bryant and the bassist Joe Martin. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $15. (Chinen) JONATHAN FINLAYSONS COMMON THREAD (Wednesday) Jonathan Finlayson, a trumpeter, convenes a cadre of young players currently or formerly apprenticed to the saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman: Shane Endsley on trumpet, Tim Albright on trombone, Matt Brewer on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. At 10 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) BEN GOLDBERG (Sunday) Mr. Goldberg, a clarinetist best known for his work in the improv-chamber group Tin Hat, leads a quintet with Carla Kihlstedt on violin, Rob Sudduth on saxophone, Devin Hoff on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums. At 10 p.m., the Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) JOEL HARRISON QUARTET (Sunday) The guitarist Joel Harrison presents what he calls Music for Unmade Films, with an appropriately atmospheric supporting cast: Will Holshauser on accordion, Todd Sickafoose on bass and Satoshi Takeishi on drums. At 9 and 10 p.m., Bar 4, 444 Seventh Avenue, at 15th Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 832-9800, bar4.net; donation, $5. (Chinen) JOHN HEBERT TRIO (Wednesday) John Hebert, an intuitive bassist, leads a promising chamber trio with Mary Halvorson on guitar and Matt Moran on vibraphone. At 8 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) * ICP ORCHESTRA (Thursday) The acronym stands for Instant Composers Pool, which conveys both the immediacy and the structural integrity of this 10-piece ensembles creations. The group, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, also happens to contain the finest improvisers in Amsterdam, like the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the drummer Han Bennink and the saxophonist and clarinetist Michael Moore. (Through April 6.) At 8 and 9:30 p.m., Tonic, 107 Norfolk Street, near Delancey Street, Lower East Side, (212) 358-7501, tonicnyc.com; cover, $15. (Chinen) * OLIVER LAKE BIG BAND (Tonight and tomorrow night) Oliver Lake is an alto saxophonist with a robust and piercing sound. This ensemble, studded with improvisers like the trumpeter Baikida Carroll and the trombonist Craig Harris, reflects his affinity for an aggressive strain of post-bop. At 9 and 10:30, Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, at Spring Street, South Village, (212) 242-1063, jazzgallery.org; cover, $15. (Chinen) TONY MALABYS PALOMA RECIO QUINTET (Tonight and tomorrow night) Tony Malaby, a powerful and increasingly prominent tenor saxophonist, brings a Spanish tinge to this ensemble, with Ben Monder on guitar, Eivind Opsvik on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. At 9 and 10:30, Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, West Village, (212) 989-9319, corneliastreetcafe.com; cover, $10, with a one-drink minimum. (Chinen) BEN MONDER GROUp (Monday) In the hands of Ben Monder, the electric guitar is a coloristic instrument first and foremost. He features his coolly convoluted pieces for a trio with Chris Lightcap on bass and Ted Poor on drums, and records the results for a forthcoming album. At 10 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) * JAMES MOODY/CLARK TERRY (Tonight through Sunday night) The effervescent saxophonist James Moody is celebrating his 82nd birthday this week by performing this double bill with another breezy old-timer, the trumpeter Clark Terry. At 8 and 10:30, Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, West Village, (212) 475-8592, bluenote.net; cover, $35 at tables, $20 at the bar, with a $5 minimum. (Chinen) SAL MOSCA (Monday) Mr. Mosca has largely based his piano style -- and, to a considerable extent, his career -- on the heady legacy of the pianist-composer Lennie Tristano. But as he approaches 80, he has an improvisational voice of his own, along with a cult following. At 9 and 11 p.m., Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080, birdlandjazz.com; cover, $30, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) * PAUL MOTIAN OCTET (Tuesday through Thursday) This luminous ensemble consists of two contrasting pairs of improvisers (the tenor saxophonists Tony Malaby and Chris Cheek, and the guitarists Steve Cardenas and Ben Monder); a couple of stabilizers (Matt Manieri and Jerome Harris, also guitarists); an anchor (the bassist Ben Street); and a mastermind (Paul Motian, on drums). (Through April 8). At 9 and 11 p.m., Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South, West Village, (212) 255-4037, villagevanguard.com; cover, $20, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) ARTURO OFARRILL TRIO (Wednesday and Thursday) Arturo OFarrill, the pianist and bandleader of the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, knows how to energize in smaller settings; this trio features Ruben Rodriguez on bass and Vince Cherico on drums. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $20. (Chinen) MICHELE ROSEWOMAN (Tonight) Michele Rosewoman is a pianist with a sharp and searching style, as she confirms on her recent album The In Side Out (Advance Dance Disques). She leads a pared-down version of a working band, Quintessence: just Brad Jones on bass and Mark Shim on tenor saxophone. At 7, Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Flatiron district, (212) 620-5000, Ext. 344, rmanyc.org; $20. (Chinen) JENNY SCHEINMAN (Tuesday) Ms. Scheinman often goes for rustic charm as a violinist, but she never ceases to be an adventurous improviser. Her partners here are the engagingly prickly guitarist Nels Cline and the polymorphically propulsive drummer Jim Black. At 7 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $8. (Chinen) GEORGE SCHULLERS CIRCLE WIDE (Sunday) George Schuller, a drummer, leads a group inspired by the acoustic fusion of Miles Davis, about 1968; the tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and the guitarist Brad Shepik apply the necessary push and pull. At 9:30 p.m., 55 Bar, 55 Christopher Street, near Seventh Avenue South, West Village, (212) 929-9883; cover, $8. (Chinen) KENDRA SHANK (Tonight) A superbly skilled vocalist, Ms. Shank interprets jazz and pop liberally, but with an abiding respect for melody. On her recent album, A Spirit Free: Abbey Lincoln Songbook, she pays homage to one of her deeper influences. At 6, 55 Bar, 55 Christopher Street, near Seventh Avenue South, West Village, (212) 929-9883, 55bar.com; no cover. (Chinen) SING INTO SPRING FESTIVAL (Tonight through Thursday night) Singers reign at Dizzys Club Coca-Cola for the next few weeks, appearing with uniformly first-rate backing bands. Ernestine Anderson holds court this weekend; Claudia Acuña appears from Tuesday through next weekend. At 7:30 and 9:30, Dizzys Club Coca-Cola, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, (212) 258-9595, jalc.org; cover, $30, with a minimum of $10 at tables, $5 at the bar. (Chinen) MARCUS STRICKLAND AND TWI-LIFE (Tuesday) Mr. Strickland, a thoughtful young tenor saxophonist, leads a group that explores the ethereal side of groove. This one-nighter -- featuring Mike Moreno on guitar and Keyon Harrold on trumpet, among others -- will be recorded for a live release. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $20. (Chinen) TAZZ/OTHER DIMENSIONS IN MUSIC (Tonight) Two texture-minded free-jazz ensembles, with a common denominator in the high-spirited trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr.; Tazz performs at 8, Other Dimensions at 10. The Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10 a set. (Chinen) * CHARLES TOLLIVER QUINTET (Tonight and tomorrow night) The trumpeter Charles Tolliver leads a hard-charging band with Billy Harper on tenor saxophone, George Cables on piano and Victor Lewis on drums. Christian McBride is the bassist tonight; Dwayne Burno plays tomorrow. At 9 and 11, Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080, birdlandjazz.com; cover, $30, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) MIGUEL ZENÓN QUARTET (Tomorrow) Miguel Zenón, a serious-minded alto saxophonist and composer from Puerto Rico, leads his excellent working band, with Luis Perdomo on piano, Hans Glawischnig on bass and Henry Cole on drums. At midnight, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $10; $5 for students; with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) Classical Full reviews of recent music performances: nytimes.com/music. Opera * DIE AGYPTISCHE HELENA (Tomorrow and Wednesday) With its convoluted libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and unevenly inspired score by Richard Strauss, this wry contemporary take on the Helen of Troy myth has remained a rarity since its 1928 premiere. But the Metropolitan Operas fancifully surreal new production by David Fielding, mounted for the soprano Deborah Voigt, makes a compelling case for this intriguing work, thanks to Ms. Voigts vocally lustrous and affecting portrayal of the title role, as well as the vibrant and insightful conducting of Fabio Luisi. The brilliant coloratura Diana Damrau is wonderful as the sorceress Aithra. The German tenor Torsten Kerl, who had to be replaced halfway through the performance on opening night, because of illness, is scheduled to sing Menelas for the remaining performances. Tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $120 to $220 tomorrow; $80 to $175 for Wednesday. (Anthony Tommasini) * ANDREA CHÉNIER (Monday) The great Ben Heppner, arguably the leading Wagnerian tenor of our day, continues his bold explorations of far-flung repertory with the title role of Giordanos verismo opera, in the Mets revival of Nicolas Joëls 1996 production. Mr. Heppner may lack the vocal colorings and idiomatic expressivity of the heroic Italian tenors who excelled in this touchstone role. But in his compelling portrayal he sings with burnished sound, vigor and lyrical sensitivity. The rich-voiced soprano Violeta Urmana as Maddalena and the powerful baritone Mark Delavan as Gérard are very strong. Marco Armiliato conducts. Monday at 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $15 to $175. (Tommasini) La DONNA DEL LAGO (Tonight, Sunday and Thursday) The New York City Opera continues its fruitful excavations of the bel canto repertory, this time with Rossinis wholly Italian take on Walter Scotts very Scottish original. Alexandrina Pendatchanska sings the part of Elena. Tonight at 8, Sunday at 1:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nycopera.com; $25 to $130. (Bernard Holland) * FLAVIO (Wednesday) The New York City Opera revives its successful production, directed by Chas Rader-Shieber, with sets by David Zinn. William Lacey makes his house debut conducting a cast that includes David Walker in the title role, Gerald Thompson as Guido and Marguerite Krull as Emilia. At 7:30 p.m., New York City Opera, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nycopera.com; $25 to $125. (Vivien Schweitzer) MADAMA BUTTERFLY (Tomorrow) The City Opera offers Mark Lamoss spartan yet attractive production competently sung by Angela Maria Blasi and Raúl Melo. At 8 p.m., New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nycopera.com; sold out. (Holland) METROPOLITAN OPERA NATIONAL COUNCIL GRAND FINALS/40TH ANNIVERSARY (Sunday and Tuesday) The Met goes from bottom to top this week: from 11 young unknowns, who have made their way through three rounds and past hundreds of other applicants in the National Council Auditions, to two of the opera worlds biggest stars. Those singers, Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón, will be showcased in three acts from three operas: La Bohème, Manon and LElisir dAmore, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Mets move to Lincoln Center. Sunday at 3 p.m., Tuesday at 7 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $15 to $150 on Sunday, $250 to $1,250 on Tuesday. (Anne Midgette) * THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE (Tomorrow) Lillian Groag avoids the topical updating that has become a Gilbert and Sullivan tradition and focuses on the works own satirical targets, which range from Victorian British society to the conventions of Italian grand opera. Even so, her direction for this City Opera production is inventive and lively, as are the performances by a cast that includes Sarah Jane McMahon as Mabel, Matt Morgan as Frederic and Marc Kudisch as the Pirate King. Gerald Steichen conducts. At 1:30 p.m., New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nycopera.com; sold out. (Allan Kozinn) TURANDOT (Tonight and Thursday night) Andrea Grubers singing is a matter of debate -- listeners tend to love her intense energy or hate her vocal unevenness -- but Puccinis ice princess Turandot is one of two roles that she indisputably owns these days (the other is Abigaille in Nabucco). Her Calaf is Richard Margison, an equally controversial though less prominent Canadian tenor who has a very respectable voice; for many the draw will be Hei-Kyung Hong, generally a radiant Liu. Since the withdrawal of Richard Armstrong, Fabio Luisi is conducting tonight and Thursdays performances; after that its Marco Armiliato. At 8, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $110 to $140 tonight, $15 to $110 for Thursday. (Midgette) Classical Music ACADEMY OF ST. MARTIN IN THE FIELDS (Tomorrow and Sunday) Like many instrumental soloists at their peak, the violinist Joshua Bell has tried his hand at conducting. He will conduct and perform as a soloist in Vivaldis Four Seasons and Tchaikovskys Serenade for Strings. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, Brookville, N.Y., (516) 299-3100, tillescenter.org; $48 and $90. Sunday at 2 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $30 to $98. (Schweitzer) PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD (Sunday) The excellent adventures of this fine French pianist continue with a mini-history of the piano, beginning with Scarlatti and Bach and extending to Messiaen, Carter, Boulez, Stockhausen and Kurtag. There will be talk as well. At 7:30 p.m., Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $40 to $48. (Holland) * LES ARTS FLORISSANTS (Tomorrow) William Christie conducts outstanding participants from Le Jardin des Voix, Les Arts Florissants academy for young singers to train them in Baroque repertory. The semistaged concert will feature madrigals and arias from Monteverdis Orfeo and Incoronazione di Poppea, and scenes from Handels Arminio, Deidamia and Rinaldo; Cavallis Calisto; Piccinnis Buona Figliuola; and Haydns Incontro Improvviso. They will be accompanied by Les Arts Florissants. At 8 p.m., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $56. (Schweitzer) BARGEMUSIC (Tonight through Sunday, and Thursday) A chamber orchestra crowds onto the intimate stage at Bargemusic this weekend to play a program that includes Vivaldis Four Seasons, as well as two more of that prolific composers works, the Concerto in B minor for Four Violins (RV 580) and the Concerto for Two Cellos (RV 531). Nestled amid all this Vivaldi is the premiere of a new work by Igor Raykhelson, commissioned by Bargemusic. On Thursday the violinist Chin Kim and the pianist David Oei play works by Stravinsky, Chausson, Respighi and Bizet as arranged by Waxman. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8, Sunday at 4 p.m., Thursday at 8 p.m., (718) 624-2083, bargemusic.org; $50 and $25 for students, tonight, tomorrow and Sunday; $35 and $20 for students on Thursday; $30 for 65+ tonight and Thursday. (Kozinn) ALFRED BRENDEL (Wednesday) This distinguished pianist makes his annual early spring visit to Carnegie Hall. The music is by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. At 8 p.m., (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $34 to $108. (Holland) BARBARA FRITTOLI (Sunday) Italian opera singers sometimes have an uneasy relationship with the recital stage. Barbara Frittoli, a frequent guest at the Metropolitan Opera (most recently in Così Fan Tutte), will set out to disprove this notion in her New York recital debut, which draws heavily on opera composers, while adding a set of Schubert and melodies by Duparc. James Vaughan is the accompanist. At 5 p.m., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $48. (Midgette) * WOLFGANG HOLZMAIR and HERMINE HASELBÖCK (Tonight, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday) On the model of a Schubertiade -- a festival of Schuberts songs -- comes a Wolfiade, devoted to the songs of Hugo Wolf, with the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair. Tonight the second of this mini-festivals three free recitals at Weill Recital Hall features Wolfs Italienisches Liederbuch, with Mr. Holzmair and the mezzo-soprano Hermine Haselböck; the last, on Thursday, adds the soprano Susanna Phillips for a rarity, the complete Spanisches Liederbuch. Mr. Holzmair is also leading master classes at the Austrian Cultural Forum, at which six selected singers will work on refining Wolf songs (on Monday) for a concluding recital (on Wednesday). Tonight and Thursday night at 8, Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall; Monday at 11 a.m. and Wednesday at 8 p.m., Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, Manhattan. Free, but reservations are required: (212) 319-5300 or acfny.org. (Midgette) * BLAIR McMILLEN (Wednesday) This young American pianist has the technique, musicianship and dynamism to play just about anything. On Wednesday he presents a recital of really new pieces, part of a three-concert series titled Music for the New Century: Works Composed Since 2000, presented by the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. There will be pieces by Joan Tower, Steven Stucky, Marco Stroppa and others. At 8 p.m., Casa Italiana, Columbia University, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue, between 116th and 118th Streets, Morningside Heights, (212) 854-1623; free, but reservations are recommended. (Tommasini) * MUSICIANS FROM MARLBORO (Tonight) During the concert season a select roster of artists from the prestigious summer Marlboro Music Festival tour America, including annual visits to New York. The next Musicians from Marlboro concert looks particularly enticing. The composer John Harbisons Twilight Music for horn, violin and piano is a worthy companion piece to Brahmss Trio in E flat (Op. 40), scored for the same unusual group of instruments. Those works frame this program, which also includes Ravels String Quartet and Stravinskys Concertino for String Quartet. At 8, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 570-3949, metmuseum.org; $40. (Tommasini) NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC (Tonight and tomorrow night) The fine Romanian pianist Radu Lupu joins Colin Davis in Mozarts supremely elegant final concerto, No. 27 in B flat. Mr. Davis, an eloquent Sibelius conductor, devotes the rest of the program to the Finnish composers Lemminkainen Suite, a set of four tone poems that describe the feats of Lemminkainen as he endeavors to win the hand of Pohjolas daughter. At 8, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nyphil.org; $28 to $96. (Kozinn) GARRICK OHLSSON (Sunday) Mr. Ohlsson plays four more sonatas in his admirable Beethoven series, including the Moonlight and the elusively beautiful Op. 101. At 3 p.m., Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $30 to $56. (Holland) VASSILY PRIMAKOV (Sunday) Arium is a commodious cafe in the meatpacking district that is quickly becoming a popular site for classical music concerts. Its Sunday afternoon series continues with a recital by the young Russian pianist Vassily Primakov, who will play works by Schumann, Beethoven and Brahms. Complimentary wine and hors doeuvres are served. At 4 p.m., Arium for the Arts, 31 Little West 12th Street, West Village, (212) 463-8630, ariumnyc.com; $40; $20 for members. (Tommasini) * DAVID RUSSELL (Tonight and tomorrow night) This English guitarist has a finely polished technique and a sharp interpretive sensibility. He is giving a master class tonight, and tomorrow he will play a recital that includes his own transcriptions of Bachs A minor Partita (BWV 1013, originally for flute) and Granadoss Valses Poéticos, as well as works by Weiss, Barrios, Mertz, José Brocá and Hans Haug. Master class tonight at 7, recital tomorrow at 8, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, (212) 415-5500, 92y.org; master class, $20; recital, $40. (Kozinn) * ST. LOUIS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (Tonight and tomorrow night) Classical musicians are lucky: 30 is the cut-off age for young in the outside world, but if youre a conductor you get to be young till youre 60 or so. At 48, David Robertson is certainly one of the most-watched young conductors around: one of his strengths is interesting programming, as his concerts with his St. Louis Symphony show. The first juxtaposes George Benjamins Sudden Time (a New York premiere); Bartoks first piano concerto, with the redoubtable Pierre-Laurent Aimard; and Sibeliuss Second Symphony. The second brings in the mezzo Susan Graham (substituting for the recovering Dawn Upshaw) for Ravels Shéhérazade, between the Adagio from Mahlers 10th and, perhaps the greatest treat of all, John Adamss Harmonielehre. At 8, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $26 to $85. (Midgette) TALICH QUARTET (Sunday) None of the original members of this Czech quartet, founded in 1964, are still in the group. But the current four, Jan Talich and Petr Macecek, violinists; Vladimir Bukac, a violist; and Petr Prause, a cellist, continue the tradition of playing Czech repertory, as well as chamber works. They will perform Haydns Quartet (Op. 64, No. 5); Mendelssohns Quartet in A minor; and Janaceks Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters). At 5 p.m., Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, (212) 547-0715, frick.org; $25. (Schweitzer) * TALLIS SCHOLARS (Tomorrow) Peter Phillips and his a cappella group have given some superb concerts of English Renaissance works recently, and they now turn their attention to Monteverdi, Palestrina, Gombert, Lassus and Browne. Among the centerpieces is Monteverdis Mass for Four Voices, a work worth discovering if you dont know it (or revisiting if you do). At 8 p.m., Riverside Church, Riverside Drive at 120th Street, Morningside Heights, (212) 854-7799, millertheater.com; $35. (Kozinn) Dance Full reviews of recent performances: nytimes.com/dance. BALLET BUILDERS (Tomorrow and Sunday) Dedicated to the proposition that ballet needs all the choreographers it can cultivate, Ballet Builders will present works by Graham Lustig, Robert Sher-Machherndl, Christophe Garcia, Jennifer Hart, David Justin, Gina Patterson and Kelly Ann Sloan, all chosen by audition. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan, (212) 355-6160; $25. (Jennifer Dunning) COMPANY XIV (Tonight and tomorrow night) This group will present an evening of Baroque, classical and contemporary dance (by the company director, Austin McCormick), incorporated with text by the Beat poet Charles Bukowski and arias by Vivaldi, created for a tow-truck warehouse that is now a dance space. At 7, 303 Bond Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, reservations@companyxiv.com; $15. (Dunning) EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (Tonight and tomorrow) Conceived, directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne, this re-envisioning of Tim Burtons dark 1990 film of the same title revisits the theme of the outsider, here a gentle boy with scissors for hands. Tonight at 7:30, tomorrow at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100, bam.org; $30 to $80. (Dunning) * FESTIVAL OF INDIA: COLORS OF RAJASTHAN (Tonight and tomorrow night) Presented by World Music Institute, this program features music and dance from the Great Thar Desert of Rajasthan in northwestern India, starring Gulabi Sapera, known as the Gypsy Queen of Rajasthan. At 8, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400, worldmusicinstitute.org; $35; $15 for students with college ID. (Dunning) FINAL LADDER (Wednesday) A dance, drama and musical tribute created by Dr. Glory Van Scott and Joan Peters, that pays tribute to New York firefighters and their bravery, specifically on 9/11. Proceeds will go to the survivors of Firefighter Patrick Boylan. At 7 p.m., Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400; $21. (Dunning) FLAMENCO VIVO CARLOTA SANTANA (Tonight through Sunday) This popular Spanish-American company will focus on the use of castanets in a new work and also offer traditional flamenco dances accompanied by onstage musicians. Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 242-0800, joyce.org; $40; $30 for Joyce members. (Roslyn Sulcas) GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA (Tomorrow) Based in Berkeley, Calif., this Balinese-American company will perform Kali Yuga, a new piece drawn from the ancient texts of the Mahabharata. At 7:30 p.m., LeFrak Concert Hall, Queens College, Long Island Expressway and Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, (718) 793-8080; $12. (Dunning) HUNGARIAN STATE FOLK ENSEMBLE/LIZ LERMAN DANCE EXCHANGE (Tonight through Sunday) The Hungarian State Folk Ensemble will perform traditional dances tonight at 8, accompanied by the groups Gypsy and Folk Orchestras. Tomorrow and Sunday, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange will perform Ms. Lermans new 613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts, which explores ancient and modern ideas about prayer as a way to illuminate what unifies and divides human beings. Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street, Newark, (888) 466-5722, njpac.org; $20 to $58 for Hungarian State Folk Ensemble; $38 for Liz Lerman. (Dunning) * JOHN JASPERSE COMPANY (Wednesday and Thursday) In his new Becky, Jodi and John, Mr. Jasperse celebrates a shared history and friendship with two colleagues, Becky Hilton and Jodi Melnick, whose humor and commitment to dance he shares. (Through April 7.) At 7:30 p.m., Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 924-0077, dtw.org; $25. (Dunning) * LARRY KEIGWIN AND COMPANY (Thursday) Mr. Keigwin and his dancers will explore the ways gender can be manipulated to allow us to look at ourselves with laughter. (Through April 7.) At 8:30 p.m., Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400, larrykeigwin.com; $25. (Dunning) AMY LARIMER AND DEBRA WANNER (Tonight through Sunday) In a program called Delicately Hinged, set to music by Peter Zummo, Ms. Larimer and Ms. Wanner explore imaginary worlds that reveal the cracks in the rational (who says?) surface of life. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8:30, Sunday at 5 p.m., West End Theater, 263 West 86th Street, Manhattan, (212) 337-9565; $15. (Dunning) MADE IN CATALUNYA (Tomorrow) This festival of Catalan dance, theater, music and poetry continues with a performance of modern dance by the august Gelabert-Azzopardi Companiya de Dansa. At 8:30 p.m., Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street, Manhattan, (212) 279-4200, baryshnikovdancefoundation.org; free. (Dunning) MOSCOW FESTIVAL BALLET (Tomorrow) The company, founded by the Bolshoi Ballet dancer Sergei Radchenko, will perform Swan Lake. At 7 p.m., Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, at Goulden Avenue, Bedford Park, the Bronx, (718) 960-8833, lehmancenter.org; $20 to $35. (Dunning) ODYSSEY DANCE THEATER OF UTAH (Wednesday and Thursday) In its New York debut, the company will perform two programs of jazz-ballet dances, created by its director, Derryl Yeager, and Mia Michaels, Eddie Ocampo, Dee Caspary, Liz Imperio and Mandy Moore. (Through April 8.) At 8 p.m., Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street, Clinton, (212) 868-4444; $20; $10 for students and 65+. (Dunning) PACO PEñA FLAMENCO DANCE COMPANY (Tonight) The guitarist Paco Peña has assembled dancers, singers and instrumentalists to perform the new A Compás (Primal Impulse). At 8, Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 840-2824, the-townhall-nyc.org; $37.50 and $40. (Dunning) MAX POLLAK & RUMBA TAP (Thursday) Mr. Pollak describes his new Viis as a tap music drama in which Nordic myth and African hero-spirits travel together on a journey of groove. (Through April 8.) At 8 p.m., Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, (212) 334-7479; $20; $15 for students. (Dunning) DESMOND RICHARDSON AND THE ALL STARS PROJECT (Tonight through Sunday) Mr. Richardson and 15 performers from All Stars, a program for teenagers, have created Homeland Security: Bringing Dr. King Up to Date, a multimedia piece that questions notions of homeland and security. Tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30, Sunday at 2 p.m., All Stars Project Theater, 543 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 941-1234, allstars.org; $30 and $35; T.D.F. vouchers accepted. (Dunning) AMY DAWN VEREBAY (Tonight and tomorrow night) A member of the wacky Circus Amok, Ms. Verebay will present a dance-theater production called Once in Love With Amy that chronicles her attempts to turn her lifes lead into gold, as she puts it. At 8, WOW Café Theater, 59-61 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 545-5334; $12. (Dunning) ELLIS WOOD DANCE (Wednesday and Thursday) Ms. Wood and her all-female company will perform her new Flat Affect, which aims to expose the cause and effect of womens irrational fears. (Could they all be irrational? Tsk, tsk.) (Through April 7.) At 8 p.m., Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway, at Chambers Street, TriBeCa, (212) 279-4200, dnadance.org; $20. (Dunning) Art Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums * brooklyn museum: GLOBAL FEMINISMS, through July 1. Too much of the work in this sprawling, international assembly of recent pieces by nearly 90 women from nearly 50 countries is essentialist and body-oriented and doesnt venture far beyond the essentialism of Judy Chicagos indomitable 1975-79 installation opus, The Dinner Party, whose enshrinement in the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art the exhibition celebrates. Thoroughly dominated by photography and video, with a documentary slant to many of its better moments, the show is more about information, politics and the struggle for equality than it is about art in any very concentrated or satisfying sense. That doesnt keep parts of it from being energetic and illuminating, especially as a record of the way that feminism has gripped and jump-started the imaginations of women around the world. 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith) FRICK COLLECTION: GEORGE STUBBS (1724-1806): A CELEBRATION, through May 27. One of the finest horse painters ever, Stubbs knew his subjects from head to hoof and skin to bones. He painted other mammals too: dogs, lions, tigers, oxen, monkeys and humans. This intimate show of 17 Stubbs paintings from English collections reveals his admirable range, although the people he portrayed in two large, late canvases have the stiffness of figures on a candy box. His horses are his true monuments. 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Grace Glueck) Guggenheim Museum: Family Pictures, through April 16. The museums news release extends the exhibitions exploration into representation of families and children in contemporary art and video. Images of children, you quickly realize, can operate as a completely different genre. Rineke Dijkstras Beach Portraits of adolescents posing awkwardly against stark seascape horizons are isolated (and isolating) images of children on the threshold of adulthood. You dont think about family when gazing at these photographs. Sally Mann is perhaps the best-known contemporary photographer of children, specifically her own. Ms. Mann, represented here by black-and-white photographs from the late 1980s and early 1990s of her ethereally gorgeous children, has been accused of everything from neglect to child abuse. The questions raised by her dual role as artist and mother, simultaneous protector and potential exploiter of the family, remain vitally interesting. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Martha Schwendener) * The METropolitan museum of art: INCISIVE IMAGES: IVORY AND BOXWOOD CARVINGS, through Nov. 25. This extraordinary show, drawn almost entirely from the Mets vaults, presents an array of nearly 100 carved figures, crucifixes, reliefs, containers, hand-held weapons and the occasional piece of furniture. It is an engrossing hive of religious fervor, Classical erudition (and occasional naughtiness), style shifts and multicultural cross-currents. And among the many feats of drop-dead artistic skill are several of traffic-stopping caliber. Dont miss it. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith) * The Met: Mother of Pearl: A Tradition in Asian Lacquer, through April 1. Ornamentalism is the term for this show of some 40 objects so exquisite that they might have been conceived with a modern museum conservators soft white cotton gloves in mind. The technique for creating mini-mosaics from slivers of mollusk shell is an ancient one that was perfected in China before traveling to Korea, Japan, Thailand and India. Examples from all those places are here in writing boxes and tea trays guaranteed to appeal to any window-shoppers acquisitive yearnings and magpie eye. (See above.) (Holland Cotter) Museum of modern art: COMIC ABSTRACTION: IMAGE-BREAKING, IMAGE-MAKING, through June 11. This unimaginative and uniformed treatment of a big idea -- the healthy and essential contamination of Modernist abstraction by popular culture -- should be seen if only because it is such a dispiriting symptom of the Moderns paralysis where contemporary art is concerned. Although it promises work that addresses perplexing questions, nearly everything here is perfectly pleasant and innocuous. The exceptions are provided by Gary Simmons, Ellen Gallagher and Sue Williams. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith) * Moma: JEFF WALL, through May 14. This show makes a case for Mr. Wall as the most complete, if traditional, of the untraditional artists who emerged from the turmoil of Conceptual Art. His often immense color transparencies are enthralling vehicles, intent on giving pleasure while making a point or two about society, art, history, visual perception, the human animal or all of the above. An imposing blend of painting, street photography and movies, they blur reality and artifice, narrative and form, detail and the big statement. You cant stop looking at them. (See above.) (Smith) * Neue Galerie: Van Gogh and Expressionism, through July 2. The Neue has, as usual, gathered a stellar roundup of Expressionist art. In one of the shows most exciting rooms, a third-floor gallery devoted mostly to self-portraits, two extraordinary van Goghs hang at opposite ends: Self-Portrait With Straw Hat (1887-88), from the Metropolitan Museums collection, filled with energetic, radiating brushstrokes, and the National Gallerys vibrant self-portrait of the artist holding a palette and brushes, painted about a year later. The most compelling pairing in this room, though, is van Goghs Bedroom from 1889, the second of three versions he painted of his room in Arles, with Egon Schieles obvious hommage, The Artists Bedroom in Neulengbach, painted in 1911, in a darker palette and with a perspective tipped precariously toward the viewer. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Schwendener) * Whitney Museum of American Art: Lorna Simpson, through May 6. This tight, refined and impassioned survey covers more than 20 years of Lorna Simpsons career, from her photo-and-text meditations on race and sexism in the 1980s, to her more recent short films, which unite American history and personal history in forceful and lyrical ways. It would be easy to put some of this work on a shelf as identity art, but with an African-American woman holding one of the highest offices in the United States government, an African-American man running for president, and the nation embroiled in what some people view as an ethnic war, this art is entirely of the moment. (See above.) (Cotter) Galleries: Chelsea JEAN SHIN: KEY PROMISES The idea is obvious, if youre as keen as this artist on recycling everyday objects: an installation using the word commands of countless computer keyboards to orchestrate a flow of suggested actions, desires and emotional states across four walls of a small gallery. From esc and shift to return and home. Art lite, perhaps, but expertly done. Frederieke Taylor Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, (646) 230-0992, frederieketaylorgallery.com, through April 7. (Smith) Galleries: Other Gifts of the Forest: Native Traditions in Wood and Bark Drawn from the collections of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, this show celebrates the trees of the rich forests that once covered the Northeast, yielding essential materials to the Pequot and other Eastern Woodland cultures. The objects run from ancient woodworking tools to contemporary objects that for the most part carry on tribal traditions, like the simple and beautiful wooden flute made in 1999 by Hawk Henires (Nipmuc) and adorned with an elegantly carved bird motif. Many things here were made in the 19th and 20th centuries: handsome woven baskets, carved bowls and spoons, decorated cradle boards for carrying babies, birch bark canoe models, an elegant birch-bark hamper whose sides bear a stylized tree motif. UBS Art Gallery, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd Streets, (212) 713-2885, through April 27. (Glueck) Last Chance * DISSOCIATE: NEW HUMANS Dominated by poster-paintings on handy rolling bases, the occasional space-confounding mirror and sundry fliers, this mutable installation by the talented sculptor and sound artist Mika Tajima has served both as a performance space and as an advertising campaign for her noise band, New Humans. The textilelike patterns; limited, decoratorish palette; and diverse printing methods are a bit familiar to art in this age of self-conscious mechanical reproduction (Wade Guyton, for example). But it is worth seeing. Collaborators include the musician Howie Chen and the artists Vito Acconci, José Léon Cerillo and Philippe Decrauzat. Elizabeth Dee, 545 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 924-7545, elizabethdeegallery.com; closes tomorrow. (Smith) * Sam Gordon: Three Ways: painting, Drawing, video Theres a lot going on in this virtuosic solo show. Mr. Gordons beautiful, cryptic drawings and paintings cover the gallery walls, while two sections of his epic video The Lost Kinetic World: Volumes 1-4, play on a monitor. The videos are a two-and-a-half-hour documentary compilation of art world events and personalities, good, bad and ugly, with past and present, prosaic and extraordinary, spliced together, willy-nilly. For whatever reason, Mr. Gordon watches the art world closely. Now its time for the art world to wake up to him, a treasure in its midst. Feature Inc., 530 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212) 675-7772; closes tomorrow. (Cotter) * Grey Art Gallery: Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle The artist Wallace Berman (1926-76) was a central, charismatic figure in an underground of West Coast artists and poets in the 1950s and 60s. A collagist, poet, photographer and the publisher of an influential journal, Semina, he inspired others to make art too, sparking hidden aptitude in startling places. After meeting him, drifters, movie stars, ex-marines and petty criminals found themselves starting to paint and write. And a traveling love company of them has come to Grey Art Gallery, trailing dreams, delusions and marijuana clouds. New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780; closes tomorrow. (Cotter) * PHILIP TAAFFE This artists first New York show since 2000 anoints him as one of the best painters of his generation, and maybe the only one to extend both 1970s Pattern and Decoration and 80s appropriation into new areas. Aided by Warhols tinted colors and Pollocks all-over rhythms, and some ingenious printing techniques of their own, these suavely eye-popping new paintings sample everything from Northwest Coast Indian masks to Islamic ornamental patterns to marbleizing and gilding. They define visual culture as a great chain of being in which anything can be connected with proper placement, color and scale in an inspiring message of unity in difference. Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, near 78th Street, (212) 744-2313, gagosian.com; closes tomorrow. (Smith) * PAUL STRAND AT WORK More than three dozen vintage improbably rich, impeccably printed vintage photographs, taken by Strand between 1943 and 1953, make their measured, concentrated way through a range of rural subjects in New England, France and Italy and dot the gallery walls like faceted gems. Pace/MacGill Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, (212) 759-7999; closes tomorrow. (Smith) * United Black Girls, This group show is a response by six artists to the way the black female body appears in popular culture. Ifetayo A. Abdus-Salam takes charge by channeling Pam Grier; Jessica Peavy links early feminism and music videos; Heather Hart takes aim with crocheted guns. Omya Alston, Ashley Reid and Felicia Megginson combine images of exploitation and empowerment in various ways, with a healthy dose of attitude. Courtney J. Martin and Vanessa C. B. Riding put it all together. Rush Arts Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 691-9552; closes tomorrow. (Cotter)
Unpacking the Anti-Drone Debate �� Duck of Minerva
My student Lina Shaikhouni and I have a new Foreign Policy piece in which we make ���The Case Against the Case Against Drones,��� to paraphrase Stephanie. Therein, we argue. Take the following explanation: interstate war has become more bloodless because great power war has been shown to be too costly as a result of the world wars and nuclear weaponry. If great powers. (the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal), accounts by major
ABC releases guidelines for January 7th GOP debate | 2016.
3) Place first, second or third in the Iowa Republican caucuses. Polling organizations include: ABC News, AP, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, FOX, Gallup, NBC News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
The Listings: Feb. 23 - March 1
Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional listings, show times and tickets: nytimes.com/theater. Previews and Openings BE Previews start today. Opens on March 13. The Tel Aviv troupe Mayumana mixes dance, music and spectacle in this globe-trotting show aiming for the Stomp audience (1:30). Union Square Theater, 100 East 17th Street, East Village, (212) 307-4100. BILL W. AND DR. BOB In previews; opens on March 5. This history play portrays the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous -- and their wives (2:15). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. BFF In previews; opens tomorrow. In Anna Zieglers memory play, a woman, haunted by her past, has a sexual awakening (1:30). DR2, 103 East 15th Street, (212) 239-6200. CURTAINS Previews start on Tuesday. Opens on March 22. Kander and Ebbs satire of a murder mystery, which opened on the West Coast, is set in a theater during a 1959 out-of-town tryout. David Hyde Pierce and Debra Monk star (2:45). Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 West 45th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. DYING CITY In previews; opens on March 4. Lincoln Center presents a new play by Christopher Shinn (Four) about a therapist who receives a visit from her deceased husbands twin brother (1:30). Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-7600. HOWARD KATZ In previews; opens on March 2. Roundabout Theater presents a new play by Patrick Marber (Closer) about a down-on-his-luck talent agent. Doug Hughes directs (1:30). Laura Pels Theater, 111 West 46th Street, (212) 719-1300. JACK GOES BOATING Previews begin on Tuesday. Opens on March 18. The Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in this new Labyrinth Theater Company play about marital problems and dating panic (2:00). Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555. KING HEDLEY II In previews; opens on March 11. Signature Theater revives August Wilsons operatic drama, set in Reagen-era Pittsburgh, about a man who has just returned from prison (2:45). Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 244-7529. KING LEAR In previews; opens on March 7. He played Hamlet. He played Falstaff. It was only a matter of time before Kevin Kline took on this proud, misguided patriarch. James Lapine directs (3:00). The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555. MY TRIP TO AL-QAEDA Previews start on Thursday. Opens on March 5. Laurence Wright explains the history of the terrorist organization in this monologue based on his book on the subject (1:30). Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street, at Broome Street, SoHo, (212) 925-1900. OUR LEADING LADY In previews; opens on March 15. A new comedy by Charles Busch (The Tale of the Allergists Wife), about the actress who was to perform at Fords Theater on the night Lincoln was shot (2:00). Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212. PRELUDE TO A KISS In previews; opens on March 8. The Roundabout revives Craig Lucass fantastical play about a young romance that takes a very bizarre turn (2:00). American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street, (212) 719-1300. SPALDING GRAY: STORIES LEFT TO TELL In previews; opens on March 6. Kathleen Russo, Spalding Grays widow, and Lucy Sexton assembled these monologues, letters and stories. Kathleen Chalfant and Frank Wood star (1:30). Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, (212) 307-4100. TALK RADIO In previews; opens on March 11. Eric Bogosians darkly funny portrait of a late-night talk show host returns for a Broadway revival starring Liev Schreiber. Robert Falls directs. Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200. Broadway THE APPLE TREE The amazing Kristin Chenoweth gives Imax-screen-size life to three curvaceous doodles who by rights shouldnt be any larger than figures in the Sunday funnies. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnicks 1966 musical, directed by Gary Griffin, shows its age but is given theatrical verve by Ms. Chenoweth, Brian dArcy James and Marc Kudisch (2:30). Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, (212) 719-1300. (Ben Brantley) A CHORUS LINE If you want to know why this show was such a big deal when it opened 31 years ago, you need only experience the thrilling first five minutes of this revival. Otherwise, this archivally exact production, directed by Bob Avian, feels like a vintage car that has been taken out of the garage, polished up and sent on the road once again (2:00). Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * THE COAST OF UTOPIA Lincoln Center Theaters brave, gorgeous, sprawling and ultimately exhilarating production of Tom Stoppards trilogy about intellectuals errant in 19th-century Russia. A testament to the seductive powers of narrative theater, directed with hot and cool canniness by Jack OBrien and featuring a starry cast (Brian F. OByrne, Jennifer Ehle, Martha Plimpton, Josh Hamilton and Ethan Hawke, among others) in a tasty assortment of roles. Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * COMPANY Fire, beckoning and dangerous, flickers beneath the frost of John Doyles elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furths era-defining musical from 1970, starring a compellingly understated Raul Esparza. Like Mr. Doyles Sweeney Todd, this production finds new clarity of feeling in Sondheim by melding the roles of performers and musicians (2:20). Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE DROWSY CHAPERONE (Tony Awards, best book of a musical and best original score, 2006) This small and ingratiating spoof of 1920s stage frolics, as imagined by an obsessive show queen, may not be a masterpiece. But in a dry season for musicals, it has theatergoers responding as if they were withering houseplants finally being watered after long neglect. Bob Martin and Sutton Foster are the standouts in the avid, energetic cast (1:40). Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway, at 45th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) * GREY GARDENS Christine Ebersole is absolutely glorious as the middle-aged, time-warped debutante called Little Edie Beale in this uneven musical adaptation of the notorious 1975 documentary of the same title. She and the wonderful Mary Louise Wilson (as her bedridden mother), in the performances of their careers, make Grey Gardens an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss (2:40). Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) MARY POPPINS This handsome, homily-packed, mechanically ingenious and rather tedious musical, adapted from the P. L. Travers stories and the 1964 Disney film, is ultimately less concerned with inexplicable magic than with practical psychology. Ashley Brown, who sings prettily as the family-mending nanny, looks like Joan Crawford trying to be nice and sounds like Dr. Phil. Directed by Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne (2:30). New Amsterdam Theater, 214 West 42nd Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) LES MISÉRABLES This premature revival, a slightly scaled-down version of the well-groomed behemoth that closed only three years ago, appears to be functioning in a state of mild sedation. Appealingly sung and freshly orchestrated, this fast-moving adaptation of Victor Hugos novel isnt sloppy or blurry. But its pulse rate stays well below normal (2:55). Broadhurst Theater, 235 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * SPRING AWAKENING Duncan Sheik and Steven Saters bold adaptation of the Frank Wedekind play is the freshest and most exciting new musical Broadway has seen in some time. Set in 19th-century Germany but with a ravishing rock score, it exposes the splintered emotional lives of adolescents just discovering the joys and sorrows of sex. Performed with brio by a great cast, with supple direction by Michael Mayer and inventive choreography by Bill T. Jones (2:00). Eugene ONeill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Charles Isherwood) TARZAN This writhing green blob with music, adapted by Disney Theatrical Productions from the 1999 animated film, has the feeling of a superdeluxe day care center, equipped with lots of bungee cords and karaoke synthesizers, where children can swing when they get tired of singing, and vice versa. The soda-pop score is by Phil Collins (2:30). Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 West 46th Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) * TRANSLATIONS The estimable Irish director Garry Hynes (a Tony winner for Martin McDonaghs Beauty Queen of Leenane) has assembled an ensemble of an extraordinarily high caliber and consistency for the third major New York production of Brian Friels 1980 play. Set in rural Ireland in 1833, as the local tongue is being supplanted by the language of the English occupying forces, the play explores the seriocomic truth that language can divide as easily as it unites, and can never hope to translate the rich music in our souls with the delicacy we yearn for. A top-flight Broadway revival (2:15). Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) THE VERTICAL HOUR David Hares soggy consideration of the Anglo-American cultural divide stars Julianne Moore (representing the Americans) and Bill Nighy (leading the British), directed by Sam Mendes. The Yanks dont stand a chance (2:20). Music Box Theater, 239 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) Off Broadway ADRIFT IN MACAO Christopher Durang wrote the book (cute) and lyrics (crude) for this fortune-cookie-sized musical set in a Chinese port in the 1950s. Flimsy but fun, this spoof of old movies is lovingly acted by a swell cast, although an hour after its over, you may be hungry for reruns of The Carol Burnett Show (1:30). 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, (212) 279-4200. (Isherwood) ALL THAT I WILL EVER BE In this false-feeling comedy-drama by Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, a gay hustler undergoes an identity crisis when he finds himself falling for one of his clients. Slick but mostly stale in its analysis of a society afraid of emotional engagement (2:15). The New York Theater Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) BLIND LEMON BLUES An exuberant musical tribute to Blind Lemon Jefferson, arguably the biggest country-blues musician of the 1920s. The facts of his life are vague, and as a result, the narrative is almost dreamlike. A delightful evening (1:50). Theater at St. Peters, 619 Lexington Avenue, at 54th Street, (212) 935-5820. (Ginia Bellafante) THE FEVER Wallace Shawn performs his provocative monologue about a guilt-riddled bourgeois everyman sweating his way through a moral crisis. The rich, often hypnotic writing draws us into his tortured mindscape, as he shifts between shame over his sense of entitlement and reasoned arguments that sacrifice is unnecessary and pointless. Meanwhile, in the third world, the violence and poverty continue unabated (1:30). Acorn Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Isherwood) GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL A very funny if not terribly original satire of musical theater features what must be the worst backers audition of all time. The excellent duo Jeremy Shamos and Christopher Fitzgerald make the pitch (2:05). The Actors Playhouse, 100 Seventh Avenue South, at Fourth Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 239-6200. (Jason Zinoman) * IN THE HEIGHTS Lin-Manuel Mirandas joyous songs paint a vibrant portrait of daily life in Washington Heights in this flawed but enjoyable show. Essentially a valentine to the barrio -- conflict of a violent or desperate kind is banished from the picture -- the musical contains a host of vibrant, funny performances and brings the zesty sound of Latin pop to the stage. (2:10). 37 Arts, 450 West 37th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Isherwood) THE LAST WORD Oren Safdies comedy about cultural generation gaps amuses as it goes along but lands at a predictable nowhere. Daniel J. Travanti stars as a Viennese Jew and aspiring playwright who does battle with a young student angling to become his writing assistant and find his voice (1:30). Theater at St. Clements, 423 West 46th Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Bellafante) THE MADRAS HOUSE A century-old drama about the woman question, this rare revival of Harley Granville Barkers fascinating play is more contemporary than you might think (2:30). Mint Theater, 311 West 43rd Street, Clinton, (212) 315-0231. ( Zinoman) MARAT/SADE The first New York production of Peter Weisss classic 1963 play captures the rawness and shock of the original with a harrowing production. The inmates of this all-male asylum fling themselves against the chain-links of their enclosure; realistic-looking vomit and feces feature in one key scene; the audience is sprayed with water from the attendants hoses and reminded that theater is not always a safe place. Its undeniably powerful; unfortunately, it remains a blunt instrument rather than a polished one, since the language is not mined as deeply as the emotion. Marat and Sades philosophical debate, and the plays topicality, tend to be obscured by the sheer brute force of whats happening onstage (2:10). The Classical Theater of Harlem, Harlem School of the Arts Theater, 647 St. Nicholas Avenue, near 141st Street, (212) 868-4444. (Anne Midgette) MARY ROSE J. M. Barrie penned this distaff variation on themes from Peter Pan in 1920, and it has mostly lain on the shelf since. A young English girl (an exuberant Paige Howard) acquires the odd habit of disappearing and reappearing some time later, untouched by times passing. Gentle and melancholy, handsomely mounted by Tina Landau, Mary Rose is nonetheless itself touched by the mark of time (1:45). Vineyard Theater, 108 East 15th Street, (212) 353-0303. (Isherwood) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and THE JEW OF MALTA F. Murray Abraham plays two Elizabethan villains in repertory for the Theater for a New Audience. Mr. Abrahams sinister but still moving Shylock is the dark heart of Darko Tresnjaks chilly, powerful staging of one of Shakespeares unfunniest comedies. As Barabas in David Herskovitss goofy, postmodern Jew of Malta, hes the lively center of a carnival that doesnt do justice to Christopher Marlowes harsh satire on Christian hypocrisy and venality (each 2:30). The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) A SPANISH PLAY The great Zoe Caldwell returns to the New York stage after an absence of a decade, in the fine company of Linda Emond, Denis OHare and Larry Pine. Thats the good news. The bad? The play. Yasmina Rezas pseudo-philosophical and metatheatrical trifle is utterly forgettable (1:50). Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101. (Isherwood) 25 QUESTIONS FOR A JEWISH MOTHER This is the comedian Judy Golds fiercely funny monologue, based on her own life as a single Jewish lesbian mother and interviews with more than 50 other Jewish mothers (1:20). St. Lukes Theater, 308 West 46th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Phoebe Hoban) A VERY COMMON PROCEDURE Courtney Barons play suffers from a very common problem: For at least half of this one-acts running time, the characters onstage are talking to us, not one another. Paradoxically, this intimacy between audience and actors keeps the story -- an odd love affair between a woman grieving the death of her baby and the doctor involved in the babys death -- at arms length (1:20). Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, West Village, (212) 279-4200. (Isherwood) * THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE David Mamet has cleanly and cannily adapted Harley Granville Barkers 1905 play about corruption in the genteel world of Victorian finance. An excellent cast and a sumptuous production bring extra immediacy to a tale of embezzlement and entitlement that feels as fresh as tomorrows stock options (1:50). Atlantic Theater, 336 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) * WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! Richard Foremans latest film-theater hybrid is a memorial service, of sorts, for the intuitive self, killed by a surface-worshiping world. It is also a dazzling exercise in reality shifting that is as invigorating as it is mournful (1:05). Ontological Theater at St. Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101. (Brantley) Off Off Broadway AT LEAST ITS PINK Bridget Everett and her big, bad attitude co-star in this mini-musical about sex and unsatisfying jobs in the city. Directed by Michael Patrick King (of Sex and the City, as it happens), who is also the co-author, and with songs written by Ms. Everett and Kenny Mellman, the piano-playing half of Kiki & Herb. Raucous and rude, its a bit like a one-woman episode of Jerry Springer (1:20). Ars Nova, 511 West 54th Street, Clinton, (212) 868-4444. (Isherwood) NELSON Three arresting performances catch your attention in this creepy play by Sam Marks about a young man who is an office flunky by day but films gang videos at night. But having set a lot of intriguing things in motion, Mr. Marks is afraid to let them collide head-on (1:10). The Lion Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Neil Genzlinger) Long-Running Shows ALTAR BOYZ This sweetly satirical show about a Christian pop group made up of five potential Teen People cover boys is an enjoyable, silly diversion (1:30). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) AVENUE Q R-rated puppets give lively life lessons (2:10). Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Cartoon made flesh, sort of (2:30). Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46th Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) CHICAGO Irrefutable proof that crime pays (2:25). Ambassador Theater, 219 West 49th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE COLOR PURPLE Singing CliffsNotes for Alice Walkers Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (2:40). Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway, at 53rd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) FORBIDDEN BROADWAY: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT Often more entertaining than the real thing (1:45). 47th Street Theater, 304 West 47th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) HAIRSPRAY Fizzy pop, cute kids, large man in a housedress (2:30). Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52nd Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) JERSEY BOYS The biomusical that walks like a man (2:30). August Wilson Theater, 245 West 52nd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE LION KING Disney on safari, where the big bucks roam (2:45). Minskoff Theater, 200 West 45th Street at Broadway, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) MAMMA MIA! The jukebox that devoured Broadway (2:20). Cadillac Winter Garden Theater, 1634 Broadway, at 50th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Who was that masked man, anyway? (2:30). Majestic Theater, 247 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE PRODUCERS The ne plus ultra of showbiz scams (2:45). St. James Theater, 246 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) RENT East Village angst and love songs to die for (2:45). Nederlander Theater, 208 West 41st Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) SPAMALOT A singing scrapbook for Monty Python fans (2:20). Shubert Theater, 225 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE A Chorus Line with pimples (1:45). Circle in the Square, 254 West 50th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) WICKED Oz revisited, with political corrections (2:45). Gershwin Theater, 222 West 51st Street, Manhattan, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) Last Chance THE CRYING WOMAN An imaginative play that manages to transform what begins as a tired culture-clash comedy involving a Mexican and United States couple sharing a house in Mexico City into a sinister tale involving strange superstitions and a ghost from the 16th century (2:30). The Beckett Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200; closes tomorrow. (Wilborn Hampton) DAI (ENOUGH) Iris Bahrs unnerving one-woman show doesnt have much to add to the Middle East debate, but it sure leaves a lasting impression. Ms. Bahr plays an assortment of characters who have the misfortune of being in a Tel Aviv cafe that is about to be visited by the havoc common to such establishments. The attack is rendered in jarring fashion, repeatedly; you watch the play on pins and needles, waiting for the next burst. Gimmicky? Sure. But viscerally effective (1:40). Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street, at Broome Street, SoHo, (212) 253-9983; closes on Sunday. (Genzlinger) DUTCHMAN A revival of the poet Amiri Barakas screed on race and American values, 43 years after its Greenwich Village debut, aims for all the fire and might of a Malcolm X speech but none of the rhetorical elegance. It shouts so loudly that you cant hear a thing (1:00). Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street, between Barrow and Bedford Streets, West Village (212) 239-6200; closes tomorrow. (Bellafante) THE FRUGAL REPAST This sweet, compact story by Ron Hirsen dabbles in the high concepts of art, but not too deeply, which makes it just right. Two circus performers see Picassos Frugal Repast in a dealers window and realize they were the models for it; when they steal the print, their lowbrow world and Picassos highbrow one amusingly collide (1:20). The June Havoc Theater, Abingdon Theater Arts Complex, 312 West 36th Street, (212) 868-4444; closes on Sunday. (Genzlinger) JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS A powerfully sung revival of the 1968 revue, presented with affectionate nostalgia by the director Gordon Greenberg. As in the original, two men and two women perform a wide selection of Brels plaintive ballads and stirring anthems (2:00). Zipper Theater, 336 West 37th Street, (212) 239-6200; closes on Sunday. (Isherwood) LOOKINGGLASS ALICE Eyecatching entertainment (1:30). The New Victory Theater, 209 West 42nd Street, (212) 239-6200; closes on Sunday. (Lawrence Van Gelder) A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM Shakespeares comedy, so dependent on things that arent what they appear to be, makes an inspired choice for Theater by the Blind, a group that mixes blind, vision-impaired and fully sighted actors. The most intriguing thing, though, is how the company stages the play with just six actors (1:50). The Barrow Group Theater, 312 West 36th Street, (212) 868-4444; closes on Sunday. (Genzlinger) THE SECRET OF MME. BONNARDS BATH A dutiful bio-play about the French symbolist Pierre Bonnard is a Behind the Music for the art history set (2:00). The Kirk Theater, Theater Row Studios, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200; closes tomorrow. ( Zinoman) VICTORIA MARTIN: MATH TEAM QUEEN Must all stage teenagers speak in that exaggerated surfer-dude style in which awesome and totally make up about 50 percent of any conversation? Yes, apparently they must, from the evidence presented in this thin comedy, which is about a high school girl who finds herself on the all-male math team. The playwright, Kathryn Walat, seems to have been trying to grab the coattails of a certain spelling-bee-related show. She missed (2:00). The Julia Miles Theater, 424 West 55th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200; closes on Thursday. (Genzlinger) Movies Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, show times and tickets: nytimes.com/movies. AVENUE MONTAIGNE (PG-13, 100 minutes, in French) A humble pleasure about love and art, about passing time and time passing, from the French director Danièle Thompson, who populates one Parisian street with minor incidents, comic faces, choreographed nonsense and melodramatic blips and swells. (Manohla Dargis) BABEL (R, 143 minutes, in English, Spanish, Japanese, Berber, Arabic and sign language) This hugely ambitious movie tells four loosely linked, not quite simultaneous stories set on three different continents, with dialogue in several languages. The themes, to the extent they are decipherable, include loss, fate and the terrible consequences of miscommunication. Written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, the movie is an intellectual muddle but a visceral tour de force, and the power of the filmmaking almost overcomes the fuzziness of the ideas. Almost. (A. O. Scott) * BAMAKO (No rating, 118 minutes, in French and Bambara) Abdelrahmane Sissakos new film is an indictment of the Wests complicity in Africas misery, staged as a public trial of the World Bank and its affiliates. The films passionate didacticism is both enriched and subverted by Mr. Sissakos deft, subtle attention to the details of daily life in the capital of Mali, where the movie takes place. (Scott) BLOOD DIAMOND (R, 138 minutes) The makers of this foolish thriller about illegal diamond trafficking in Africa, starring an excellent Leonardo DiCaprio, want you to know there may be blood on your hands, specifically your wedding finger. Too bad they havent thought through what it means to turn misery into entertainment. (Dargis) BREACH (PG-13, 110 minutes) In his fine, no-nonsense account of the capture of the F.B.I. agent turned mole Robert Philip Hanssen, the director Billy Ray manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending. Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe star. (Dargis) * BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA (PG, 95 minutes) Grounded more in reality than in fantasy, this smart adaptation of Katherine Patersons award-winning novel offers an affecting story of a transformative friendship between two unusually gifted children. Beautifully capturing a time when a bully in school can loom as large as a troll in a nightmare, the director, Gabor Csupo, keeps the fantasy in the background to find magic in the everyday. (Jeannette Catsoulis) * CHILDREN OF MEN (R, 100 minutes) The end is nigh in this superb thriller directed by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. Based on the P. D. James book, the film stars an excellent Clive Owen and features equally sterling support from Michael Caine, Danny Huston and Chiwetel Ejiofior, among others. (Dargis) CLOSE TO HOME (No rating, 94 minutes, in Hebrew) This movie minutely scrutinizes the daily routine of two spirited women, both 18-year-old conscripts in the Israeli army, who work as a team patrolling the streets of Jerusalem. It adopts the tunnel vision of impatient, self-centered soldiers gritting their teeth as they fulfill their two-year military obligation. (Stephen Holden) * DAYS OF GLORY (R, 120 minutes, in French) Rachid Boucharebs tale of North African soldiers fighting to free their French colonial masters from German Occupation during World War II is a potent combat picture, and also a searching and complex political drama. (Scott) * THE DEPARTED (R, 150 minutes) Martin Scorseses cubistic entertainment about men divided by power, loyalty and their own selves is at once a success and a relief. Based on the crackling Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, it features fine twinned performances from Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, and a showboating Jack Nicholson. (Dargis) DREAMGIRLS (PG-13, 131 minutes) The Broadway musical arrives on the screen, capably directed by Bill Condon, ardently acted and sung by Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Beyoncé Knowles and (especially) Jennifer Hudson, but undone by mediocre and anachronistic songs. (Scott) FACTORY GIRL (R, 91 minutes) Its not entirely inappropriate that this film, George Hickenloopers biography of Edie Sedgwick, the most glamorous of Andy Warhols so-called superstars, should suggest a magazine layout masquerading as a film. The world through which Ms. Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) blazed and burned out was one that lived and died by the camera. It existed to be seen and drooled over. But God help you if you actually lived in it. (Holden) GHOST RIDER (PG-13, 114 minutes) After a long string of flops, Nicolas Cage returns to play Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcycle rider whose soul belongs to the Devil. Despite the promise of the first 30 minutes -- when Johnny is played by the charming young actor Matt Long -- a witless script and a central character whos more funny than frightening suggest that the filmmakers franchise hopes may be dashed. (Catsoulis) GRBAVICA: THE LAND OF MY DREAMS (No rating, 90 minutes, in Bosnian) In a neighborhood of Sarajevo that was the site of a notorious prison camp, a single mother lives with her tomboyish 12-year-old daughter. The tension between the present and the recent past is embodied in the volatile relationship between mother and daughter, which comes to a boil over the issue of the girls paternity. (Holden) HANNIBAL RISING (R, 121 minutes) Marked by too much respect and too little energy, this primer on the early years of Hannibal Lecter reduces one of our most mythic villains to a callow, dysfunctional chef. Orphaned in World War II, our psychopathic hero hunts down his familys killers and snacks on their remains. But burrowing into the id of pop cultures most repulsive gourmet demands a sanguinary glee that the director, Peter Webber, may not possess; for all the movies spurting gore, theres no accompanying rush of blood to the head. (Catsoulis) THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (R, 121 minutes) Kevin Macdonald paints a queasily enjoyable portrait of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin from inside the palace walls. Forest Whitaker plays the mad king, while James McAvoy plays the fool. (Dargis) * LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (R, 141 minutes, in Japanese) Another masterwork from Clint Eastwoods astonishing late period, and one of the best war movies ever. Ken Watanabe is especially fine as the general commanding Japanese troops in the doomed defense of the island of Iwo Jima. (Scott) * LITTLE CHILDREN (R, 130 minutes) Todd Fields adaptation of Tom Perrottas novel of suburban adultery is unfailingly intelligent and faultlessly acted. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson are superb as the parents of young children who meet at the playground and enact a two-handed variation on Madame Bovary against a backdrop of social paranoia and middle-class malaise. (Scott) * Little Miss Sunshine (R, 101 minutes) A bittersweet comedy of dysfunction that takes place at the terminus of the American dream. The excellent cast includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano and that national treasure, Alan Arkin. (Dargis) * THE LIVES OF OTHERS (R, 137 minutes, in German) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarcks debut feature takes place in East Berlin in 1984, and it is a smart, moving inquiry into the moral predicament facing good people in a bad system. Ulrich Mühes performance as a conscience-stricken Stasi officer is a tightly wound tour de force, and Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck are both superb as a playwright and his actress lover who are drawn into the cruel, absurd clutches of the Communist secret police. (Scott) MUSIC AND LYRICS (PG-13, 96 minutes) Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant phone in passable impersonations of themselves in this competent romantic comedy, which is somewhat enlivened by parodies of bad pop songs from both the 1980s and the present. (Scott) NORBIT (PG-13, 97 minutes) Eddie Murphy plays a nebbish, a fat woman and a Chinese restaurant owner in this crude, sometimes mean, but often funny farce. (Scott) NOTES ON A SCANDAL (R, 92 minutes) Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett play a misogynistic game of cat and mouse from which no one emerges unscathed, including the audience. Adapted by Patrick Marber from a novel by Zoë Heller and directed by Richard Eyre. (Dargis) * PANS LABYRINTH (R, 119 minutes, in Spanish) Guillermo del Toros tale of a young girls ordeal in post-Civil-War fascist Spain is either a fairy tale in the guise of a political allegory or vice versa. In either case it is a moving, enchanting, strange and humane example of popular art at its very best. (Scott) THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (PG-13, 117 minutes) How you respond to this fairy tale in realist drag may depend on whether you find Will Smiths performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams. (Dargis) * THE QUEEN (PG-13, 103 minutes) Directed by Stephen Frears from a very smart script by Peter Morgan, and starring a magnificent Helen Mirren in the title role, The Queen pries open a window in the House of Windsor around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, blending fact with fiction. (Dargis) THE ROYAL GUARD (No rating, 107 minutes, in Hindi) Vidhu Vinod Chopras somber drama is a contemporary tale about the aging, devoted protector (Amitabh Bachchan) of an aristocratic family out to avenge his masters murder. Though it combines Shakespearean ambience with snatches of genre cinema (westerns, martial arts movies), the film is primarily a tribute to the singular presence of Mr. Bachchan, a monumental Bollywood legend of indisputable seriousness. (Andy Webster) 79th ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: FEATURES AND ANIMATION (No rating, 137 minutes) This grab bag of 5 live-action shorts and 10 animated shorts is heavy on production values but light on true idiosyncrasy, much less daring. The best of the bunch are the animated short film The Danish Poet, with the actress Liv Ullmann narrating the story of an accidental meeting between an obscure poet and a famous writer that ultimately produced a child, and the live-action Eramos Pocos (One Too Many), in which a husband deals with his wifes sudden disappearance by convincing his mother-in-law to become his maid. (Matt Zoller Seitz) VENUS (R, 91 minutes) A modest, diverting, touching tale of a young woman who attracts the interest -- avuncular and also erotic -- of an aging actor, played with effortless aplomb by the great Peter OToole. (Scott) * VOLVER (R, 121 minutes, in Spanish) Another keeper from Pedro Almodóvar, with Penélope Cruz -- as a resilient widow -- in her best role to date. (Scott) Film Series BELA TARR TRILOGY (Tonight through Sunday) The Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr makes dark, damp and moody dramas, usually set in bleak small towns where long takes and elaborate camera movements are used to unite the inarticulate characters in webs of lust and deceit. Three of his most critically celebrated films are based on the work of the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and all will be presented this weekend at the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn: Damnation (1988) today; the 450-minute Satantango(1994) on Saturday; and Mr. Tarrs most recent effort, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) on Sunday. Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100, www.bam.org; $10. (Dave Kehr) FILM COMMENT SELECTS (Tonight through Tuesday) Theres still quite a lot to see in the final days of this lively series of new films and revivals programmed by the editors of Film Comment magazine. Screening this afternoon and Sunday evening is Robert Aldrichs red-hot political thriller of 1977, Twilights Last Gleaming, in an uncut print from Mr. Aldrichs personal archives. Perhaps the most radical critique of Americas Vietnam policy in the English-speaking cinema, it remains unavailable on domestic DVD. Tomorrow brings two recent films by the great landscape filmmaker James Benning, Ten Skies (10 10-minute shots of shifting skies) and 13 Lakes (13 10-minute shots of lakes that reflect the landscape behind them). On Sunday and Monday, theres the United States premiere of These Encounters of Theirs, the final film collaboration by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and on Tuesday the series comes to an odd anticlimax with Paul Verhoevens highly commercial World War II drama Black Book. Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 875-5601, filmlinc.org; $10. (Kehr) PICTURES IN PRINT: LILLIAN ROSS AND THE MOVIES (Tonight through Wednesday) The New Yorker writer Lillian Ross has specialized in covering film-related subjects since the early 50s, when she profiled the director John Huston at work on The Red Badge of Courage in a series of articles that were later published as Picture. This tribute to Ms. Ross and her reportage begins tonight, appropriately, with a screening of Red Badge, introduced by Ms. Ross and followed by a discussion between her and Susan Morrison, an editor of The New Yorker. The program continues with Francis Ford Coppolas One from the Heart (tomorrow), Akira Kurosawas Ran (Sunday), Otto Premingers Anatomy of a Murder (Monday) and Richard Fleischers Boston Strangler(Wednesday). Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, (212) 708-9400, moma.org; $10. (Kehr) Pop Full reviews of recent concerts: nytimes.com/music. APOLLO SUNSHINE (Wednesday and Thursday) The tunefulness of folk-rock and the Beatles goes joyously off the rails in the songs of this Boston band, which tends to get more raucously enthusiastic somewhere around the second verse. Wednesday at 8 p.m., with Maplewood, Inouk and Vampire Weekend, at the Annex, 152 Orchard Street, between Stanton and Rivington Streets, Lower East Side, (212) 673-3410, theannexnyc.com; $8. Thursday at 9 p.m., with Self Righteous Brothers and Up the Empire, at Southpaw, 125 Fifth Avenue, near Sterling Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 230-0236, spsounds.com; $10. (Jon Pareles) THE BIRD AND THE BEE (Monday) This Los Angeles duo toys with two fashionable ideas: retro French pop glittering with electronics, and Sex and the City-style sexual conundrums, as the singer Inara George mulls the ways of noncommittal boyfriends and promises in a catwalk soprano -- to herself or a man, its never clear -- I would be so winning, so absolutely winning. Monday at 7:30 p.m., Joes Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555, joespub.com; $15. (Ben Sisario) BROADWAY BY THE YEAR: THE MUSICALS OF 1928 (Monday) The Cradle Will Rock, Hellzapoppin, The Boys From Syracuse and other shows from 1928 get the oh-what-a-time treatment in the latest installment of Town Halls series, with Christiane Noll, Sarah Uriarte Berry, Hugh Panaro and Barbara Walsh. At 8 p.m., 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 840-2824, the-townhall-nyc.org; $40 to $50. (Sisario) * JUDY COLLINS (Tonight and tomorrow night, and Tuesday through Thursday) What Ms. Collins brings to a song is perspective. You have the sense of a woman standing alone in the night air, gazing at a star and directing a beam of psychic energy into the cosmos. Or maybe she is the receiver of this cool, steady light; it cuts both ways. At 8:45 p.m., Café Carlyle, Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com; $100 cover at tables, $65 at the bar. (Stephen Holden) DALEK (Tuesday) Dalek is a hip-hop trio from Newark led by a rapper of the same name, who intones apocalyptic rhymes over noisy, atmospheric backing tracks. With Destructo Swarmbots, Alex Delivery and Psychic Paramount. At 8 p.m., Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, (212) 260-4700, mercuryloungenyc.com; $10. (Sisario) Baby Jane Dexter (Tonight and tomorrow night) The theme of addiction, of someone being pursued by all sorts of demons, runs through the intelligent but disturbing show by this singer, whose pop-gospel voice projects strength, solidity and a heartiness that runs counter to the songs images of people in thrall to fantasy. At 8, Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 206-0440, metropolitanroom.com; $25 cover, two-drink minimum. (Holden) ROB DICKINSON (Wednesday) In the 90s Mr. Dickinson led the Catherine Wheel, a British band that created a muscular, dramatic sweep with fogs of guitar noise. He has since refashioned himself as a cynical balladeer in the Warren Zevon mode, the kind who may or may not be sarcastic when saying that the secret to life is merely to smile and hang out with intelligent people. At 7 p.m., Luna Lounge, 361 Metropolitan Avenue, at Havemeyer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (866) 468-7619, lunalounge.com; $12 in advance, $14 at the door. (Sisario) THE DOUBLE (Tonight) Something is always intriguingly askew in the songs of this local band: jagged guitars, David Greenhills neurotic sing-speak vocals, the asymmetric gurglings of its Vox Continental organ. But the oblique lines come together in unexpected and sometimes hauntingly beautiful ways. Tonight the band will preview songs from a new album. At 7:30 and 10, Monkey Town, 58 North Third Street, between Kent and Wythe Avenues, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 384-1369, monkeytownhq.com; $8, with a $10 minimum. (Sisario) J. J. GREY AND MOFRO (Thursday) A singer and guitarist from Jacksonville, Fla., who grows organic vegetables when not on the road, J. J. Grey uses a rich, funky swamp blues to mourn the erosion of rural values and celebrate lifes most fundamental joys (Glory, glory hallelujah/Im alive and Im feeling fine). With Virginia Coalition. At 9 p.m., Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place, at 15th Street, Manhattan, (212) 777-6800, irvingplaza.com; $20. (Sisario) KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, DRAGONFORCE (Thursday) Killswitch Engage, from Massachusetts, churns those machine-gun metal guitars like the best of them, but also gets bravely mushy: Ill be waiting for the end of my broken heart, sings Howard Jones in a line that, were it not surrounded by biochemical noise, could have come from the wispiest emo boy. DragonForce, a six-man metal army from London, sounds like some combination of Iron Maiden and Yngwie Malmsteen on frantic fast-forward: all the chant-along major-key melodies and fretboard-tickling guitar solos of those 80s metal heroes are there, but sped up to an exhilarating (and comical) degree. With Chimaira and He Is Legend. At 6:45 p.m., Roseland, 239 West 52nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 777-6800, roselandballroom.com; $26 in advance, $30 at the door. (Sisario) * LINCOLN CENTERS AMERICAN SONGBOOK (Tonight and tomorrow night) Having expanded greatly from its origins as a home for the midcentury pantheon of Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and the like, this series ends its ninth season with two young women whose programs exemplify its growth. Tonight is Neko Case, whose supple, powerful alto is just as eloquent in spunky indie-rock or the most somber country. Tomorrow the ever-classy Jane Monheit sings standards. Tonight at 8:30 and 10:30, and tomorrow night at 8:30, Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; sold out. (Sisario) JOHN MAYER (Wednesday) When recently crowned one of the 20 new guitar gods by Rolling Stone, this 29-year-old from Bridgeport, Conn., told the magazine, I want my guitar to sound like Stings voice -- thick, on the bottom. He might have added elegant like Eric Clapton and nimbly funky like Curtis Mayfield. After some smooth if colorless hits early in his career, Mr. Mayer has pushed himself to develop his every musical muscle, and his latest album, Continuum (Columbia), is solid and deceptively easygoing, with worries about aging and the powerlessness of youth. At 8 p.m., Madison Square Garden, (212) 307-7171, thegarden.com; $45 and $55. (Sisario) * MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE (Tonight) The first emo band to embrace the bombast and drama of the rock opera, this New Jersey five-piece mingles fist-pumping stadium rock with sickly, Brechtian theatrics on its album The Black Parade (Reprise). It follows a tradition laid out by Green Day, Marilyn Manson and Pink Floyd, but does those bands one better by scoring a cameo from Liza Minnelli. With Rise Against. At 8, Nassau Coliseum, 1255 Hempstead Turnpike, Uniondale, N.Y., (631) 888-9000, nassaucoliseum.com; $27.25. (Sisario) EL PELE (Tonight) This Gypsy singer from Córdoba, Spain, best known for his recordings in the 1980s with Vicente Amigo, makes his American debut as part of the New York Flamenco Festival. At 8, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, (212) 279-4200, worldmusicinstitute.org; $42 and $50. (Sisario) * ELVIS PERKINS (Thursday) Having firmly established himself on the singer-songwriter circuit with a discursive acoustic style derived from groups like Clem Snide, Mr. Perkins has finally released his bittersweet and beautiful debut album, Ash Wednesday (XL). He began it in 2002, a decade after his father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS, and a year after his mother, the fashion photographer Berry Berenson Perkins, perished on Sept. 11 in one of the planes that was crashed into the World Trade Center. At 9:30 p.m., Joes Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555, joespub.com; sold out. (Sisario) EL PERRO DEL MAR (Thursday) The words be-bop-a-lula have never been sung with such plaintive fragility as when cooed by Sarah Assbring, a multitasking Swedish singer who records as El Perro del Mar. Her self-titled new album is a sweet and meticulous girl-group production for the Bjork age, with sha-la-la choruses echoing eerily as Ms. Assbring murmurs, This loneliness aint pretty no more. She begins her first United States tour at the Bowery Ballroom, with Marissa Nadler and Chris Garneau opening the show. At 8 p.m., 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2111, boweryballroom.com; $15 in advance, $18 at the door. (Sisario) IKE REILLY ASSASSINATION (Thursday) An eloquent wiseguy whose songs evoke Bob Dylan and Paul Westerberg, Mr. Reilly, a former bellhop and gravedigger from Chicago, has the kind of high-energy, hook-heavy folk-rock sound that turns every head in a bar, while his nasal vocals are unsparingly sardonic: The friends that you rely on are the train tracks that you lie on. At 9 p.m., Mo Pitkins, 34 Avenue A, near Third Street, East Village, (212) 777-5660, mopitkins.com; $15. (Sisario) SOWETO GOSPEL CHOIR (Tonight) Gospel music and traditional South African harmonies and rhythms have found common ground and hybrid possibilities since Christian missionaries arrived in South Africa in the 19th century. This 26-member choir carries the fusion toward jubilation, performing traditional songs (and Mbube, the Zulu song better known as The Lion Sleeps Tonight), alongside gospel messages. At 10, Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; sold out. (Pareles) SPARKLEHORSE (Wednesday) Sunny, Beatlesesque melodies have to bubble through a melancholic film of entropy and electronic fuzz in the songs of Sparklehorses Mark Linkous, a talented and troubled songwriter from Richmond, Va., whose languid fantasies have an endearing tendency to include horses, metaphorical and otherwise. With Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter. At 8 p.m., Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, (212) 533-2111, bowerypresents.com; $22. (Sisario) * Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap (Tonight and tomorrow night) The style of this mother-son team is minimalist. Where conventional voice-and-piano duos follow a formula in which the music swells at dramatic moments, Ms. Stewart and Mr. Charlap use pauses, silences, and hushed moments to bring out the interior lives of songs. At 9 and 11:30, Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, Manhattan, (212) 419-9331, algonquinhotel.com; $60 cover; $65 dinner charge at 9; $25 minimum at 11:30. (Holden) TIBET HOUSE BENEFIT (Monday) The 17th annual concert for Tibet House, an organization in New York that has among its aims housing a library and art collection for eventual repatriation, features Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Sigur Ros, Ray Davies, Deborah Harry, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe and Ben Harper. At 7:30 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $30 to $85. (Sisario) * TRANS AM, ONEIDA (Tomorrow) Long live weird rock. As part of the Knitting Factorys strangely underhyped 20th-anniversary celebration (not to be confused with the Town Hall show that invokes the clubs name), the Chicago band Trans Am, which plays tightly coiled, retro-futuristic electronic rock like a band stuck in the light matrix of Tron, plays two sets with Brooklyns beloved Oneida, whose drums, keyboards and guitar converge into powerful, pulsating drones. At 6:45 and 10:30 p.m., Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, TriBeCa, (212) 219-3132, knittingfactory.com; $13 in advance, $15 at the door. (Sisario) YOUNG LOVE (Wednesday) Dan Keyes, the skinny cherub who records as Young Love, is the latest indie rocker in the wake of the Killers to discover the dance floor. His debut, Too Young to Fight It (Island), enthusiastically follows a familiar if still fruitful formula: chunky guitar riffs plus kitschy synthesizers, high-adrenaline beats and lyrics like If you get the chance/You must dance, dance, dance. At 7:30 p.m., Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2111, boweryballroom.com; $13. (Sisario) Jazz Full reviews of recent jazz concerts: nytimes.com/music. GERI ALLEN TRIO (Wednesday) Timeless Portraits and Dreams (Telarc) showcases Geri Allens sleek pianism in a number of settings, including one with a vocal chorus. She revisits some of that material in a trio with her longtime associate Darryl Hall on bass and the venerable Jimmy Cobb on drums. At 8:30 p.m., Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $44. (Nate Chinen) BROOKLYN QAWWALI PARTY (Tomorrow) The Sufi devotional music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan provides a repertory mandate for this ensemble. Faithful to its source mainly in terms of exuberance, the group creates a storm of percussion, horns, harmonium and guitars. At 9:30 p.m., Joes Pub at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, East Village, (212) 539-8778, joespub.com; cover, $12, with a two-drink minimum. (Chinen) TAYLOR HO BYNUM AND TOMAS FUJIWARA (Tuesday) On True Events (482 Music), a scintillating album due out next week, Mr. Bynum, a cornetist, and Mr. Fujiwara, a drummer, engage in a duologue crackling with improvisational energy but guided by compositional prescription. At 8 p.m., the Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) * FRANK CARLBERG (Tonight) Mr. Carlberg is a pianist and composer enamored of language, as he demonstrates on his most recent album, State of the Union (Fresh Sound New Talent). For the premiere of The American Dream, a 12-part song cycle based on the poetry of Robert Creeley, Mr. Carlberg enlists his gifted regular collaborators: Christine Correa on vocals, Chris Cheek on tenor saxophone, John Hebert on bass and Michael Sarin on drums. At 7 p.m., Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Flatiron district, (212) 620-5000, Ext. 344, rmanyc.org; $20. (Chinen) * MARILYN CRISPELL TRIO (Tuesday through Thursday) Marilyn Crispell, a pianist equally celebrated for aggressive atonality and delicate lyricism, regroups with the bassist Mark Helias and the drummer Paul Motian, the same team as on her exquisite album Storyteller (ECM), from a few years ago. (Through March 4.) At 9 and 11 p.m., Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, West Village, (212) 255-4037, villagevanguard.com; cover, $20, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) CURHA-CHESTRA (Tonight) Curtis Hasselbring, a mischievous trombonist, leads an experimental quintet with Briggan Krauss on baritone saxophone, Brandon Seabrook on guitar and banjo, Trevor Dunn on bass and Ches Smith on drums. In a preceding set, at 8, Mr. Smith performs duets with Andrea Parkins on accordion. At 10, the Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) LIBERTY ELLMAN (Tomorrow) Mr. Ellman, a guitarist and composer with a taste for rhythmic convolutions, leads a dynamic trio with Stephan Crump on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. At midnight, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $10, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) THE FOUR BAGS (Sunday) The instrumental palette of the Four Bags -- Brian Drye on trombone, Jacob Garchik on accordion, Sean Moran on guitar and Mike McGinnis on reeds -- suggests a contemporary species of chamber jazz. For this performance, part of the Brooklyn Next Festival, they welcome a guest vocalist, Judith Berkson. At 8 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) THE FRINGE + ZARTH (Tonight) The Fringe, a Boston institution for more than 30 years, conjoins the tenor saxophonist George Garzone, the drummer Bob Gulloti and the bassist John Lockwood in unscripted improvisation. Here the group takes on a second bassist, Garth Stevenson, and drummer, Ziv Ravitz. At 9 and 10:30, Tea Lounge, 837 Union Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, Park Slope, (718) 789-2762; no cover. (Chinen) JAVON JACKSON (Tonight through Sunday night) Mr. Jackson, a tenor saxophonist with a relaxed, rhythmic approach, has lately favored backbeat-girded groove. He plays here with the right musicians for it: Dr. Lonnie Smith on organ, David Gilmore on guitar, Kenny Davis on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. At 7:30 and 9:30, with an 11:30 set tonight and tomorrow, Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232; cover, $30; $25 on Sunday. (Chinen) * JAZZ AND ART (Tonight and tomorrow night) The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Museum of Modern Art combined resources to produce this high-minded and ambitious concert. Its centerpiece will be Portrait in Seven Shades, a suite by the orchestra member and woodwind player Ted Nash, with sections directly inspired by pieces from the museums collection. At 8, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, (212) 721-6500, jalc.org; $30 to $120. (Chinen) SEAN JONES (Monday) Mr. Jones is a trumpeter with an incisive tone and a firm grasp of jazz traditions. In his group with the pianist Orrin Evans, he spikes the post-bop punch with funk and soul. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $20. (Chinen) * JUILLIARD JAZZ TRIBUTE TO JAZZ LEGENDS (Tuesday) The Juilliard School presents five luminaries -- the trumpeters Clark Terry and Joe Wilder, the saxophonists James Moody and Frank Wess, and the pianist Dr. Billy Taylor -- with its Presidents Medal, and with custom-fitted arrangements to perform with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra. Joining in celebration are the singer Audra McDonald, the tenor saxophonist Benny Golson and the bassist Christian McBride. At 8 p.m., Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 155 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, juilliard.edu; $25 and $50. (Chinen) RALPH LALAMA (Tonight and tomorrow night) Though best known for his work in big bands, the tenor saxophonist Ralph Lalama has no problem applying his nimble style to smaller settings; his quartet here includes the pianist Dave Lalama, his brother. At 8, 10 and midnight, Sweet Rhythm, 88 Seventh Avenue South, at Bleecker Street, West Village, (212) 255-3626; cover, $20, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) IVAN LINS/TRIO DA PAZ (Tuesday through Thursday) Mr. Lins, a prolific Brazilian singer and composer, headlines this engagement; Trio da Paz, consisting of Romero Lubambo on guitar, Nilson Matta on bass and Duduka da Fonseca on drums, plays an effervescent opening set. (Through March 4.) At 8 and 10:30 p.m., Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, West Village, (212) 475-8592; bluenote.net; cover, $37.50 at tables, $25 at the bar, with a $5 minimum. (Chinen) BILL McHENRY-ETHAN IVERSON QUARTET (Wednesday) Bill McHenry, an introspective yet surefooted tenor saxophonist, and Ethan Iverson, a smartly prickly pianist, jointly lead this sharp ensemble, with Ben Street on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $20. (Chinen) OLLYS BEACHES (Tonight and tomorrow night) The Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen leads this groove-focused band with the keyboardist Jason Lindner, the bassist Meshell Ndegeocello and the drummer Adam Deitch. At 9 and 10:30, Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, at Spring Street, South Village, (212) 242-1063, jazzgallery.org; cover, $15. (Chinen) OM/SHALOM (Monday) The drummer Michael Stephans leads this project, an attempt to link the meditative aspects of Hebrew liturgical music with the resourceful drama of modern jazz. He has strong collaborators for the task, including David Liebman and Benny Maupin on reeds and Scott Colley on bass. At 8 and 10:30 p.m., Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, West Village, (212) 475-8592, bluenote.net; cover, $15 at tables, $10 at the bar, with a $5 minimum. (Chinen) OPEN LOOSE (Tomorrow) Together with the tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby and the drummer Tom Rainey, Mark Helias, a bassist and composer, walks a line between form and freedom, confirming that there can be rigor in both. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, West Village, (212) 989-9319, corneliastreetcafe.com; cover, $10, with a one-drink minimum. (Chinen) * PIANISTS PLAY FOR LARRY (Monday) A benefit for the pianist Larry Willis, who recently lost his home to a fire; among the evenings distinguished guests are Randy Weston, Geri Allen, Don Friedman, Bertha Hope and Jean-Michel Pilc. At 7 p.m., St. Peters Lutheran Church, 619 Lexington Avenue, at 54th Street, (212) 642-5277; suggested donation, $20. (Chinen) REV-ELATION (Tuesday through Thursday) Milt Jackson, who died in 1999, was one of the top vibraphonists in the history of jazz. Here, as on the album Rev-Elation (Sharp Nine), he receives an appropriately boppish tribute from the mallet virtuoso Joe Locke, the pianist Mike LeDonne, the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Mickey Roker. (Through March 4.) At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Dizzys Club Coca-Cola, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, (212) 258-9595, jalc.org; cover, $30, with a minimum of $10 at tables, $5 at the bar. (Chinen) JIMMY SCOTT (Tonight through Sunday night) Mr. Scotts piercing singing voice and achingly emotional style are rightfully enshrined in the annals of songbook interpretation. At 8:30 and 10:30, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $35, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) * SCULPTURED SOUNDS MUSIC FESTIVAL (Sunday) This concert series organized by the bassist Reggie Workman concludes with performances by the African-American Legacy Project, a talent-loaded orchestra and chorus conducted by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver; the Matt Garrison Trio, led by Mr. Garrison, a fearsomely proficient bassist; and Sojourner, a string quartet that includes Sioka Workman, Mr. Workmans daughter, on cello. At 7 p.m., St. Peters Lutheran Church, 619 Lexington Avenue, at 54th Street, (212) 642-5277, sculpturedsounds.com; suggested donation, $20. (Chinen) EDWARD SIMON TRIO (Thursday) On his fine recent album, Unicity (Cam Jazz), the pianist Edward Simon explores a sensitive but adventurous trio dynamic with the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade, who appear here. (Through March 4.) At 8:30 and 10:30 p.m., Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $30, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) JAMES SPAULDING QUARTET (Tonight and tomorrow) James Spaulding is a flutist and alto saxophonist with a driving sense of rhythm, equally comfortable straining against tonality or settling into a hard-bop mode. At 8, 10 and 11:30, Smoke, 2751 Broadway, at 106th Street, (212) 864-6662, smokejazz.com; cover, $25. (Chinen) LOREN STILLMAN (Thursday) Trio Alto Volume One (Steeplechase), a recent album by the alto saxophonist Loren Stillman, suggests an explorer with one foot planted in tradition and the other caught in midstride. Here Mr. Stillman digs in with the bassist John Hebert and the drummer Ted Poor. At 9 p.m., BAR4, 444 Seventh Avenue, at 15th Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 832-9800, bar4.net; cover, $5. (Chinen) MARTIN WIND QUARTET (Tonight and tomorrow) Martin Wind, a versatile bassist, convenes an ensemble featuring the saxophonist Scott Robinson, the pianist Bill Cunliffe and the drummer Greg Hutchinson. At 8 and 9:45 p.m., Kitano Hotel, 66 Park Avenue, at 38th Street, (212) 885-7119, kitano.com; cover, $20, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) Classical Full reviews of recent music performances: nytimes.com/music. Opera * EUGENE ONEGIN (Tomorrow and Wednesday) The dynamic conductor Valery Gergiev and the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky bring stylistic authority to the Metropolitan Operas revival of its 1997 production of Tchaikovskys Eugene Onegin. Mr. Hvorostovsky is riveting in the title role, singing with earthy richness and fully conveying this worldly, entitled and dashing young mans aloofness. The surprises come from the soprano Renée Fleming, in her first Russian role at the Met, who gives a vocally exquisite and vulnerable portrayal of Tatiana, and the tenor Ramón Vargas, a bel canto specialist, who makes an ardent and endearing Lenski. You will seldom see better acting in opera. Tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; sold out. (Anthony Tommasini) IPHIGÉNIE EN AULIDE (Tonight) The opera productions at the Juilliard School have generally been thoughtfully staged and vocally polished. The school is also judicious in its repertory choices. Iphigénie en Aulide has much to recommend it, as Glucks dramatically focused and supremely lyrical operas invariably do. The cast for Robin Guarinos production includes Tharanga Goonetilleke in the title role, with Paul LaRosa as Agamemnon, Faith Sherman as Clytemnestra and Paul Appleby as Achille, with Ari Pelto conducting. At 8, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Juilliard School, 155 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 769-7406, juilliard.edu; free. (Allan Kozinn) * LOST HIGHWAY (Tonight and tomorrow night) The Miller Theater and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music present the United States premiere of Lost Highway by Olga Neuwirth, an opera based on the David Lynch film. The moody score includes instrumentalists, singers, actors, as well as high-tech effects. Timothy Weiss conducts the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and an all-student cast. At 8, Miller Theater, Broadway at 116th Street, Morningside Heights, (212) 854-7799, millertheater.com; $35; $21 for students. (Vivien Schweitzer) DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG (Thursday) Wagners great celebration of German music returns with James Levine conducting James Morris, Johan Botha and Hei-Kyung Hong. At 6 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $15 to $275. (Bernard Holland) SIMON BOCCANEGRA (Tonight and Tuesday night) A strong cast led by Angela Gheorghiu, Thomas Hampson, Ferruccio Furlanetti and Marcello Giordani and conducted by a fairly volcanic conductor named Fabio Luisi continues the Mets run of this dark, convoluted and often beautiful opera. At 8, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $110 to $295 tickets remaining tonight; $15 to $275 on Tuesday. (Holland) THÉRÈSE RAQUIN (Tonight through Sunday) Six years after its premiere, this work by Tobias Picker is finally having its first New York performances, by the Dicapo Opera, in a reduced version for chamber orchestra. But opera tends to romanticize its subjects, and Mr. Pickers librettist, Gene Scheer, certainly does, turning the stultifying bourgeois characters that surround Thérèse into heart-of-gold stereotypes. Still, the vocal writing is grateful, and the story is reasonably compelling: the best moment is the reappearance of Camille, the murdered husband, as a ghost. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8, Sunday at 4 p.m., Dicapo Opera Theater, 184 East 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 288-9438, dicapo.com; $47.50. (Anne Midgette) DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE (Tomorrow) The revival of Julie Taymors production of Mozarts Zauberflöte continues at the Met, complete with the magical puppets and stage effects that made it an audience hit when it opened in 2004. James Levine conducts a cast that includes Lisa Milne as Pamina, Cornelia Götz as Queen of the Night, Michael Schade as Pamino, Rodion Pogossov as Papageno, Eike Wilm Schulte as the Speaker, and Vitalij Kowaljow as Sarastro. At 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $150 to $295 tickets remaining. (Schweitzer) Classical Music AMEDEO MODIGLIANI QUARTET (Tuesday) This quartet, formed in 2003 by students at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, won the 2006 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and the 2005 Young Concert Artists European Auditions in Paris. For their New York debut on Tuesday, they will perform Wolfs Italian Serenade, Ravels Quartet and Beethovens Quartet in C (Op. 59, No. 3). At 7:30 p.m., Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $25 and $35. (Schweitzer) PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI (Tomorrow) This splendid young Polish pianist plays the big hall at Carnegie (a k a Stern Auditorium). The music is by Beethoven and Szymanowski. At 8 p.m., (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $23 to $76. (Holland) CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER (Tonight and Sunday) This admirable mini-festival called An English Musical Renaissance intensely focuses on an area of music thats only passingly familiar to most concertgoers: the first decades of the 20th century, when English composers were striving to find a distinctive voice. The series closes this weekend with a concert tonight featuring songs performed by Susanne Mentzer and works by Benjamin Dale, Frederick Delius and Frank Bridge and, on Sunday, with William Waltons early Piano Quartet in D minor and a riper Piano Quintet by the mature Edward Elgar. Tonight at 8 and Sunday at 5 p.m., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 875-5788, chambermusicsociety.org; $28 to $50. (Midgette) JOYCE DiDONATO (Thursday) Maybe its Carmen. Spain and mezzo-sopranos seem to have a particular affinity. Joyce DiDonato recently released an album called ¡Pasión! and is showing more Spanish material at her recital this week with Julius Drake, in which she will sing Granados, Falla and Montsalvatge, as well as songs by Bizet and Rossinis Giovanna dArco. At 7:30 p.m., Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $34. (Midgette) JUILLIARD STRING QUARTET (Thursday) The Juilliard Quartet is celebrating its 60th anniversary with an all-Mozart program. The group has another excuse to celebrate: the Juilliard Schools recent acquisition of Mozart manuscripts. The program includes the Quartets in E flat (K. 428), D minor (K. 421) and C (K. 465). At 8 p.m., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 769-7406, juilliard.edu; free, but tickets are required. (Kozinn) SIMONE KERMES AND THE VENICE BAROQUE ORCHESTRA (Tuesday) Having just played a concert of (mostly) Vivaldi Concertos at Zankel Hall, the Venice Baroque Orchestra moves to Weill Recital Hall for a program of chamber music and vocal works, with Vivaldi again dominating, but with works by Uccellini and Corelli as well. The soloist is Simone Kermes, a German soprano who specializes in Baroque music. At 7:30 p.m., Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $40. (Kozinn) JAIME LAREDO, LEON FLEISHER (Thursday) Schubert wrote meltingly for the violin, and melodiously for just about any instrument, talents demonstrated in four of his Sonatas for Violin and Piano from 1816 and 1817. In a recital devoted to the works, the singing violin lines, taken by Jaime Laredo, will be balanced out by the masterly pianist Leon Fleisher. At 7:30 p.m., Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $40 to $54. (Midgette) NEW WORLD SYMPHONY (Tuesday and Wednesday) Michael Tilson Thomas has done wonders with this Florida-based national youth orchestra, and he will show off its strengths (ideally) with an all-Shostakovich program that includes the Cello Concerto No. 2, with Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist. In a Discovery program on Wednesday, Mr. Thomas offers insights into Shostakovichs Fifth Symphony, which the orchestra performs again. At 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $40 to $129 on Tuesday; $10 to $35 on Wednesday. (Kozinn) NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC (Tonight, tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday) Tonight and tomorrow, Lorin Maazel leads a program highlighting members of the Philharmonic. Robert Langevin, the flutist, and Nancy Allen, the harpist, perform Mozarts Concerto for Flute and Harp. Philip Myers, Erik Ralske, R. Allen Spanjer and Howard Wall play Schumanns tricky Konzertstück for Four Horns. Joseph Alessi plays Melinda Wagners Trombone Concerto, which received its premiere yesterday. Next week, Kurt Masur, the former music director of the Philharmonic, leads Mendelssohns Hebrides Overture; Sibeliuss Violin Concerto, with the fine young violinist Sergey Khachatryan as soloist; and Tchaikovskys Symphony No. 6. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8, Wednesday and Thursday nights at 7:3o, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nyphil.org; $28 to $96. (Schweitzer) NEW YORK YOUTH SYMPHONY (Sunday) Paul Haas leads this orchestra of talented young musicians -- their ages range from 12 to 22 -- in a program that includes the Brahms Symphony No. 4; the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations, with Efe Baltacigil as the cello soloist; and the premiere of a new work, Tapuat, by Paul Fowler. At 2 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $7 to $55. (Kozinn) GARRICK OHLSSON (Sunday) Mr. Ohlsson continues his admirable Beethoven series in a program that includes the early C Sonata and Liszts arrangement of the Fourth Symphony. At 2 p.m., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $50. (Holland) PEOPLES COMMISSIONING FUND CONCERT/BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS (Thursday) However democratic the process of commissioning music, the idea of doing so with a fund gathered from donations of as little as $5 is appealing, and Bang on a Cans annual concert can be counted on to generate electricity and excitement. The main focus this year may not be the three hot young composers Lukas Ligeti, Joshua Penman and Stefan Weisman, but a hot established one, Meredith Monk, who will be a guest and join in performances of five works of her own. At 8 p.m., Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan, (212) 501-3330, kaufman-center.org; $20 in advance; $25 at the door. (Midgette) PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA (Thursday) The charismatic pianist Martha Argerich is soloist in Beethovens Second Piano Concerto. Charles Dutoit conducts Sibelius and Rimsky-Korsakov crowd-pleasers. No wonder this concert is sold out. At 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org. (Holland) Dance Full reviews of recent performances: nytimes.com/dance. DANCE CONVERSATIONS @ THE FLEA (Tuesday) Featured choreographers in this installment of the dance and talk showcase are Alethea Adsitt, Renée Archibald, Ashley A. Friend and Sahar Javedani. The moderator is Karen Bernard. At 7 p.m., Flea Theater, 41 White Street, between Church Street and Broadway, TriBeCa, (212) 645-6462, theflea.org; free. (Jennifer Dunning) DEDICATED TO DUNHAM (Sunday) Produced by Community Works and the New Heritage Theater Group, this four-hour program includes performances, workshops and symposiums that celebrate the life and legacy of Katherine Dunham. At 1 p.m., Kaufmann and Linder Theaters, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, (212) 769-5315, amnh.org/blackhistory; free with museum admission. (Dunning) ANTHONY FERRO AND JAMES SUTTON: SOLO DANCES (Tonight and tomorrow night) Between them, Mr. Ferro and Mr. Sutton have an astonishing range of performance and teaching credentials. Their dances are set to music by Irwin Bazelon and Bach and an autobiographical text by Mr. Ferro. Tonight at 9, tomorrow night at 8, Merce Cunningham Studio, 55 Bethune Street, at Washington Street, West Village, ferrodance@aol.com; $20; $15 for students and 65+. (Dunning) * THE FORSYTHE COMPANY (Wednesday and Thursday) William Forsythe confronts the horror and hypocrisy of war -- not a popular dance topic, bless his heart -- in his new Three Atmospheric Studies, a piece inspired by the imagery and effects of conflict in the Middle East. Before Thursdays performance, Mr. Forsythe will speak about the work at the BAM Rose Cinemas. (Through March 3.) Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, talk at 6 and performance at 7:30; Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100 ; $20 to $70; $8 for Mr. Forsythes talk. (Dunning) THE 4 TANGO SEASONS (Tonight through Sunday, and Thursday) The show explores natures cycles as seen in a man and a woman in love. (Through April 1.) Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 3 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 4 p.m., Thursday at 8 p.m., Thalia Spanish Theater, 41-17 Greenpoint Avenue, Sunnyside, Queens, (718) 729-3880, thaliatheatre.org; $30; $27 for students and 65+; all tickets $25 tonight and Thursday. (Dunning) KO-RYO DANCE THEATER (Tonight through Sunday) Sunwha Chungs Bi-Sang: Ascending Timeless is a suite of seven dances expressing a womans changes in her way of life as she makes a transition between her original culture and a new one. At 8 p.m., Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, (212) 334-7479, joyce.org; $20; $15 for students and 65+; $10 for children in fifth grade and younger. (Jack Anderson) * Movement Research at the Judson Church (Monday) An artist in residence, Milka Djordjevich, helps to kick off Movement Researchs winter/spring 2007 series, the first under the directors Barbara Bryan and Kim Doelger. New leadership always brings new direction, but its hard to imagine theyll change this popular program. At 8 p.m., 55 Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, (212) 598-0551, movementresearch.org; free. (Claudia La Rocco) * NEW YORK CITY BALLET (Tonight through Sunday) The company closes its winter season this weekend with For the Fun of It (Jerome Robbinss Circus Polka, George Balanchines Walpurgisnacht Ballet, Peter Martinss Jeu de Cartes and the Balanchine-Robbins Firebird), tonight and Sunday afternoon, and A Banquet of Dance (Balanchines Raymonda Variations, Robbinss Afternoon of a Faun and Antique Epigraphs, and Christopher Wheeldons Evenfall), tomorrow afternoon and tomorrow evening. Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-5570, nycballet.com; $20 to $95. (Dunning) * NEW YORK FLAMENCO FESTIVAL (Tomorrow) The closing program, Malaga en Flamenco, features 20 or so of the regions best dancers and singers, among them Rocio Bazán. The evening will include a wide range of folkloric and ancient forms, among them malagueñas, tangos and saetas. At 8 p.m. (with a preconcert talk on flamenco dance at 7 p.m.), Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, (212) 279-4200, worldmusicinstitute.org; $42 and $50. (Dunning) 92ND STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE FESTIVAL (Tomorrow, Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday) Claire Porter/Portables performs tomorrow and Sunday in Words Away From Home. Next week Joe Chvala and the Flying Foot Forum, a percussive-dance group from Minneapolis-St. Paul, creates rhythmic patterns with taps, found objects and vocalizing. (Through March 18.) Claire Porter/Portables, tomorrow at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m.; Joe Chvala and the Flying Foot Forum, Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street, Clinton, (212) 415-5500, 92y.org/Harkness Festival; $20; $10 for students and 65+. (Dunning) OYU ORO: AFRO-CUBAN FOLKLORE EXPERIMENTAL DANCE ENSEMBLE (Tonight through Sunday) This company will present Palenque, which incorporates dances from both African and Cuban cultures. Tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30, Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., La MaMa E.T.C., 74A East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 475-7710, lamama.org; $20; $15 for students. (Dunning) AMY PIVAR/ANN AND ALEXX MAKE DANCES (Thursday) Ms. Pivar, known for brainy, powerfully emotional choreography, teams up here with the mezzo-soprano Elaine Valby and the composer-performers Paula M. Kimper and Gilda Lyons for the latest installment in a five-year collaboration. Musical texts include poetry by Paul Bowles and a setting in Hebrew of the 23rd Psalm. Sharing the program are Alexandra Shilling and Ann Robideaux, who create a surreal landscape in their new Long Night. (Through March 3.) Thursday at 8 p.m., Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway, at Chambers Street, TriBeCa, (212) 279-4200 and dnadance.org; $17. (Dunning) Anna Sperber (Thursday through Saturday) In her first full-length show at Dance Theater Workshop, Ms. Sperber investigates the space between resistance and release, as an all-female cast navigates a walled-in landscape in The Tiger Situation. At 7:30 p.m., 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 924-0077, dtw.org; $12 and $20. (La Rocco) TRINITY IRISH DANCE COMPANY (Tonight and Sunday) This large Irish-American company, which performs in two theaters in the New York region this weekend, is known for its progressive (read newfangled) Irish dancing to accompaniment on guitar, uilleann pipes and drums. Tonight at 8, Tilles Center, C. W. Post Campus, Route 25A, Brookville, N.Y., (516) 299-3100, tillescenter.org; $40 to $65; $37 to $62 for 65+. Sunday at 2 p.m., Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, one block from the junction of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues, Flatbush, (718) 951-4500, brooklyncenteronline.org; $15 to $30. (Dunning) VISION DANCE MUSIC SERIES (Tonight and tomorrow) The focus of this festival is collaborations between dancers and jazz musicians. The eight pairs include Carmen de Lavallade and Todd Nicholson, and Treva Offutt and Jean-Baptiste Bocle. At 7:30 p.m., Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 696-6681, visionfestival.org; $25. (Dunning) WORKS & PROCESS: SEAN CURRAN (Sunday and Monday) Mr. Curran will discuss new and recent choreography, set to music by Janacek, Meredith Monk and Chris Lancaster. Excerpts will be performed by his dancers. Sunday and Monday at 7:30 p.m., Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3587, worksandprocess.org; $24; $20 for 65+; $15 for students. (Dunning) Chantal Yzermans/Radical Low (Thursday through Saturday) Catch the United States premiere of the Belgian choreographer Chantal Yzermanss newest work, ONR-I, allegory of night. Created by Ms. Yzermans in 2002, Radical Low employs custom software created by the artists to probe the places where dance and technology meet. In ONR-I, this exploration is in the service of mythology, some of it as ancient as the technology is new. At 8:30 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212) 674-8194; $15. (La Rocco) Art Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums * American Folk Art Museum: MARTíN RAMíREZ, through April 29. Ramírez, a Mexican peasant who immigrated to Northern California and died there at 68 in 1963, spent the last 32 years of his life in a mental hospital, making some of the greatest art of the last century. He had his own way with materials and color and an unforgettable cast of characters (most notably, a mounted caballero and a levitating Madonna crowned like the Statue of Liberty.) But most of all, Ramírez had his own brand of pictorial space, established by rhythmic systems of parallel lines, both curved and straight, whose mesmerizing expansions and contractions simultaneously cosset and isolate his figures. This show should render null and void the distinction between insider and outsider art. 45 West 53rd Street, (212) 265-1040. (Roberta Smith) * American Museum of Natural History: GOLD, through Aug. 19. This astounding array of art, artifacts and natural samples -- larded with fascinating facts and tales -- ranges from prehistoric times to the present. Stops along the way include pre-Columbian empires, sunken treasure, Bangladesh dowry rituals and the moon landing. It turns out that gold comes from the earth in forms as beautiful as anything man has thought to do with it. You are certain to emerge with mind boggled and eyes dazzled. Central Park West and 79th Street, (212) 769-5100, amnh.org. (Smith) * Asia Society: Glass, Gilding, and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224-642 A.D.), through May 20. This glinting, glowing show is a reduction of a much larger Paris exhibition that included material from Iranian museums impossible to bring to the United States. But with some 70 examples of silver, glass and silk textile fragments, many from European museums, it is still substantial and the first major exhibition of its kind in this part of the world for more than 30 years. For about four centuries, the Sasanians ruled territory stretching from present-day Iran and Iraq to North Africa. Their only rivals were Rome, Byzantium and, at the very end, the early Islamic dynasties. Much of their surviving art is a sterling example of empire in action. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 288-6400. (Holland Cotter) * Grey Art Gallery: Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, through March 31. The artist Wallace Berman (1926-76) may ring only a faint bell to many New Yorkers, but he was a central, charismatic figure in an underground of West Coast artists and poets in the 1950s and 60s. A collagist, poet, photographer and the publisher of an influential journal, Semina, he inspired others to make art too, sparking hidden aptitude in startling places. After meeting him, drifters, movie stars, ex-marines and petty criminals found themselves starting to paint and write. And a traveling love company of them has come to Grey Art Gallery, trailing dreams, delusions and marijuana clouds. New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780. (Cotter) Guggenheim Museum: Family Pictures, through April 16. This show sounds ripe with possibilities. The results, however, are more mixed. The exhibition is drawn from the museums collection, which explains some of its exclusions and limitations. Many artists you associate with contemporary photography and the family are not in attendance: Richard Bellingham, Tina Barney, Malerie Marder. There is also a sense of false advertising in the exhibitions title. The museums news release extends the exhibitions exploration into representation of families and children in contemporary art and video. Images of children, you quickly realize, can operate as a completely different genre. A good portion of the work falls under this rubric. Rineke Dijkstras Beach Portraits of adolescents posing awkwardly against stark seascape horizons are isolated (and isolating) images of children on the threshold of adulthood. You dont think about family when gazing at these photographs. Sally Mann is perhaps the best-known contemporary photographer of children, specifically her own. Ms. Mann, represented here by black-and-white photographs from the late 1980s and early 1990s of her ethereally gorgeous children (now grown), has been accused of everything from neglect to child abuse. The questions raised by her dual role as artist and mother, simultaneous protector and potential exploiter of the family, and her choice of family as the central focus of artistic practice, remain vitally interesting. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Martha Schwendener) International Center of Photography: Henri Cartier-Bressons Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932-46, through April 29. Arrived by way of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, this show has more than 300 of the prints the photographer glued into an album and toted to New York for curators at the Museum of Modern Art to cull. Captured by the Nazis, he had been presumed dead when the Modern planned his retrospective. Then he turned up alive -- the posthumous exhibition opened, with him in attendance, in 1947. The current exhibition reconstructs as best as possible the original layout of the scrapbook. Its an eye-straining affair, but it surveys the revolutionary work he shot in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Britain and France. His taste for uncanny detail linked him to Surrealism and Surrealist wit, but unlike many Surrealists, he remained committed to human values. Boys mug at his camera. Prostitutes swan. Their gazes equalize them with us. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Michael Kimmelman) International Center of Photography: Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot! through April 29. Munkacsi, who inspired Cartier-Bresson, was, by contrast, self-taught, a creature of his own devising. This is the most complete retrospective, with a thick catalog (not too well researched) and dozens of vintage prints from the 1920s through the early 60s. He favored scenes of daily life, absorbing avant-garde ideas about odd angles and abstract compositions. In 1928 he moved to Berlin and traveled the world on assignment to Brazil, Algeria and Egypt. Munkacsi was a stylist, and he made catchy images the only way he knew how, in a modernist mode, which, being an opportunistic form, could serve any master. (See above.) (Kimmelman) * The METropOlitan museum of art: ONE OF A KIND: THE STUDIO CRAFT MOVEMENT, through Sept. 3. Focusing on the postwar development of artist-craftsmen, this display of furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewelry and fiber includes funny, quirky, provocative and sometimes gorgeous things. Among its stars are a witty bust by the California funk ceramicist Robert Arneson (1920-92), portraying the mother of the 16th-century painter and printmaker Albrecht Durer, and Bonnie Seemans fetching ceramic coffeepot and tray, whose mock cabbage leaves and rhubarb stalks evoke the genteel tradition of 18th-century British and continental china, but can also be read as human rather than vegetative tissue. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Grace Glueck) * Morgan Library & Museum: Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, through April 8. This show is drawn entirely from an anonymous private collection. Despite the veil of secrecy, a couple of things are obvious: the collector had significant capital for investing in old masters and either an exceptional eye or a good adviser (or both). The works span more than 400 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, and include drawings in ink and pencil, watercolor, chalk and gouache. The earliest works come from a period when drawing wasnt an autonomous practice but was used as a form of exercise, to apply ones craft, to experiment and to make preliminary sketches for larger works. The best example -- and the most historically significant work here -- is a black chalk drawing, The Dead Christ (1529-35), by Agnolo Bronzino. With more than 90 drawings in the show, being a diligent observer quickly becomes exhausting. In which case, put down the guide, find a few drawings you like, and enjoy them while you can. After all, you dont know where they came from, where theyre going, or when youll see them again. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, morganlibrary.org. (Schwendener) Museum of Modern Art: Artistic Collaborations: 50 Years of Universal Limited Art Editions, through May 21. This exhibition marks the half-century milestone for Universal Limited Art Editions in West Islip, N.Y., and its association with the Museum of Modern Art: The museum has acquired one print from every edition made at Universal, more than 1,200 works by nearly 50 artists. Prints by 12 artists are in this show. Among them are lithographs by Jasper Johns, mostly from the 1960s, with his signature maps and flags. Robert Rauschenberg is represented primarily by lithographs from the 1960s that combine found images of figures like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson with the freehand scrawling associated with Abstract Expressionism. Its hard to fault an exhibition that features prints by masters like Mr. Johns and Mr. Rauschenberg. But given the somewhat precarious position of prints in the contemporary art world, the inclusion of younger artists would make a good argument that traditional printmaking is still relevant and holds possibilities for this generation. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Schwendener) * MOMA: Armando ReverÓn, through April 16. Unless you spotted his single smoke-puff of a painting at MoMA months ago, Armando Reverón probably means nothing to you. Why should he? The artist, who died in 1954, spent most of his life in a shack by the sea in his native Venezuela. Many of his contemporaries dismissed him as nuts. His white-on-white pictures are practically unphotographable. But chances are that if you visit this retrospective, youll find yourself thinking about him a lot. His art and his story are like few others, and so is the museums inspired installation: a single, long corridor with cabinetlike rooms of paintings on either side and, at the very end, against a sea-green wall, a life-size doll with giant bat wings floating overhead. (See above.) (Cotter) * National Academy Museum: HIGH TIMES, HARD TIMES: NEW YORK PAINTING, 1967-1975, through April 22. Organized under the auspices of International Curators Incorporated, this brave if confused exhibition is the first to tackle a neglected subject: New York painting during the period it was supposed to be dead. The shows 42 works by 37 artists reveal that, far from dead, painting was in fact in an uproar that was commensurate with the artistic, social and political turbulence of the times. The alternation between artists who remained loyal in their way to stretched canvas and those who abandoned it, which makes for clear installation, also tidies up history. The main problem is that the exhibition sticks too purposefully to the margins, mixing generations and levels of achievement and continuing the neglect of the main story. Too much of this work is as derivative now as it was then, and functions more as artifact than art. 1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 369-4880, nationalacademy.org. (Smith) Neuberger Museum of Art: FUGITIVE ARTIST: THE EARLY WORK OF RICHARD PRINCE, 1974-77, through June 24. This artist is one of the most elusive, perverse and sardonic of all of the important appropriation artists to emerge in the early 1980s, so perhaps it is not surprising that he has boycotted this exhibition of little-known early work, all from public and private collections. But that doesnt stop the 50 pieces on view from revealing his roots in 1970s Conceptual Art; his progress from generic to original and radical; or the depth and duration of his fascination with language, photography, print-making, the more banal forms of urban postwar Americana and a disconnected, decidedly male blankness. If anything, it increases his stature. Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y., (914) 251-6100, neuberger.org. (Smith) Galleries: Chelsea * Fredericks & Freiser: BAKER OVERSTREET: NEW PAINTINGS, through March 17. Like Keegan McHargue and Devendra Banhart, this young artist has a penchant for tribal motifs, which he flattens into symmetrical compositions and renders with an outsider roughness. The works in his debut show evoke the imagery of the space-ship-obsessed, self-taught artist Ionel Talpazan, as well as Alfred Jensen and Forrest Bess. Their notion of the visionary is both self conscious and familiar, but they are painted with energetic dispatch and a sure sense of scale, color and wit that encourages you to stay tuned. 536 West 24th Street, (212) 633-6555. (Smith) Last Chance * Ceres: Agents of Change: Women, Art, and Intellect In a gathering wave of feminist shows this season, this one is a modest-size, timely arrival. Organized by the artist Leslie King-Hammond, with an immaculate installation by Lowery Stokes Sims, its a multiethnic, multi-generational pick of work by 19 artists spanning some 40 years. If theres a theme, its a loose one: feminist art happened, in many forms; it is still happening, in many forms. 547 West 27th Street, Suite 201, Chelsea, (212) 947-6100; closes tomorrow. (Cotter) Chambers Fine Art: QIU ZHIJIE: THE SHAPE OF TIME Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting are rendered postmodern in 24 large color photographs that document the performance-writing (at night, with a flashlight, before a time-lapse camera) of characters for the solar markers of the Chinese year. The haunting results resemble elegant, disembodied neon and are suspended (along with blurred hints of the artist himself) in settings where old China meets new. 210 Eleventh Avenue, at 25th Street, Chelsea, (212) 414-1169; closes tomorrow. (Smith) China Institute: Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese This second installation of a two-part show glances back at the period of artistic expansion in the 1970s, and its contraction, when the Communist Party clamped down on free expression after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Qiu Zhijies photographic library, which papers the walls of the China Institutes main staircase, makes evident the information explosion in the 80s. Among the thousands of titles are Chinese classics, books on natural sciences, and treatises by Plato, Disraeli and Harold Bloom, as well as art books on Indian stupa, Japanese manga and Barbara Kruger. Such a trove might have been considered a treasure before Tiananmen Square; afterward, such resources became sources of angst. The figure that appears throughout Zhang Xiaogangs 1991 series Private Notes, for example, looks as if he is losing his mind as he struggles to write letters and decode illegible manuscripts. Without easy access to words, the images imply, there can be no such thing as free expression. 125 East 65th Street, (212) 744-8181, chinainstitute.org; closes tomorrow. (Bridget L. Goodbody) * Danziger Projects: Seydou Keita and Lolo Veleko The great Malian photographer Seydou Keita, who died in 2001, gave us modern Bamako in his black-and-white studio portraits. The young South African photographer Lolo Veleko, a star of Snap Judgments at the International Center of Photography last year, gives us contemporary Johannesburg, in fabulous color, in hers. 521 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 629-6778; closes tomorrow. (Cotter) Momenta Art: ELISABETH KLEY A fascination with drag stars like the filmmaker Jack Smith and the Warhol regular Candy Darling and, it would seem, their relationship to the exotic and to non-Western decorative traditions fuels this dense show of collaged ink drawings and sly majolica ceramic vessels. Preening peacocks are another point of departure, and the plethora of eyes, whether in the portraits, the tail feathers or the glazes, creates a watchful intensity that turns the traditional straight, Western gaze back on itself. 359 Bedford Avenue, near South Fourth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 218-8058; through Monday. (Smith) * NEUE GALLERY: JOSEF HOFFMANN: INTERIORS, 1902-1913 Hoffmann was a believer in the Gesamkunstwerk, or total work of art, orchestrating useful objects with paintings, sculptures and architecture in a composition greater than its parts. His early, intensely 20th-century design program, based on the grid and the square, is evident here in the installation of four interiors he designed for wealthy Viennese patrons, replete with furniture, wall and floor coverings, textiles, lighting, ceramics, glass and metal work. Most impressive here is the dining room he designed in 1913 for the Geneva apartment of the Swiss Symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler, a large, calm space with furniture that has a pre-postmodern look. Behind the dining room is a huge vitrine fitted out with a dazzling variety of Hoffmann-designed useful and decorative objects; other showcases display larger works. Though focused on interiors, the show conveys the basic ideas of a designer immersed in a new vision. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org; closes on Monday. (Glueck) Storefront for Art and Architecture: Clip/Stamp/Fold This show examines the world of small magazines from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s, when the field of architecture was still marked by a playful intellectual and political independence. Its packed with gorgeous cover images, from copulating robots to an elephant attacking the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to a skyscraper made of Swiss cheese. Often thrown together on a shoestring budget, the magazines have an intoxicating freshness that should send a shudder down the spine of those whove spent the last decade bathed in the glow of the computer screen. But this is not an exercise in nostalgia. Its a piercing critique, intended or not, of the smoothness of our contemporary design culture. These magazine covers map out an era when architecture was simmering with new ideas. Youre bound to leave the show with a nagging sense of what was lost as well as gained during the electronic juggernaut of the last three decades. 97 Kenmare Street, between Mulberry and Lafayette Streets, Little Italy, (212) 431-5795, storefrontnews.org; closes tomorrow. (Nicolai Ouroussoff)
Gerald L. Baliles to Step Down as Director of the Miller.
���His tenure at the center included several noteworthy accomplishments, including the launch of the National Discussion and Debate Series and the assembling of the National War Powers Commission.. Douglas Blackmon, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former senior national correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, was recruited to the center, as were acclaimed Kennedy family scholar Barbara Perry and the former head of the State Council of Higher Education for��.
Elizabeth Warren Insists Shes Not Running for President. These Activists Are.
In Iowa and New Hampshire, progressive groups have hired full-time staff to build support for a Warren run, hundreds of thousands of people have signed online petitions urging her to run, and house meetings about her potential candidacy are happening.
The Listings: Feb. 16 - Feb. 22
Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional listings, show times and tickets: nytimes.com/theater. Previews and Openings BILL W. AND DR. BOB Previews start today. Opens on March 5. This history play portrays the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous -- and their wives (2:15). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. BFF Previews start tomorrow. Opens on Feb. 24. In Anna Zieglers memory play, a woman, haunted by her past, has a sexual awakening (1:30). DR2, 103 East 15th Street, (212) 239-6200. THE COAST OF UTOPIA: SALVAGE In previews; opens on Sunday. Tom Stoppards epic trilogy about 19th-century Russian intelligentsia comes to an end with this final installment, which once again stars a vigorous and immense cast, including Brian F. OByrne, Jennifer Ehle, Martha Plimpton and Ethan Hawke. Jack OBrien directs (2:30). Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 239-6200. DYING CITY In previews; opens on March 4. Lincoln Center presents a new play by Christopher Shinn (Four) about a therapist who receives a visit from her deceased husbands twin brother (1:30). Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-7600. HOWARD KATZ In previews; opens on March 2. Roundabout Theater presents a new play by Patrick Marber (Closer) about a down-on-his-luck talent agent. Doug Hughes directs (1:30). Laura Pels Theater, 111 West 46th Street, (212) 719-1300. JOURNEYS END In previews; opens on Thursday. This English transfer of R. C. Sherriffs early-20th-century antiwar play stars the Tony winners Boyd Gaines and Jefferson Mays (2:40). Belasco Theater, 111 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. KING HEDLEY II Previews start on Tuesday. Opens on March 11. Signature Theater revives August Wilsons operatic drama, set in Reagen-era Pittsburgh, about a man who just returned from prison (2:45). Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 244-7529. KING LEAR In previews; opens on March 7. He played Hamlet. He played Falstaff. It was only a matter of time before Kevin Kline took on this proud, misguided patriarch. James Lapine directs (3:00). The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555. MARY ROSE In previews; opens on Tuesday. Although it can sometimes seem otherwise, J. M. Barrie wrote stories besides Peter Pan, including this one about a girl who might be a ghost. Tina Landau directs (1:45). Vineyard Theater, 108 East 15th Street, (212) 353-0303. OUR LEADING LADY Previews start on Thursday. Opens on March 20. A new comedy by Charles Busch (The Tale of the Allergists Wife), about the actress who was to perform at Fords Theater on the night Lincoln was shot (2:00). Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212. PRELUDE TO A KISS Previews start today. Opens on March 8. The Roundabout revives Craig Lucass fantastical play about a young romance that takes a very bizarre turn (2:00). American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street, (212) 719-1300. SEALED FOR FRESHNESS In previews; opens on Feb. 24. Set in the 60s, Doug Stones new play features a group of Midwestern housewives at a Tupperware party. Comedy ensues (2:00). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. SPALDING GRAY: STORIES LEFT TO TELL Previews start on Tuesday. Opens on March 6. Kathleen Russo, Spalding Grays widow, and Lucy Sexton assembled this collection of his monologues, letters and stories. Kathleen Chalfant and Frank Wood star (1:30). Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, (212) 307-4100. TALK RADIO In previews; opens on March 11. Eric Bogosians darkly funny portrait of a late-night talk show host returns for a Broadway revival starring Liev Schreiber. Robert Falls directs. Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200. Broadway THE APPLE TREE The amazing Kristin Chenoweth gives Imax-screen-size life to three curvaceous doodles who by rights shouldnt be any larger than figures in the Sunday funnies. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnicks 1966 musical, directed by Gary Griffin, shows its age but is given theatrical verve by Ms. Chenoweth, Brian dArcy James and Marc Kudisch (2:30). Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, (212) 719-1300. (Ben Brantley) A CHORUS LINE If you want to know why this show was such a big deal when it opened 31 years ago, you need only experience the thrilling first five minutes of this revival. Otherwise, this archivally exact production, directed by Bob Avian, feels like a vintage car that has been taken out of the garage, polished up and sent on the road once again (2:00). Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * THE COAST OF UTOPIA The exhilarating first two installments of Tom Stoppards trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals dreaming of revolution, these productions pulse with the dizzy, spring-green arrogance and anxiety of a new generation moving as fast as it can toward the future. Jack OBrien directs a fresh, vigorous and immense cast that includes Brian F. OByrne, Jennifer Ehle, Billy Crudup and Ethan Hawke (2:45). Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * COMPANY Fire, beckoning and dangerous, flickers beneath the frost of John Doyles elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furths era-defining musical from 1970, starring a compellingly understated Raul Esparza. Like Mr. Doyles Sweeney Todd, this production finds new clarity of feeling in Sondheim by melding the roles of performers and musicians (2:20). Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE DROWSY CHAPERONE (Tony Awards, best book of a musical and best original score, 2006) This small and ingratiating spoof of 1920s stage frolics, as imagined by an obsessive show queen, may not be a masterpiece. But in a dry season for musicals, it has theatergoers responding as if they were withering houseplants finally being watered after long neglect. Bob Martin and Sutton Foster are the standouts in the avid, energetic cast (1:40). Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway, at 45th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) * GREY GARDENS Christine Ebersole is absolutely glorious as the middle-aged, time-warped debutante called Little Edie Beale in this uneven musical adaptation of the notorious 1975 documentary of the same title. She and the wonderful Mary Louise Wilson (as her bedridden mother), in the performances of their careers, make Grey Gardens an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss (2:40). Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) MARY POPPINS This handsome, homily-packed, mechanically ingenious and rather tedious musical, adapted from the P. L. Travers stories and the 1964 Disney film, is ultimately less concerned with inexplicable magic than with practical psychology. Ashley Brown, who sings prettily as the family-mending nanny, looks like Joan Crawford trying to be nice and sounds like Dr. Phil. Directed by Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne (2:30). New Amsterdam Theater, 214 West 42nd Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) LES MISÉRABLES This premature revival, a slightly scaled-down version of the well-groomed behemoth that closed only three years ago, appears to be functioning in a state of mild sedation. Appealingly sung and freshly orchestrated, this fast-moving adaptation of Victor Hugos novel isnt sloppy or blurry. But its pulse rate stays well below normal (2:55). Broadhurst Theater, 235 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) * SPRING AWAKENING Duncan Sheik and Steven Saters bold adaptation of the Frank Wedekind play is the freshest and most exciting new musical Broadway has seen in some time. Set in 19th-century Germany but with a ravishing rock score, it exposes the splintered emotional lives of adolescents just discovering the joys and sorrows of sex. Performed with brio by a great cast, with supple direction by Michael Mayer and inventive choreography by Bill T. Jones (2:00). Eugene ONeill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Charles Isherwood) TARZAN This writhing green blob with music, adapted by Disney Theatrical Productions from the 1999 animated film, has the feeling of a superdeluxe day care center, equipped with lots of bungee cords and karaoke synthesizers, where children can swing when they get tired of singing, and vice versa. The soda-pop score is by Phil Collins (2:30). Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 West 46th Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) * TRANSLATIONS The estimable Irish director Garry Hynes (a Tony winner for Martin McDonaghs Beauty Queen of Leenane) has assembled an ensemble of an extraordinarily high caliber and consistency for the third major New York production of Brian Friels 1980 play. Set in rural Ireland in 1833, as the local tongue is being supplanted by the language of the English occupying forces, the play explores the seriocomic truth that language can divide as easily as it unites, and can never hope to translate the rich music in our souls with the delicacy we yearn for. A top-flight Broadway revival (2:15). Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) THE VERTICAL HOUR David Hares soggy consideration of the Anglo-American cultural divide stars Julianne Moore (representing the Americans) and Bill Nighy (leading the British), directed by Sam Mendes. The Yanks dont stand a chance (2:20). Music Box Theater, 239 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) Off Broadway ALL THAT I WILL EVER BE In this false-feeling comedy-drama by Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, a gay hustler undergoes an identity crisis when he finds himself falling for one of his clients. Slick but mostly stale in its analysis of a society afraid of emotional engagement (2:15). The New York Theater Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) THE BIG VOICE: GOD OR MERMAN? Think of two gifted and smart gay men with years of life together deploying their considerable talents from the two pianos you happen to have in your living room. The result is a hilarious and very touching memoir of two decades of love and the funky glories of show business life (2:00). Actors Temple Theater, 339 West 47th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Honor Moore) THE CRYING WOMAN An imaginative play that manages to transform what begins as a tired culture-clash comedy involving a Mexican and United States couple sharing a house in Mexico City into a sinister tale involving strange superstitions and a ghost from the 16th century (2:30). The Beckett Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Wilborn Hampton) DAI (ENOUGH) Iris Bahrs unnerving one-woman show doesnt have much to add to the Middle East debate, but it sure leaves a lasting impression. Ms. Bahr plays an assortment of characters who have the misfortune of being in a Tel Aviv cafe that is about to be visited by the havoc common to such establishments. The attack is rendered in jarring fashion, repeatedly; you watch the play on pins and needles, waiting for the next burst. Gimmicky? Sure. But viscerally effective (1:40). Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street, at Broome Street, SoHo, (212) 253-9983. (Neil Genzlinger) DUTCHMAN A revival of the poet Amiri Barakas screed on race and American values, 43 years after its Greenwich Village debut, aims for all the fire and might of a Malcolm X speech but none of the rhetorical elegance. It shouts so loudly that you cant hear a thing (1:00). Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street, between Barrow and Bedford Streets, West Village (212) 239-6200. (Ginia Bellafante) THE FANTASTICKS A revival -- well, more like a resuscitation -- of the Little Musical That Wouldnt Die. This sweet-as-ever production of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidts commedia-dellarte-style confection is most notable for Mr. Joness touching performance (under the pseudonym Thomas Bruce) as the Old Actor, a role he created when the show opened in 1960. Mr. Jones also directs (2:05). Snapple Theater Center, 210 West 50th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) THE FEVER Wallace Shawn performs his provocative monologue about a guilt-riddled bourgeois everyman sweating his way through a moral crisis. The rich, often hypnotic writing draws us into his tortured mindscape, as he shifts between shame over his sense of entitlement and reasoned arguments that sacrifice is unnecessary and pointless. Meanwhile, in the third world, the violence and poverty continue unabated (1:30). Acorn Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Isherwood) THE FRUGAL REPAST This sweet, compact story by Ron Hirsen dabbles in the high concepts of art, but not too deeply, which makes it just right. Two circus performers see Picassos Frugal Repast in a dealers window and realize they were the models for it; when they steal the print, their lowbrow world and Picassos highbrow one amusingly collide (1:20). The June Havoc Theater, Abingdon Theater Arts Complex, 312 West 36th Street, (212) 868-4444. (Genzlinger) GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL A very funny if not terribly original satire of musical theater features what must be the worst backers audition of all time. The excellent duo Jeremy Shamos and Christopher Fitzgerald make the pitch (2:05). The Actors Playhouse, 100 Seventh Avenue South, at Fourth Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 239-6200. (Jason Zinoman) * IN THE HEIGHTS Lin-Manuel Mirandas joyous songs paint a vibrant portrait of daily life in Washington Heights in this flawed but enjoyable show. Essentially a valentine to the barrio -- conflict of a violent or desperate kind is banished from the picture -- the musical contains a host of vibrant, funny performances, and brings the zesty sound of Latin pop to the stage. (2:10). 37 Arts, 450 West 37th Street, (212) 307-4100. (Isherwood) JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS A powerfully sung revival of the 1968 revue, presented with affectionate nostalgia by the director Gordon Greenberg. As in the original, two men and two women perform a wide selection of Brels plaintive ballads and stirring anthems (2:00). Zipper Theater, 336 West 37th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) THE JADED ASSASSIN Imagine mediocre professional wrestling mixed with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and you get the idea (1:15). The Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, SoHo, (212) 868-4444. (Zinoman) A JEW GROWS IN BROOKLYN You dont have to be Jewish or Brooklynish to empathize with Jake Ehrenreich, but in terms of fully appreciating his essentially one-man show, it probably helps. Especially the Catskills jokes (2:05). 37 Arts, 450 West 37th Street, (212) 560-8912. (Anita Gates) THE LAST WORD Oren Safdies comedy about cultural generation gaps amuses as it goes along but lands at a predictable nowhere. Daniel J. Travanti stars as a Viennese Jew and aspiring playwright who does battle with a young student angling to become his writing assistant and find his voice (1:30). Theater at St. Clements, 423 West 46th Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200. (Bellafante) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and THE JEW OF MALTA F. Murray Abraham plays two Elizabethan villains in repertory for the Theater for a New Audience. Mr. Abrahams sinister but still moving Shylock is the dark heart of Darko Tresnjaks chilly, powerful staging of one of Shakespeares unfunniest comedies. As Barabas in David Herskovitss goofy, postmodern Jew of Malta, hes the lively center of a carnival that doesnt do justice to Christopher Marlowes harsh satire on Christian hypocrisy and venality (each 2:30). The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM Shakespeares comedy, so dependent on things that arent what they appear to be, makes an inspired choice for Theater by the Blind, a group that mixes blind, vision-impaired and fully sighted actors. The most intriguing thing, though, is how the company stages the play with just six actors (1:50). The Barrow Group Theater, 312 West 36th Street, (212) 868-4444. (Genzlinger) MY MOTHERS ITALIAN, MY FATHERS JEWISH AND IM IN THERAPY Steve Solomon does skillful impersonations in his one-man show, but some of his jokes are as old as the hills (1:30). Little Shubert Theater, 422 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Gates) NO CHILD Teachers will love Nilaja Suns one-woman show about the challenges of teaching drama at Malcolm X High School (1:10). Barrow Street Theater, 27 Barrow Street, at Seventh Avenue South, West Village, (212) 239-6200. (Gates) ROOM SERVICE The Peccadillo Theater Company puts a charge into this comedy from the 1930s, thanks to a brisk pace by the director, Dan Wackerman, and a dozen dandy performances. David Edwards is the would-be producer whose bills threaten to swamp his efforts to put a show on Broadway, and Fred Berman is particularly fine as his director (2:00). SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, South Village, (212) 691-1555. (Genzlinger) A SPANISH PLAY The great Zoe Caldwell returns to the New York stage after an absence of a decade, in the fine company of Linda Emond, Denis OHare and Larry Pine. Thats the good news. The bad? The play. Yasmina Rezas pseudo-philosophical and metatheatrical trifle is utterly forgettable (1:50). Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101. (Isherwood) 25 QUESTIONS FOR A JEWISH MOTHER This is the comedian Judy Golds fiercely funny monologue, based on her own life as a single Jewish lesbian mother and interviews with more than 50 other Jewish mothers (1:20). St. Lukes Theater, 308 West 46th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Phoebe Hoban) VICTORIA MARTIN: MATH TEAM QUEEN Must all stage teenagers speak in that exaggerated surfer-dude style in which awesome and totally make up about 50 percent of any conversation? Yes, apparently they must, from the evidence presented in this thin comedy, which is about a high school girl who finds herself on the all-male math team. The playwright, Kathryn Walat, seems to have been trying to grab the coattails of a certain spelling-bee-related show. She missed (2:00). The Julia Miles Theater, 424 West 55th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Genzlinger) * THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE David Mamet has cleanly and cannily adapted Harley Granville Barkers 1905 play about corruption in the genteel world of Victorian finance. An excellent cast and a sumptuous production bring extra immediacy to a tale of embezzlement and entitlement that feels as fresh as tomorrows stock options (1:50). Atlantic Theater, 336 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) * WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! Richard Foremans latest film-theater hybrid is a memorial service, of sorts, for the intuitive self, killed by a surface-worshiping world. It is also a dazzling exercise in reality shifting that is as invigorating as it is mournful (1:05). Ontological Theater at St. Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101. (Brantley) Off Off Broadway AT LEAST ITS PINK Bridget Everett and her big, bad attitude co-star in this mini-musical about sex and unsatisfying jobs in the city. Directed by Michael Patrick King (of Sex and the City, as it happens), who is also the co-author, and with songs written by Ms. Everett and Kenny Mellman, the piano-playing half of Kiki & Herb. Raucous and rude, its a bit like a one-woman episode of Jerry Springer (1:20). Ars Nova, 511 West 54th Street, Clinton, (212) 868-4444. (Isherwood) T J AND DAVE The comics T. J. Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi miraculously improvise a one-hour play at every performance. This is an impressive feat of mental athletics, but the results are also observant, complex and frequently enormously funny (1:00). Barrow Street Theater, 27 Barrow Street, West Village, (212) 239-6200. (Gates) Long-Running Shows ALTAR BOYZ This sweetly satirical show about a Christian pop group made up of five potential Teen People cover boys is an enjoyable, silly diversion (1:30). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) AVENUE Q R-rated puppets give lively life lessons (2:10). Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Cartoon made flesh, sort of (2:30). Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46th Street, (212) 307-4747. (Brantley) THE COLOR PURPLE Singing CliffsNotes for Alice Walkers Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (2:40). Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway, at 53rd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) FORBIDDEN BROADWAY: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT Often more entertaining than the real thing (1:45). 47th Street Theater, 304 West 47th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) HAIRSPRAY Fizzy pop, cute kids, large man in a housedress (2:30). Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52nd Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) JERSEY BOYS The biomusical that walks like a man (2:30). August Wilson Theater, 245 West 52nd Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE LION KING Disney on safari, where the big bucks roam (2:45). Minskoff Theater, 200 West 45th Street at Broadway, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) MAMMA MIA! The jukebox that devoured Broadway (2:20). Cadillac Winter Garden Theater, 1634 Broadway, at 50th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Who was that masked man, anyway? (2:30). Majestic Theater, 247 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE PRODUCERS The ne plus ultra of showbiz scams (2:45). St. James Theater, 246 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) RENT East Village angst and love songs to die for (2:45). Nederlander Theater, 208 West 41st Street, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) SPAMALOT A singing scrapbook for Monty Python fans (2:20). Shubert Theater, 225 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200. (Brantley) THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE A Chorus Line with pimples (1:45). Circle in the Square, 254 West 50th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200. (Isherwood) WICKED Oz revisited, with political corrections (2:45). Gershwin Theater, 222 West 51st Street, Manhattan, (212) 307-4100. (Brantley) Last Chance ANON. Kate Robins savvy, dark romantic comedy about sexual addiction doesnt live up to its potential (2:10). Atlantic Theater Company, Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street, Chelsea, (212) 239-6200; closes on Sunday. (Zinoman) EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL This likable horror comedy based on Sam Raimis gory movies wants to be the next Rocky Horror Show. To that end, it offers deadpan lyrics, self-referential humor and geysers of stage blood (2:00). New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200; closes tomorrow. (Gates) FRANKS HOME Peter Weller plays Frank Lloyd Wright in Richard Nelsons dreary bio-drama, which lingers lovingly on its subjects feet of clay while paying arid lip service to his genius (1:45). Playwrights Horizons Mainstage, 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 719-4200; closes on Sunday. (Isherwood) * THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED The comedy of manners, a form widely believed to be extinct in the American theater, has actually resurfaced on Broadway with all its vital signs intact in Douglas Carter Beanes breezy but trenchant satire about truth and illusion, Hollywood style. With the wonderful Julie White as the movie agent you hate to love (but just cant help it) (2:00). Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200; closes on Sunday. (Brantley) MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS This musical is too big for its stage, but the young turn-of-the-last-century sweethearts have great chemistry, and there are four terrific songs (2:00). Irish Repertory Theater, 132 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 727-2737; closes on Sunday. (Gates) * TOYS IN THE ATTIC Austin Pendletons fine revival of Lillian Hellmans last play faithfully attacks the corrosive attachments of family. What good is a family, and thus a society, the play implicitly asks, that can only look in the mirror? (2:30) Pearl Theater, 80 St. Marks Place, East Village, (212) 598-9802; closes on Sunday. (Bellafante) Movies Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, show times and tickets: nytimes.com/movies. ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES (PG, 94 minutes) Luc Besson serves up a hybrid of live actors and computer-generated figures to tell a not-endearing-enough story about a boy (Freddie Highmore) who shrinks to microscopic size to find some gems and his missing grandfather. Lots of famous names (Madonna, Robert De Niro, David Bowie, Snoop Dogg) lend their voices to the computerized part of the movie, but only briefly near the end does everything click. (Neil Genzlinger) BABEL (R, 143 minutes, in English, Spanish, Japanese, Berber, Arabic and sign language) This hugely ambitious movie tells four loosely linked, not quite simultaneous stories set on three different continents, with dialogue in several languages. The themes, to the extent they are decipherable, include loss, fate and the terrible consequences of miscommunication. Written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, the movie is an intellectual muddle but a visceral tour de force, and the power of the filmmaking almost overcomes the fuzziness of the ideas. Almost. (A. O. Scott) BECAUSE I SAID SO (PG-13, 102 minutes) Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore as mother and daughter. What did she say, exactly? Whatever it was, it wasnt as funny as it should have been. (Scott) * BLACK FRIDAY (No rating, 143 minutes, in Hindi) Set in 1993, this is an exploration of how religious hatred between Indias Hindu majority and Muslim minority manifested itself in institutionalized discrimination, race rioting and, ultimately, a series of terrorist bombings by Muslim guerrillas that killed 257 people in Mumbai. The upshot is an exhaustive, exhausting, often moving thriller that spreads both empathy and condemnation around democratically. (Matt Zoller Seitz) BLOOD DIAMOND (R, 138 minutes) The makers of this foolish thriller about illegal diamond trafficking in Africa, starring an excellent Leonardo DiCaprio, want you to know there may be blood on your hands, specifically your wedding finger. Too bad they havent thought through what it means to turn misery into entertainment. (Manohla Dargis) BREAKING AND ENTERING (R, 119 minutes) This high-toned, feel-bad exercise in liberal guilt comes from Anthony Minghella, who brings the same earnest humorlessness to present-day London that he has brought to the historical past. Jude Law is an architect; Juliette Binoche is a Bosnian seamstress; and Vera Farmiga provides a glimmer of wit and liveliness as a Russian prostitute who shows up to drink coffee, show her underwear and discuss the themes of the movie. (Scott) * CHILDREN OF MEN (R, 100 minutes) The end is nigh in this superb thriller directed by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. Based on the P. D. James book, the film stars an excellent Clive Owen and features equally sterling support from Michael Caine, Danny Huston and Chiwetel Ejiofior, among others. (Dargis) * DAYS OF GLORY (R, 120 minutes, in French) Rachid Boucharebs tale of North African soldiers fighting to free their French colonial masters from German Occupation during World War II is a potent combat picture, and also a searching and complex political drama. (Scott) * THE DEPARTED (R, 150 minutes) Martin Scorseses cubistic entertainment about men divided by power, loyalty and their own selves is at once a success and a relief. Based on the crackling Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, it features fine twinned performances from Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, and a showboating Jack Nicholson. (Dargis) DREAMGIRLS (PG-13, 131 minutes) The Broadway musical arrives on the screen, capably directed by Bill Condon, ardently acted and sung by Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Beyoncé Knowles and (especially) Jennifer Hudson, but undone by mediocre and anachronistic songs. (Scott) EPIC MOVIE (PG-13, 86 minutes) A cheap, dumb parody of expensive, dumb movies. (Scott) FACTORY GIRL (R, 91 minutes) Its not entirely inappropriate that this film, George Hickenloopers biography of Edie Sedgwick, the most glamorous of Andy Warhols so-called superstars, should suggest a magazine layout masquerading as a film. The world through which Ms. Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) blazed and burned out was one that lived and died by the camera. It existed to be seen and drooled over. But God help you if you actually lived in it. (Stephen Holden) HANNIBAL RISING (R, 121 minutes) Marked by too much respect and too little energy, this primer on the early years of Hannibal Lecter reduces one of our most mythic villains to a callow, dysfunctional chef. Orphaned in World War II, our psychopathic hero hunts down his familys killers and snacks on their remains. But burrowing into the id of pop cultures most repulsive gourmet demands a sanguinary glee that the director, Peter Webber, may not possess; for all the movies spurting gore, theres no accompanying rush of blood to the head. (Jeannette Catsoulis) THE ITALIAN (PG-13, 99 minutes, in Russian) This dark fairy tale from Russia pulls you into a richly atmospheric, persuasively inhabited world teeming with young foundlings and pathos, and upended by one remarkable little boy. (Dargis) THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (R, 121 minutes) Kevin Macdonald paints a queasily enjoyable portrait of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin from inside the palace walls. Forest Whitaker plays the mad king, while James McAvoy plays the fool. (Dargis) * LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (R, 141 minutes, in Japanese) Another masterwork from Clint Eastwoods astonishing late period, and one of the best war movies ever. Ken Watanabe is especially fine as the general commanding Japanese troops in the doomed defense of the island of Iwo Jima. (Scott) * LITTLE CHILDREN (R, 130 minutes) Todd Fields adaptation of Tom Perrottas novel of suburban adultery is unfailingly intelligent and faultlessly acted. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson are superb as the parents of young children who meet at the playground and enact a two-handed variation on Madame Bovary against a backdrop of social paranoia and middle-class malaise. (Scott) * Little Miss Sunshine (R, 101 minutes) A bittersweet comedy of dysfunction that takes place at the terminus of the American dream. The excellent cast includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano and that national treasure, Alan Arkin. (Dargis) THE LIVES OF OTHERS (R, 137 minutes, in German) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarcks debut feature takes place in East Berlin in 1984, and it is a smart, moving inquiry into the moral predicament facing good people in a bad system. Ulrich Mühes performance as a conscience-stricken Stasi officer is a tightly wound tour de force, and Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck are both superb as a playwright and his actress lover who are drawn into the cruel, absurd clutches of the Communist secret police. (Scott) * MAFIOSO (No rating, 99 minutes, in Italian) This 1962 film, revived by Rialto Pictures, is a rambunctious, astonishing blend of farce, thriller and social satire. The director, Alberto Lattuada, follows an up-and-coming Fiat manager (Alberto Sordi) on a visit from Milan to his native village in Sicily. His homecoming is full of surprises -- painful for him, altogether delightful for the audience. (Scott) NORBIT (PG-13, 97 minutes) Eddie Murphy plays a nebbish, a fat woman and a Chinese restaurant owner in this crude, sometimes mean, but often funny farce. (Scott) NOTES ON A SCANDAL (R, 92 minutes) Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett play a misogynistic game of cat and mouse from which no one emerges unscathed, including the audience. Adapted by Patrick Marber from a novel by Zoë Heller and directed by Richard Eyre. (Dargis) NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN (No rating, 97 minutes) Martina Kudlaceks documentary shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene, whose sphere of influence included Edward Albee, Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. (Dargis) * PANS LABYRINTH (R, 119 minutes, in Spanish) Guillermo del Toros tale of a young girls ordeal in post-Civil-War fascist Spain is either a fairy tale in the guise of a political allegory or vice versa. In either case it is a moving, enchanting, strange and humane example of popular art at its very best. (Scott) THE PAINTED VEIL (PG-13, 125 minutes) Nicely directed by John Curran, this version of the W. Somerset Maugham novel draws you in by turning a distaff bildungsroman into a fine romance with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. (Dargis) THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (PG-13, 117 minutes) How you respond to this fairy tale in realist drag may depend on whether you find Will Smiths performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams. (Dargis) PUCCINI FOR BEGINNERS (No rating, 81 minutes) Snappy repartee with the ring of real conversation among people who are never at a loss for a remark is something every self-respecting Manhattan sophisticate imagines can be channeled into a screenplay with the crackle of vintage Woody Allen. That elusive tone is sustained through enough of Maria Maggentis film Puccini For Beginners to make this screwball comedy of sexual confusion with lesbian inclinations a rarity. (Holden) * THE QUEEN (PG-13, 103 minutes) Directed by Stephen Frears from a very smart script by Peter Morgan, and starring a magnificent Helen Mirren in the title role, The Queen pries open a window in the House of Windsor around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, blending fact with fiction. (Dargis) * REGULAR LOVERS (No rating, 175 minutes, in French) Philippe Garrels tender portrait of late-1960s French youth stars the filmmakers son, Louis Garrel, as a 20-year-old Parisian struggling through the fires of revolutionary promise and its smoldering remains. Magnificent. (Dargis) THE SITUATION (No rating, 106 minutes, in English and Arabic) Connie Nielsen stars as a correspondent sniffing around wartime Iraq in a narcoleptic thriller directed by Philip Haas from a screenplay by the journalist Wendell Steavenson. (Dargis) SMOKIN ACES (R, 107 minutes) Absolute garbage. (Scott) STOMP THE YARD (PG-13, 109 minutes) Brotherhood is powerful in this sometimes compelling, sometimes complacent movie about stepping and African-American fraternity life at an Atlanta institution called Truth University. D J (Columbus Short), a street-style dancer, needs to find his place in a university ruled by Gammas and Thetas and stepping. (Rachel Saltz) AN UNREASONABLE MAN (No rating, 122 minutes) A very reasonable documentary about the long career of Ralph Nader as a consumer advocate and, more recently and vexingly to some of his former admirers, a perennial presidential candidate. (Scott) VENUS (R, 91 minutes) A modest, diverting, touching tale of a young woman who attracts the interest -- avuncular and also erotic -- of an aging actor, played with effortless aplomb by the great Peter OToole. (Scott) * VOLVER (R, 121 minutes, in Spanish) Another keeper from Pedro Almodóvar, with Penélope Cruz -- as a resilient widow -- in her best role to date. (Scott) Film Series FILM COMMENT SELECTS (Tonight through Thursday) A series of critically acclaimed films that were not released commercially, chosen by the editors of Film Comment, continues tonight with Pedro Costas Colossal Youth, one of the most divisive titles of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. A slow-moving study of the immigrants from Cape Verde who live in a run-down corner of Lisbon, the film evoked both the standard comparisons to paint drying and high praise comparing Mr. Costas work to that of the avant garde masters Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (whose final film will be shown in this series next weekend). Also this week: Bardo (2005), by the Taiwanese director Lin Tay-jou; the controversial Chinese film Summer Palace (2006), by Lou Ye; and a new, arty thriller, Retribution, (2006), by the Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa. (Through Feb. 27.) Walter Reade Theater 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 875-5600, filmlinc.org; $10. (Dave Kehr) FIST AND SWORD: AN AFTERNOON WITH RON VAN CLIEF (Sunday) This African-American martial arts star appears with a program of clips from the many films and television programs he has worked on since 1974, including Way of the Black Dragon (1978) and Touch of Death (1980). Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, (718) 784-0077, movingimage.us; $10. (Kehr) GRAHAM GREENE NOIR (Thursday) A series of four weekly screenings of films based on thrillers by Graham Greene begins with a rarely seen 1944 film by Fritz Lang, Ministry of Fear, a spy tale loosely based on Greenes novel of the same title, filled out with haunting, surrealist imagery. Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds star. (Through March 30.) Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Street, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100, www.bam.org; $10. (Kehr) MORRICONE (Tonight through Thursday) The third and final week of a tribute to the Italian film composer Ennio Morricone features some very rare titles, including Giuliano Montaldos 1968 Machine Gun McCain, starring John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, on Sunday and Monday, and Samuel Fullers fatally misunderstood fable on race relations, White Dog (1982), on Tuesday. Film Forum 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village, (212) 727-8110, filmforum.org; $10.50. (Kehr) A VIEW FROM THE VAULTS: WARNER BROs., RKO PICTURES AND FIRST NATIONAL PICTURES (Tonight through Thursday) Ten features from the aforementioned studios, shown in prints recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. This weeks screenings include Irving Rappers 1945 The Corn Is Green, with Bette Davis; Michael Curtizs lurid 1949 carnival melodrama, Flamingo Road, with Joan Crawford; Raoul Walshs 1940 tale of high-speed truck drivers, They Drive by Night; and Gunga Din, George Stevenss rousing colonialist adventure of 1939. (Through Feb. 24.) Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, (212) 708-9400, moma.org; $10. (Kehr) Pop Full reviews of recent concerts: nytimes.com/music. JON ANDERSON AND THE SCHOOL OF ROCK ALL-STARS (Sunday and Monday) As seen in the documentary Rock School, Paul Green offers an extensive curriculum at his Philadelphia school, teaching youngsters the rock n roll canon, as well as the fundamentals of power chords and budda-budda bass lines. Here his students get the equivalent of a dissertation defense: backing up Jon Anderson, the helium-voiced former singer of Yes, in that bands hair-pullingly complex, neoclassical prog-rock songs. At 8 p.m., B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 997-4144, bbkingblues.com; $35 in advance, $40 at the door (sold out on Sunday). (Ben Sisario) * ARCADE FIRE (Tonight and tomorrow night) Three years ago, with its jubilantly clamorous album Funeral, this Montreal group performed a kind of musical miracle: making navel-gazing indie-rock seem not only fresh and sincere but also deeply meaningful. Its brilliant second record, Neon Bible (Merge), to be released next month, is darker and more preoccupied but nearly as cathartic. At 7:30, Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, (212) 260-4700, bowerypresents.com; sold out. (Sisario) BARR (Tonight and tomorrow night) Over bare stutters of piano and drums, Brendan Fowler of Barr lets loose an endlessly self-regarding logorrhea, questioning his every thought and instinct in a naked, paratactic melancholy. What is the saddest thing I can say? he asks on Barrs new album, Summary (5RC). Words arent sad enough. Music isnt sad enough. How could it bear to be? It doesnt need to be cause life is there to do it for real. With Lucky Dragons. At 8, the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-5793, thekitchen.org; $10. (Sisario) RICHARD BUCKNER (Tomorrow and Sunday) With a dry baritone and a creaky acoustic guitar, Richard Buckner broods about women, booze and death. And hes serious about all this American Gothic stuff: his 2000 album The Hill was an appropriately bleak setting of 18 poems from Edgar Lee Masterss Spoon River Anthology. With Six Parts Seven. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Sunday at 9:30 p.m., Union Hall, 702 Union Street, at Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 638-4400, unionhallny.com; $10. (Sisario) JUDY COLLINS (Tonight and tomorrow night, and Tuesday through Thursday) A folk songbird for seemingly longer than anybody else has been a folk songbird, Ms. Collins is at the Café Carlyle for her debut cabaret engagement. At 8:45 p.m., Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com; $100 cover at tables, $65 at the bar. (Sisario) BOBBY CONN (Thursday) Bobby Conn is a wiseguy iconoclast from Chicago who never skips his daily dose of irony as he turns pop songs into excursions all over the musical landscape. He wanders amid retro-funk, jazz and noise as he proclaims his romantic intentions in sardonically overwrought vocals. With Detholz and the Victoria Lucas. At 9 p.m., Trash Bar, 256 Grand Street, at Roebling Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (718) 599-100, thetrashbar.com; $10. (Sisario) KEVIN DEVINE, JENNIFER OCONNOR (Tomorrow) Mr. Devine, once of the band Miracle of 86, has carved out a niche as a sharp and unassuming singer-songwriter in the Elliott Smith mold. Ms. OConnors portraits of the lovelorn, in poker-faced, half-sung, half-spoken vocals, are dry but not unsympathetic: Maybe shes on her lunch break thinking of you. With Pablo and Koufax. At 8 p.m., Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, TriBeCa, (212) 219-3132, knittingfactory.com; $10 in advance, $12 at the door. (Sisario) DUB TRIO (Monday and Tuesday) Made up of well-traveled session players for the likes of the Fugees and Mos Def, Dub Trio plays spacious reggae grooves spiked with high-adrenaline punk, affectionately recalling Bad Brains. At 8 p.m., Union Pool, 484 Union Avenue, at Meeker Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 609-0484; $5. (Sisario) EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY (Monday and Tuesday) The epic instrumentals by this band from Austin, Tex., begin in peace, with single notes twinkling amid darkness, and gradually build to turbulent vortexes of noise. Borrowing a few tricks from Pink Floyd, Explosions in the Sky keeps the pace majestic and the vistas cinematic, and takes its time. Monday at 9 p.m., with Mountains, at Warsaw, 261 Driggs Avenue, at Eckford Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (718) 387-0505, warsawconcerts.com; Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., the Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, Manhattan, wordlessmusic.org; both shows sold out. (Sisario) MELISSA FERRICK, TIM FITE (Tonight) Somewhere between Ani DiFranco and Melissa Etheridge, Ms. Ferrick slings an acoustic guitar and belts songs filled with bravado. Tim Fites songs about kicking every can in New York City are booby-trapped with quick changes, from clean country-pop to corrosive punk. At 9, Southpaw, 125 Fifth Avenue, near Sterling Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 230-0236, spsounds.com; $18. (Sisario) GANG GANG DANCE (Tomorrow) Like radio waves converging somewhere in outer space, this New York groups music -- made from tribal rhythms, pulsating electronic noises and Bollywoodesque vocals -- is a tangle of disparate sounds that seem slightly out of sync but in time develop their own hypnotic patterns. At 9 p.m., Studio B, 259 Banker Street, between Meserole Avenue and Calyer Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (718) 389-1880, clubstudiob.com; $12.50. (Sisario) GYM CLASS HEROES (Thursday) It was inevitable: emo rap. Gym Class Heroes, from Geneva, N.Y., were as obscure a hip-hop act as could be when they made Taxi Driver, which winkingly name-checks a Warped Tours worth of emo bands. (I took a cutie for a ride in my death cab. Before she left she made a dashboard confessional.) By last summer, when they released New Friend Request, about MySpace etiquette, they were rubbing shoulders with all those groups -- on the Warped Tour, of course. With RX Bandits, P.O.S. and k-os. At 5:30 p.m., Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, (212) 533-2111, bowerypresents.com; sold out. (Sisario) IN THE ATTIC (Tuesday) Its good to be connected. Rachel Fuller, a British songwriter, presents this informal musical salon with her companion, a little-known guitarist named Pete Townshend. In the Attic is usually a live Web cast from Mr. Townshends studio, but lately Ms. Fuller has been taking it on the road, and on Tuesday she and Mr. Townshend preside over a jam session with surprise guests. At 9:30 p.m., Joes Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555, joespub.com; sold out. (Sisario) RICKIE LEE JONES (Tonight) With a new album, The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard (New West), that sets sayings by Jesus to raw, droney rock songs, Rickie Lee Jones, the beret-wearing neo-Beat with the girlish slur, offers yet another twist in a career full of odd turns. At 8, the Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, Manhattan, (212) 307-7171, concertstonight.com; $49.50. (Sisario) KIKI AND HERB (Sunday) A few years ago this brilliantly perverse cabaret duo played their farewell show at Carnegie Hall. Then came a run on Broadway. And some late-night gigs at Joes Pub. And the annual, inimitable Christmas show. (Highlight: a medley of Smells Like Teen Spirit and Frosty the Snowman.) Kiki and Herb cant stay away from the stage, and New York is the better for it. At 11:30 p.m., Joes Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555, joespub.com; $20. (Sisario) B. B. KING (Thursday) With his latest guitar called Lucille, B. B. King can, on a good night, summon all the tribulation and joy and resilience of the blues. At 8 p.m., New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street, Newark, (888) 466-5722, njpac.org; $35 to $95. (Jon Pareles) LINCOLN CENTERS AMERICAN SONGBOOK (Wednesday and Thursday) Now in its ninth season, this series has expanded greatly from its origins as a home for the midcentury pantheon of Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and the like. On Wednesday Ute Lemper, one of the few performers who can make cabaret seem dangerous, sings songs by Kurt Weill, Tom Waits and Van Morrison, as well as some of her own. Thursday is a triple bill of young New York songwriters who have long shared (small) stages together: Sasha Dobson, whose songs float on a breeze of bossa nova; Jesse Harris, who wrote Dont Know Why for his friend Norah Jones; and Richard Julian, who is endlessly enamored of, and frustrated by, his most frequent subject, New York. At 8:30 p.m., Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $30 to $60 (sold out on Wednesday). (Sisario) MALAJUBE, SNOWDEN (Tomorrow through Monday) Trading places as the headliner in three shows: Malajube, a Montreal band whose seductively surreal songs (sung in French) riffle through decades of influence, from happy Beatles pop to rap and stomping grunge-pop; and Snowden, whose members are from Atlanta but play stylishly depressive postpunk riffs like true Brooklynites. Tomorrow and Sunday at 8:30 p.m., Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, (212) 260-4700, mercuryloungenyc.com; sold out. Monday at 8:30 p.m., Southpaw, 125 Fifth Avenue, near Sterling Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 230-0236, spsounds.com; $10. (Sisario) PELA, HIGH STRUNG (Tonight) All Friday nights at the Mercury Lounge should be like this, and many are: two excellent, underhyped bands and a cover charge that doesnt necessitate a trip to the A.T.M. Pela, from Brooklyn, calls its style pastoral punk, which means wide-open skies of bouncy, Pixiesesque basslines and sharp, sparkling guitars that recall the Strokes and U2. The High Strung, whose members are based in Detroit but did time in New York, live up to their name with antsy, accelerated songs that draw from both the raggedness of garage rock and the bright, clear lines of New Wave. The band gets extra points for touring dozens of public libraries. With XYZ Affair and the Teeth. At 8:30, Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, (212) 260-4700, mercuryloungenyc.com; $10. (Sisario) * SAVAGE REPUBLIC (Tomorrow) Between 1980 and 1989, this Los Angeles band released four albums of droning, pounding, brawling postpunk that could be assaultive or hypnotic -- a West Coast counterpart to early Public Image Ltd., Swans and Sonic Youth. Touring sporadically since the reissue of its complete catalog in 2002, the group comes to Club Midway in the East Village. Tomorrows Friend, Va Va China and Oliver North open the show. At 8 p.m., 25 Avenue B, at Second Street, (212) 253-2595, clubmidway.com; $15 in advance, $18 at the door. (Pareles) * SONIC YOUTH (Tonight) Conventional wisdom would say it should have burned out years ago: Sonic Youth has been treading the same shaggy avant-indie path since the early 1980s, and each of its members has had plenty of other interests to pursue. But since its 2002 album Murray Street, partly about life after 9/11, the band has hit a wonderful new stride, and on its latest album, Rather Ripped (Geffen), sounds as comfortable, focused and invigorated as ever. With Wooden Wand. At 6:30, Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, (212) 533-2111, bowerypresents.com; sold out. (Sisario) ROD STEWART (Wednesday) His four Great American Songbook albums may not represent the most distinguished readings of those songs -- ditto his Bob Seger and Creedence Clearwater Revival covers on the recent Still the Same Great Rock Classics of Our Time (J) -- but when Rod Stewart lets go of his smugness, that whisky tenor of his can be a powerful interpretive instrument. Doesnt happen often, though. At 8 p.m., Madison Square Garden, (212) 307-7171, thegarden.com; $55 to $129.50. (Sisario) SUPER DIAMOND (Tonight and tomorrow night) A tribute to the songs of Neil Diamond, particularly his triumphal 1970s material. Smirking is optional. At 9, Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place, at 15th Street, Manhattan, (212) 777-6800, irvingplaza.com; $25 in advance, $30 at the door. (Pareles) * LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE (Tomorrow) One of the most popular and longest-running bands in the Americas, Los Tigres del Norte, from the western Mexican state of Sinaloa, have for 35 years been setting gritty stories of drug smugglers, immigrants and other hardscrabble characters to the bopping, accordion-driven polkas of norteño (a sound better known on this side of the border as Tex-Mex). The group regularly draws thousands to its shows in New York, and tomorrow it plays the 60,000-square-foot Bedford Avenue Armory in Brooklyn. At 8 p.m., 1579 Bedford Avenue, at President Street, Crown Heights, (646) 261-1588; $40. (Sisario) Jazz Full reviews of recent jazz concerts: nytimes.com/music. ALL-STAR ORGAN SUMMIT (Tonight and tomorrow night) This descriptively titled engagement features no fewer than three Hammond B-3 organists -- Jimmy McGriff, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Reuben Wilson -- together with the tenor saxophonist Jerry Weldon and the guitarist Peter Bernstein, among others. At 8, 10 and 11:30, Smoke, 2751 Broadway, at 106th Street, (212) 864-6662, smokejazz.com; cover, $30. (Nate Chinen) SAM BARSH BAND (Tonight) The sharp young keyboardist Sam Barsh leads a groove-minded working band with Tim Collins on vibraphone, Ari Folman-Cohen on bass and Jaimeo Brown on drums. At 10, 11 and 12:30, Rose Live Music, 345 Grand Street, between Havemeyer and Marcy Streets, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 599-0069, liveatrose.com; cover, $7. (Chinen) * BRIAN BLADE FELLOWSHIP (Tuesday through Thursday) Brian Blade is an unusually sensitive drummer, as he has proven not only with Wayne Shorter but also with Joni Mitchell. He turns the spotlight to his own painterly compositions in this influential ensemble with the saxophonists Myron Walden and Melvin Butler, the guitarist Peter Bernstein, the pianist Jon Cowherd and the bassist Christopher Thomas. (Through Feb. 25.) At 9 and 11 p.m., Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, West Village, (212) 255-4037, villagevanguard.com; cover, $25, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) JOHNATHAN BLAKE QUARTET (Tomorrow) The drummer Johnathan Blake propels a band with two sure-footed saxophonists -- Jaleel Shaw, on alto, and Joel Frahm, on tenor -- as well as the pianist Orrin Evans and the bassist Joe Martin. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, at Spring Street, South Village, (212) 242-1063, jazzgallery.org; cover, $15; $10 for members. (Chinen) BROOKLYN QAWWALI PARTY (Tomorrow) The Sufi devotional music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan provides a repertory mandate for this ensemble, led by the trumpeter Jesse Neuman. Faithful to its source mainly in terms of exuberance, the group creates a roiling polyphony of percussion, saxophones, brass, bass, harmonium and guitar. At 9 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) CYRUS CHESTNUT QUARTET WITH CARLA COOK (Tuesday through Thursday) Cyrus Chestnut is a pianist with a penchant for gospel harmonies, as he will demonstrate here with a rhythm section and Ms. Cook, a powerful singer. (Through Feb. 25.) At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Dizzys Club Coca-Cola, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, (212) 258-9595, jalc.org; cover, $30, with a minimum of $10 at tables, $5 at the bar. (Chinen) KURT ELLING (Tonight through Sunday night) Mr. Ellings deep musicality and literary sensibility have made him the leading male jazz vocalist of our time, though perhaps not the most consistent. He comes with a rhythm section, led by the pianist Laurence Hobgood, and a handful of special guests. At 8 and 10:30, Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, West Village, (212) 475-8592, bluenote.net; cover, $35 at tables, $20 at the bar, with a $5 minimum. (Chinen) EXPLODING HEART/EXPLORATIONS (Tomorrow) Explosion and exploration are sure to be closely related processes in both these ad hoc ensembles. Exploding Heart consists of Tony Malaby on saxophones, William Parker on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums; Explorations features the alto saxophonist Matana Roberts and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. At 8 p.m., the Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) FIVE OF A KIND (Tuesday) This collaborative quintet, which makes its debut here, features ambitious musician-composers with a shared interest in world music: the trumpeter Avishai Cohen, the saxophonist Joel Frahm, the pianist Jason Lindner, the bassist Omer Avital and the drummer Johnathan Blake. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $20. (Chinen) DON FRIEDMAN (Tonight) Mr. Friedmans stylistic history as a pianist runs from traditional to slightly left of center; hes likely to range freely in this recital at Fazioli Salon, a solo piano series at the Klavierhaus workshop. At 8, Klavierhaus, 211 West 58th Street, Manhattan, (212) 245-4535, pianoculture.com; $25. (Chinen) AARON GOLDBERG 3 PLUS STEFON HARRIS (Wednesday and Thursday) On his last album, Worlds (Sunnyside), the pianist Aaron Goldberg showcased the strong rapport of his working trio, with the bassist Reuben Rogers and the drummer Eric Harland. Here he has a substitute drummer, Greg Hutchinson, and a dynamic guest soloist, the vibraphonist Stefon Harris. At 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $20. (Chinen) MARY HALVORSON AND JESSICA PAVONE (Wednesday) Ms. Halvorson plays acoustic guitar in this duo, and Ms. Pavone plays viola. Their experimental instincts, honed by an affiliation with the composer Anthony Braxton, commingle with folksy lyricism; they even sing, without a shred of protective irony. At 10 p.m., the Stone, Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) * AHMAD JAMAL TRIO (Tuesday through Thursday) A touchstone of jazz piano since the 1950s, Mr. Jamal still has his broad, dynamic range and signature touch, as he proved on a recent live album, After Fajr (Dreyfus). He also has a no-nonsense rhythm team: the bassist James Cammack and the drummer Idris Muhammad. (Through Feb. 25.) At 8 and 10:30 p.m., Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, West Village, (212) 475-8592, bluenote.net; cover, $40 at tables, $30 at the bar, with a $5 minimum. (Chinen) RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA QUARTET (Tonight) Codebook (Pi), the latest album by the alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, investigates the topic of cryptography, not the most promising theme for an improviser. What lifts the project off the ground is the brazen imaginative exertion of his band, with Vijay Iyer on piano, Carlo DeRosa on bass and Dan Weiss on drums. At midnight, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $10; $5 for students; with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) JOE MARTIN QUARTET (Thursday) Joe Martin, a reliably supportive bassist, turns the spotlight on his own compositions and on the interplay of a promising quartet, with John Ellis on saxophones, Aaron Parks on piano and Marcus Gilmore on drums. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, at Spring Street, South Village, (212) 242-1063, jazzgallery.org; cover, $12; $10 for members. (Chinen) T. S. MONK (Wednesday and Thursday) Thelonious Sphere Monk Jr., a loquacious drummer whose taste skews less idiosyncratic than his fathers, leads a polished hard-bop band. (Through Feb. 24.) At 9 and 11 p.m., Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080, birdlandjazz.com; cover, $40, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) * MY BAND FOOT FOOT (Tomorrow) The Shaggs, a trio of sisters from New Hampshire -- and by common consensus one of the very best truly awful rock bands of all time -- receive a jazz makeover from a sextet led by the wry trumpeter John McNeil. This is the projects first performance; results could be bad, which might be all the better. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, West Village, (212) 989-9319, corneliastreetcafe.com; cover, $10, with a one-drink minimum. (Chinen) OREGON (Tonight through Sunday night) This influential and worldly ensemble, formed more than 35 years ago, has continued making its distinctive light fusion over the years, sometimes in orchestral settings. Its lineup features the guitarist Ralph Towner, the bassist Glen Moore and the woodwind player Paul McCandless -- all founding members -- along with the drummer Mark Walker. At 8:30 and 10:30, with a midnight set tonight and tomorrow, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $30, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) JEAN-MICHEL PILC TRIO (Tonight and tomorrow night) Jean-Michel Pilcs piano playing has a joyous bounce, no matter how dark or furious the extemporization. Hes at his best in the company of assertive partners like the bassist Boris Kozlov and the drummer Ari Hoenig, who join him here. At 8 and 9:45, Kitano Hotel, 66 Park Avenue, at 38th Street, (212) 885-7119, kitano.com; cover, $20, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) ODEAN POPE TRIO (Tomorrow) Odean Pope is best recognized for his Saxophone Choir, a powerful and vivid post-Coltrane assembly based in his hometown, Philadelphia. Here the only saxophonist on hand is Mr. Pope himself, though his full-blown style might make it seem otherwise. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Sistas Place, 456 Nostrand Avenue, at Jefferson Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, (718) 756-7600, sistasplace.org; cover, $25 in advance, $30 at the door. (Chinen) * DAFNIS PRIETO AND THE ABSOLUTE QUINTET (Tonight) The drummer Dafnis Prietos Absolute Quintet (Zoho) might not have won the Grammy for best Latin jazz album, but that doesnt diminish its power. Dramatic and serious, it makes references to the avant-garde and early fusion, but always with a lifeline to Latin rhythm; its cast includes Yosvany Terry on saxophones, Christian Howes on violin, Dana Leong on cello and Jason Lindner on piano and organ. At 7:30, Harlem Stage at the Gatehouse, 150 Convent Avenue, at West 135th Street, (212) 650-7100, harlemstage.org; $25. (Chinen) * RECONNECTED: THE FREDDIE REDD QUARTET (Monday) In the late 1950s, the pianist Freddie Redd wrote music for The Connection, a landmark Off Broadway play in which he also appeared onstage. Released on Blue Note, the subsequent album became a hard-bop classic, though that didnt prevent Mr. Redd from slipping into obscurity. He resurfaces here with the bassist Mickey Bass and the drummer Louis Hayes; Donald Harrison inherits the alto saxophone part memorably played by Jackie McLean, who died last year. Another alto saxophone veteran, Lou Donaldson, appears in the concerts first half. At 8 p.m., Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, (212) 501-3330, kaufman-center.org; $30 in advance, $35 on Monday. (Chinen) KENDRICK SCOTT ORACLE (Tomorrow) Kendrick Scott, the drummer of choice for the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, previews some of the ambient neo-fusion material from The Source, the debut album by his band Oracle, due this spring. At midnight, Iridium, 1650 Broadway, at 51st Street, (212) 582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com; cover, $10; $5 for students, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen) * SCULPTURED SOUNDS MUSIC FESTIVAL (Sunday) This avant-garde concert series, organized by the bassist Reggie Workman, continues with performances by three powerful ensembles: a trio led by the intense alto saxophonist and pianist Charles Gayle; Billy Harper and Friends, a project of Mr. Harper, a searching tenor saxophonist; and Ashantis Message, led by Mr. Workman and featuring the multireedist J. D. Parran, the pianist Yayoi Ikawa and the percussionists Tyshawn Sorey and Kevin Jones. At 7 p.m., St. Peters Lutheran Church, 619 Lexington Avenue, at 54th Street, (212) 642-5277, sculpturedsounds.com; suggested donation, $20. (Chinen) SEX MOB (Tonight) Fresh off a Grammy nomination for its album Sexotica (Thirsty Ear), this scrappy downtown band returns to its home turf. The slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein leads the charge, but equal weight is pulled by Briggan Krauss on alto saxophone, Tony Scherr on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums. At 8, Tonic, 107 Norfolk Street, near Delancey Street, Lower East Side, (212) 358-7501, tonicnyc.com; cover, $12. (Chinen) LOREN STILLMAN ORGAN PROJECT (Wednesday) Loren Stillman, an alto saxophonist with an inquisitive relationship to jazz conventions, introduces a quartet with Gary Versace on Hammond B-3 organ; the guitarist Nate Radley and the drummer Ted Poor round out the band. At 8 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) MARK TAYLOR QUARTET (Wednesday) Mr. Taylors French horn playing has been heard in avant-garde ensembles led by the august composers Henry Threadgill and Muhal Richard Abrams. His own material is fodder for this group, which features two strong reed players, Marty Ehrlich and Michaël Attias. At 10 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen) DAN WILLIS (Tomorrow) Mr. Willis, a saxophonist, recently released an album, Velvet Gentlemen (OmniTone), inspired by the classical composer Erik Satie but suffused with post-bop sonorities. Here he regroups most of its cast: Chuck MacKinnon on trumpet, Ron Oswanski on Fender Rhodes piano and accordion, Kermit Driscoll on bass and John Hollenbeck on drums. At 8 p.m., Nightingale Lounge, 213 Second Avenue, at 13th Street, East Village, (212) 473-9398, nightingalelounge.com; cover, $8. (Chinen) TIM ZIESMERS AMPERSAND (Wednesday) The guitarist Tim Ziesmer features his own rock-influenced compositions in this mutable band, featuring Chris Speed on tenor saxophone, Drew Gress on bass and Take Toriyama on drums. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Tea Lounge, 837 Union Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (718) 789-2762, tealoungeny.com; $5 donation. (Chinen) Classical Full reviews of recent music performances: nytimes.com/music. Opera * EUGENE ONEGIN (Tomorrow and Tuesday) The dynamic conductor Valery Gergiev and the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky bring stylistic authority to the Metropolitan Operas affecting revival of its 1997 production of Tchaikovskys Eugene Onegin. In his first Met performances of the title role, Mr. Hvorostovsky is riveting, singing with earthy richness and fully conveying this worldly, entitled and dashing young mans aloofness until the final tragic scene. The surprises come from the soprano Renée Fleming, in her first Russian role at the Met, who gives a vocally exquisite and vulnerable portrayal of Tatiana, and the tenor Ramón Vargas, a Bel Canto specialist, who makes an ardent and endearing Lenski, Onegins well-meaning but fatally impulsive friend. You will seldom see better acting in opera than from this excellent cast. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; sold out. (Anthony Tommasini) IPHIGÉNIE EN AULIDE (Monday and Wednesday) The opera productions at the Juilliard School have generally been thoughtfully staged and vocally polished, with casts of student singers who may be heard from on grander stages. The school is also judicious in its repertory choices, presenting works not normally offered at the Met or the New York City Opera. Iphigénie en Aulide has much to recommend it, as Glucks dramatically focused and supremely lyrical operas invariably do. The cast for Robin Guarinos production includes Tharanga Goonetilleke in the title role; Paul LaRosa and Sidney Outlaw sharing the role of Agamemnon; Faith Sherman as Clytemnestra; and Paul Appleby as Achille, with Ari Pelto conducting. At 8 p.m., Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 155 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 769-7406, juilliard.edu; free. (Allan Kozinn) * JENUFA (Tomorrow) The charismatic Finnish soprano Karita Mattila is riveting in the title role of Leos Janaceks grim, insightful and, by the end, consoling Czech opera Jenufa, in the Mets revival of its 2003 production by Olivier Tambosi. Ms. Mattilas gleaming voice, with its cool, Nordic colorings and vibrant sensuality, are ideal for this character, a foolishly trusting young woman in a Moravian village who has become pregnant by her cousin, the town rake who owns the local mill. The ageless German soprano Anja Silja is at once terrifying and pitiable as Jenufas stern stepmother, Kostelnicka. Jiri Belohlavek conducts a sensitive and sweeping account of Janaceks teeming score, presented in its 1908 version. Tomorrows matinee is the final performance of the season. At 1:30 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $42 to $220. (Tommasini) * THE Maid of Orleans (Thursday) The Collegiate Chorales annual opera-in-concert presentations focus on infrequently performed works. This year Daniele Callegari conducts Tchaikovskys Maid of Orleans, which the composer based on Friedrich Schillers play Die Jungfrau von Orleans. According to the company, the work has never been fully staged by the Metropolitan Opera or the New York City Opera. The mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick sings the title role; Carol Vaness is Agnes; Oleg Kulko is Charles VII; Igor Tarasov is Lionel; and Andrei Antonov is Thibaut. At 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $25 to $155. (Vivien Schweitzer) * SIMON BOCCANEGRA (Monday) Boccanegra is the kind of opera that gives opera plots a bad name: the action begins with a prologue and then scoots ahead 25 years (requiring some prodigious feats from the makeup artist), after which half the characters seem to be appearing under assumed names. Verdi himself took nearly 25 years off from it before going back and revising large chunks, creating some magnificent music but uneven dramaturgy. Yet there is much to love in Boccanegra, and the Mets cast -- Thomas Hampson, who has done it in Vienna; Angela Gheorghiu; Marcello Giordani; and Ferruccio Furlanetto -- should be able to do it credit. At 7:30 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $175 tickets remaining. (Anne Midgette) THÉRÈSE RAQUIN (Tonight through Sunday) Admirers of Tobias Pickers opera An American Tragedy, which had its premiere at the Met last season, will want to attend the New York premiere of his 2001 opera, Thérèse Raquin, with a libretto by Gene Scheer. Mr. Pickers adaptation of Zolas piercing and, at the time, scandalous novel of adultery and murder (an oppressed young woman, married to a weak mothers boy, falls for a hunky and boisterous office worker, with fatal consequences) had its premiere at the Dallas Opera, where it received a mixed critical reception. The composer has recently revised the score and thinned down the orchestration. Steven Osgood conducts; Michael Capasso directs. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8, Sunday at 4 p.m., Dicapo Opera Theater, at St. Jean Baptiste Church, 184 East 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 288-9438, dicapo.com; $47.50. (Tommasini) LA TRAVIATA (Tonight and Thursday night) For its revival of Verdis Traviata, in Franco Zeffirellis extravagant 1998 production, the Met is rotating casts, with three sopranos sharing the role of Violetta this season. Mary Dunleavy, who made her company debut in 1993, is currently singing the role. Wookyung Kim, a promising young Korean tenor with a robust, lyrical voice, sings Alfredo, the role of his Met debut this season, and the baritone Charles Taylor sings Germont. Carlo Rizzi conducts. At 8, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $220 tickets remaining tonight; $80 and $175 on Thursday. (Tommasini) DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE (Wednesday) The revival of Julie Taymors production of Mozarts Zauberflöte continues at the Met, complete with the magical puppets and stage effects that made it an audience hit when it opened in 2004. James Levine conducts a cast that includes Lisa Milne as Pamina, Cornelia Götz as Queen of the Night, Michael Schade as Pamino, Rodion Pogossov as Papageno and Eike Wilm Schulte as the Speaker. At 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000, metopera.org; $80 and $175 tickets remaining. (Schweitzer) Classical Music ACADEMY OF ST. MARTIN IN THE FIELDS (Sunday and Monday) The venerable and ever-prolific conductor Neville Marriner returns to the area with his orchestra of choice, performing Stravinsky and Beethoven. The talented and not at all venerable Jonathan Biss is pianist in Mozarts C minor Concerto. Sunday at 3 p.m., New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street, Newark, (888) 466-5722, njpac.org; $24 to $88. Monday at 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $28 to $96. (Bernard Holland) AMERICAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (Tuesday) Steven Mercurio conducts Beethoven, Debussy and Delius, but the evening is perhaps more about the soprano Sumi Jo, who will do a collection of operatic numbers. At 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $25 to $85. (Holland) BORROMEO STRING QUARTET (Tonight) This formidable and, with more than 100 concerts a year, very busy quartet plays a demanding if fairly familiar program, with Stravinskys Concertino, Bartoks Fifth Quartet and Beethovens Quartet in E minor, the second of the three astounding Razumovsky Quartets. At 7:30, Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $44. (Tommasini) * RENAUD CAPUÇON (Sunday) The violinist Renaud Capuçon is fast making a name for himself as a soloist and chamber musician, often performing with Gautier Capuçon, his talented cellist brother. Here he makes his New York recital debut with the pianist Nicholas Angelich in a program featuring the three Brahms Sonatas for Violin and Piano, as part of the affordably priced Peoples Symphony Concerts lineup. At 2 p.m., Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 586-4680, pscny.org; sold out. (Schweitzer) CHAMBER MUSIC AT THE Y (Tuesday and Wednesday) The pianist Peter Serkin and the violist Peter Tenenbom join the 92nd Street Y perennials Jaime Laredo, a violinist, and Sharon Robinson, a cellist, to perform music by Dallapiccola, Reger and Mozart. At 8 p.m., 1395 Lexington Avenue, (212) 415-5500, 92y.org; $40. (Holland) JUILLIARD ORCHESTRA (Tonight and Tuesday night) The conductor Andreas Delfs led the premiere last April of Lowell Liebermanns opera Miss Lonelyhearts. He returns tonight to conduct the talented young musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra in Mr. Liebermanns Piano Concerto No. 2, with the pianist Vasileios Varvaresos. The program also includes Prokofievs Symphony No. 5 and Heiner Goebbelss D&C (the third movement from his 1994 work Surrogate Cities). On Tuesday James DePreist leads the Julliard Orchestra in Haydns Symphony No. 88 in G, Strausss Oboe Concerto and Elgars Violin Concerto. Tonight at 8, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; $10 and $20; free for students and 65+. Tuesday at 8, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center; free, but tickets are required. Information: (212) 769-7406, juilliard.edu. (Schweitzer) NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC (Tomorrow, Tuesday and Thursday) Lorin Maazel and his orchestra continue their exploration of Brahms tomorrow and Tuesday, with performances of the Serenade No. 2 -- which isnt heard nearly enough -- and the Piano Concerto No. 2. Emanuel Ax, a superb Brahmsian, is the soloist in the concerto. On Thursday Mr. Maazel offers a varied program intended to show off soloists within the orchestra. Included are Mozarts Concerto for Flute and Harp, with Robert Langevin, the flutist, and Nancy Allen, the harpist; Schumanns taxing Konzertstück for Four Horns, in which the soloists are Philip Myers, Erik Ralske, R. Allen Spanjer and Howard Wall; and a Trombone Concerto by Melinda Wagner, with Joseph Alessi as the soloist. Also on the program is Gershwins American in Paris. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, nyphil.org; $35 to $101 tomorrow; $33 to $99 on Tuesday; $28 to $94 on Thursday. (Kozinn) ORLANDO CONSORT (Sunday) This remarkable English vocal quartet builds its programs of medieval and Renaissance works around literary or historical themes and has released recordings of several on the Harmonia Mundi label, packaged as CD-size hardcover books, with artwork and text translations. The groups 2005 disc, The Rose, the Lily and the Whortleberry explores works inspired by medieval gardens and flora (and their metaphorical imagery), including works by Machaut, Power, Agricola, de Rore and other composers from England, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Those works will make up the heart of the ensembles program in its two performances at the Cloisters. At 1 and 3 p.m., Fort Tryon Park, Washington Heights, (212) 650-2290, metmuseum.org; $35. (Kozinn) JOHN SCOTT (Tomorrow) Mr. Scott, the organist and music director at St. Thomas Church, plays the fourth concert in his 10-part series exploring the organ works of Buxtehude, in honor of the 300th anniversary of the composers death. Built in a style similar to that of north Germany and the Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries, St. Thomass Taylor & Boody organ is ideal for this venture. At 4 p.m., Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street, (212) 757-7013, saintthomaschurch.org; free. (Schweitzer) * TONDALS VISION (Sunday) Early-music fans, take note. Dialogos, the acclaimed ensemble that took part in Chant Wars here in 2005, is returning to New York (thanks to Music Before 1800) with a production that has won awards throughout Europe: a 12th-century story of a knight who leaves his body, told through medieval Croatian vocal music. The six-woman piece was conceived by Dialogoss director, Katarina Livljanic, and staged in collaboration with Yoshi Oida, an actor who has worked frequently with Peter Brook. At 4 p.m., Corpus Christi Church, 529 West 121st Street, Morningside Heights, (212) 666-9266, mb1800.org; $25 to $40; $5 off for students and 62+. (Midgette) VENICE BAROQUE ORCHESTRA (Thursday) This Italian ensemble, led by Andrea Marcon, with Giuliano Carmignola as its violin soloist, sounds vital and energetic on the handful of Vivaldi recordings it has made for the Sony Classical and Archiv labels. There is plenty of Vivaldi -- seven concertos -- on its Thursday evening program, with one by Tartini for at least minimal variety. At 7:30 p.m., Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $60, with limited availability. (Kozinn) VOICES OF ASCENSION (Thursday) Verdis Requiem gets a church performance on lower Fifth Avenue. At 8 p.m., Church of the Ascension, Fifth Avenue at 10th Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 358-1469, voicesofascension.org; $15 to $45. (Holland) Dance Full reviews of recent performances: nytimes.com/dance. * ASSOCIATION NOA/COMPANY VINCENT MANTSOE (Tuesday and Wednesday) Vincent Mantsoe, one of South Africas leading choreographers, joins forces with Anthony Kaplan and the African Music Workshop Ensemble in Men-Jaro, which explores the relationships between African contemporary dance, ritual and music. At 8 p.m., Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues, downtown Brooklyn, (718) 488-1624, brooklyn.liu.edu/kumbletheater; $20; $13 for students and 65+. (Jack Anderson) BODY BLEND (Tuesday) This showcase series will feature Malika Green and Beth Maderal, Lisa Parra and Maré Hieronimus, and April Biggs, all chosen by Isabel Lewis. At 8 p.m., Dixon Place, 258 Bowery, near Houston Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-0736, dixonplace.org; $12; $10 for students and 65+; T.D.F. accepted. (Jennifer Dunning) CHINESE NEW YEAR SPECTACULAR (Today and tomorrow) Well, it certainly does sound spectacular, celebrating the Year of the Pig with dance and music presentations that include a multimedia depiction of heaven, complete with angels, fairies and gods drifting by on clouds. Today at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.; tomorrow at 2 and 8 p.m., Radio City Music Hall, (212) 307-7171, radiocity.com; $42.50 to $184.50. (Dunning) * COMPAÑÍA METROS (Wednesday and Thursday) Ramón Ollers new choreographic adaptation of Carmen for a company from Barcelona condenses the action to a single act and lets it unfold on a rooftop in contemporary Spain. (Through March 8.) Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 8 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 242-0800, joyce.org; $44. (Anderson) DANCEBRAZIL (Tonight through Sunday) Jelon Vieira, the artistic director of this vibrant company from Bahía, has been particularly successful at fusing the techniques of capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art, with modern dance forms. To celebrate the companys 30th anniversary, he has created a new work, The Ritual of the Roda, that traces the history of capoeira; the kickboxing fireworks artfully transformed into dance should be well worth seeing. Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 242-0800, joyce.org; $42; Joyce members, $32. (Roslyn Sulcas) THE 4 TANGO SEASONS (Tonight through Sunday, and Thursday) The show promises to explore the cycles of nature as seen in a man and a woman in love. (Through April 1.) Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 3 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 4 p.m., Thursday at 8. Thalia Spanish Theater, 41-17 Greenpoint Avenue, Sunnyside, Queens (718) 729-3880, thaliatheatre.org; $30; $27 for students and 65; $25 for all tonight and Thursday. (Dunning) FRIDAYS@NOON (Today) Chris Ferris, Anthony Ferro and Eva Dean will show new and unfinished works in this free dance and talk series. At noon, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue, (212) 415-5500, 92Y.org. (Dunning) EUN JUNG GONZALEZ AND CATEY OTT (Tonight through Sunday night) Choreographers who are both collaborators and friends offer Corridors, a program of dances on themes like confinement, compassion and freedom. At 8:30, Danspace Project, St. Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212) 674-8194, danspaceproject.org; $15. (Anderson) GUTA HEDEWIG DANCE (Thursday) Guta Hedewigs Dog Days: Or 19 Ways of Looking at a Shrub expresses the choreographers disquiet over the Bush administration and satirizes the presidents rhetoric. (Through Feb. 25.) At 8:30 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212) 674-8194 or danspaceproject.org; $15 (Anderson) KO-RYO DANCE THEATER (Thursday) Sunwha Chungs Bi-Sang: Ascending Timeless is a suite of seven dances expressing a womans changes in her way of life as she makes a transition between her original culture and a new one. (Through Feb. 25.) At 8 p.m., Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, (212) 334-7479, joyce.org; $20; $15 for students and 65+; $10 for children in fifth grade and younger. (Anderson) MOVEMENT COLLECTIVE (Sunday) This Brooklyn-based modern-dance company will perform works by Alaine Handa, Jenny Schworm, Renee Gonzalez and Molly Campbell. At 2:30 p.m., La Tea Theater, 107 Suffolk Street, between Delancey and Rivington Streets, Lower East Side; $10. (Dunning) NAI-NI CHEN DANCE COMPANY (Tomorrow and Sunday) Year of the Boar celebrates the Chinese New Year with Chinese dragons, twirling ribbons, martial arts and traditional and contemporary music and dance. At 2, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street, Newark, (888) 466-5722, njpac.org; $19; $10 for children. (Anderson) REGINA NEJMAN & Company (Tonight through Sunday night) Ms. Nejmans new Frozen Baby is described as a dance installation, which might indicate that there wont be too much dancing. But Ms. Nejman is a choreographer who revels in sheer physicality, and there should be plenty of high-energy movement to watch. The work is set to commissioned music by Mio Morales, whose last score for Ms. Nejman was a compelling mix of Brazilian pop and sharp electronic rhythyms. At 8, Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, (212) 334-7479; $20; $17 for students. (Sulcas) NEW YORK CITY BALLET (Tonight through Sunday, and Tuesday through Thursday) Just one more week to see the company in its winter season. This weeks programs are A Banquet of Dance (Raymonda Variations, Afternoon of a Faun, Antique Epigraphs and Evenfall (tonight and Tuesday); For the Fun of It (Circus Polka, Walpurgisnacht Ballet, Jeu de Cartes and Firebird) (tomorrow afternoon); Visionary Voices (Klavier, Russian Seasons and The Four Temperaments) (tomorrow night, Sunday afternoon and Thursday); and Contemporary Quartet (Carousel (A Dance), Intermezzo No. 1, Slice to Sharp and Friandises) (Wednesday). New and interesting casting includes Craig Halls role debut in Jerome Robbinss Afternoon of a Faun tonight, dancing with Janie Taylor. Tonight and Thursday at 8; tomorrow at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-5570, nycballet.com; $20 to $95. (Dunning) NEW YORK FLAMENCO FESTIVAL (Tonight through Sunday, and Thursday) Two of the great contemporary Spanish flamenco divas promise to get the weekend off to a fiery start, beginning with Rafaela Carrasco and her company tonight, and Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras tomorrow and Sunday. Ms. Carrasco threatens to explore new concepts in flamenco. Perhaps she will go easy on that august art. Ms. Baras, known particularly for her fast feet, is air to Ms. Carrascos earth. And Carmen Cortés, fast approaching divadom, will offer examples of Gypsy flamenco puro in a program on Thursday with the flamenco guitarist Gerardo Núñez and his quintet. (Through Feb. 24.) Tonight, tomorrow and Thursday night at 8; Sunday at 7 p.m., City Center (Carrasco and Baras), 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; and Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Cortés), 566 LaGuardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, (212) 545-7536, worldmusicinstitute.org; $30 and $70 (Carrasco/Baras); $42 and $50 (Cortés). (Dunning) 92ND STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE FESTIVAL (Tomorrow, Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday) LeeSaar the Company, a gutsy, brainy modern-dance troupe founded seven years ago in Tel Aviv, is performing this weekend in this five-week festival with new and repertory dances. On Wednesday through Feb. 24, Claire Porter/Portables mixes dance, storytelling and blithe and nutty humor in her work, which here includes her new Words Away From Home. LeeSaar tomorrow at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m.; Claire Porter/Portables Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street, Clinton, (212) 415-5500, 92Y.org/HarknessFestival; $20; $10 for students and 65+. (Dunning) OYU ORO (Tonight through Sunday) This company of Afro-Cuban performers will present Palenque, which incorporates popular and traditional dances from both cultures. (Through Feb. 25.) Tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30, Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., La MaMa E.T.C., 74A East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 475-7710, lamama.org; $20; $15 for students. (Dunning) THUNDERBIRD AMERICAN INDIAN DANCERS (Tonight through Sunday) A pow-wow and performing of dances from the Iroquois and other American Indian tribes. Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 3 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101, theaterforthenewcity.net; $10; $1 for children under 12 accompanied by an adult. (Dunning) VISION DANCE/MUSIC: DRUMMING DANCE AND SOUNDING STRINGS (Wednesday and Thursday) This focus of this festival is collaborations between dancers and jazz musicians. The eight pairs include Carmen de Lavallade and Todd Nicholson, and Treva Offutt and Jean-Baptiste Bocle. (Through Feb. 24.) At 7:30 p.m., Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 696-6681, visionfestival.org; $25. (Dunning) Art Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums * American Folk Art Museum: MARTíN RAMíREZ, through April 29. Ramírez, a Mexican peasant who immigrated to Northern California and died there at 68 in 1963, spent the last 32 years of his life in a mental hospital, making some of the greatest art of the last century. He had his own way with materials and color and an unforgettable cast of characters (most notably, a mounted caballero and a levitating Madonna crowned like the Statue of Liberty.) But most of all, Ramírez had his own brand of pictorial space, established by rhythmic systems of parallel lines, both curved and straight, whose mesmerizing expansions and contractions simultaneously cosset and isolate his figures. This show should render null and void the distinction between insider and outsider art. 45 West 53rd Street, (212) 265-1040. (Roberta Smith) * American Museum of Natural History: GOLD, through Aug. 19. This astounding array of art, artifacts and natural samples -- larded with fascinating facts and tales -- ranges from prehistoric times to the present. Stops along the way include pre-Columbian empires, sunken treasure, Bangladesh dowry rituals and the moon landing. It turns out that gold comes from the earth in forms as beautiful as anything man has thought to do with it. You are certain to emerge with mind boggled and eyes dazzled. Central Park West and 79th Street, (212) 769-5100, amnh.org. (Smith) * Grey Art Gallery: Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, through March 31. The artist Wallace Berman (1926-76) may ring only a faint bell to many New Yorkers, but he was a central, charismatic figure in an underground of West Coast artists and poets in the 1950s and 60s. A collagist, poet, photographer and the publisher of an influential journal, Semina, he inspired others to make art too, sparking hidden aptitude in startling places. After meeting him, drifters, movie stars, ex-marines and petty criminals found themselves starting to paint and write. And a traveling love company of them has come to Grey Art Gallery, trailing dreams, delusions and marijuana clouds. New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780. (Holland Cotter) * GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM: Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso, TIME, TRUTH, AND HISTORY through March 28. This show is carried along on its sheer star power and optical finesse. There are dozens of Goyas and Velázquezes and Zurbaráns and El Grecos and Riberas and Dalís and Picassos, many famous, many not. I cant tell you how often I was stopped by a picture so good or unexpected that it made me do a double take. Velázquezs painting of a dwarf is alone worth crossing a continent to see. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Michael Kimmelman) International Center of Photography: Henri Cartier-Bressons Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932-46, through April 29. Arrived by way of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, this show has more than 300 of the prints the photographer glued into an album and toted to New York for curators at the Museum of Modern Art to cull. Captured by the Nazis, he had been presumed dead when the Modern planned his retrospective. Then he turned up alive -- the posthumous exhibition opened, with him in attendance, in 1947. The current exhibition reconstructs as best as possible the original layout of the scrapbook. Its an eye-straining affair, but it surveys the revolutionary work he shot in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Britain and France. His taste for uncanny detail linked him to Surrealism and Surrealist wit, but unlike many Surrealists, he remained committed to human values. Boys mug at his camera. Prostitutes swan. Their gazes equalize them with us. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Kimmelman) International Center of Photography: Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot! through April 29. Munkacsi, who inspired Cartier-Bresson, was, by contrast, self-taught, a creature of his own devising. This is the most complete retrospective, with a thick catalog (not too well researched) and dozens of vintage prints from the 1920s through the early 60s. He favored scenes of daily life, absorbing avant-garde ideas about odd angles and abstract compositions. In 1928 he moved to Berlin and traveled the world on assignment to Brazil, Algeria and Egypt. Munkacsi was a stylist, and he made catchy images the only way he knew how, in a modernist mode, which, being an opportunistic form, could serve any master. He became a celebrity in America. He photographed Fred Astaire dancing and Joan Crawford poolside. In the breezy layouts of Harpers Bazaar, the work looked brilliant. (See above.) (Kimmelman) * The MET: ONE OF A KIND: THE STUDIO CRAFT MOVEMENT, through Sept. 3. Focusing on the postwar development of artist-craftsmen, this display of furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewelry and fiber includes funny, quirky, provocative and sometimes gorgeous things. Among its stars are a witty bust by the California funk ceramicist Robert Arneson (1920-92), portraying the mother of the 16th-century painter and printmaker Albrecht Durer, and Bonnie Seemans fetching ceramic coffeepot and tray, whose mock cabbage leaves and rhubarb stalks evoke the genteel tradition of 18th-century British and continental china, but can also be read as human rather than vegetative tissue. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Grace Glueck) Morgan Library & Museum: Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, through April 8. This show is drawn entirely from an anonymous private collection. Despite the veil of secrecy, a couple of things are obvious: the collector had significant capital for investing in old masters and either an exceptional eye or a good adviser (or both). The works span more than 400 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, and include drawings in ink and pencil, watercolor, chalk and gouache. The earliest works come from a period when drawing wasnt an autonomous practice but was used as a form of exercise, to apply ones craft, to experiment and to make preliminary sketches for larger works. The best example -- and the most historically significant work here -- is a black chalk drawing, The Dead Christ (1529-35), by Agnolo Bronzino. With more than 90 drawings in the show, being a diligent observer quickly becomes exhausting. In which case, put down the guide, find a few drawings you like, and enjoy them while you can. After all, you dont know where they came from, where theyre going, or when youll see them again. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, morganlibrary.org. (Martha Schwendener) * Museum of Modern Art: Armando ReverÓn, through April 16. Unless you spotted his single smoke-puff of a painting at MoMA months ago, Armando Reverón probably means nothing to you. Why should he? The artist, who died in 1954, spent most of his life in a shack by the sea in his native Venezuela. Many of his contemporaries dismissed him as nuts. His white-on-white pictures are practically unphotographable. But chances are that if you visit this retrospective, youll find yourself thinking about him a lot. His art and his story are like few others, and so is the museums inspired installation: a single, long corridor with cabinetlike rooms of paintings on either side and, at the very end, against a sea-green wall, a life-size doll with giant bat wings floating overhead. (212) 708-9400. (Cotter) Neuberger Museum of Art: FUGITIVE ARTIST: THE EARLY WORK OF RICHARD PRINCE, 1974-77, through June 24. This artist is one of the most elusive, perverse and sardonic of all of the important appropriation artists to emerge in the early 1980s, so perhaps it is not surprising that he has boycotted this exhibition of little-known early work, all from public and private collections. But that doesnt stop the 50 pieces on view from revealing his roots in 1970s Conceptual Art; his progress from generic to original and radical; or the depth and duration of his fascination with language, photography, print-making, the more banal forms of urban postwar Americana and a disconnected, decidedly male blankness. If anything, it increases his stature. Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y., (914) 251-6100. (Smith) Last Chance * Tony Conrad In 1973 the conceptual artist, composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad decided to make a movie that would last a lifetime, so he painted white squares on big, scroll-like sheets of paper and hung the results on the wall for a one-night screening. In fact, those Yellow Movies have been playing ever since, the action being physical change through the effects of time and light. Displayed in a gallery more than 30 years later, they are an exhilarating sight: Zen thankas that are also abstract paintings that are also existential projection screens. The film of a lifetime is still in progress. Greene Naftali, 526 West 26th Street, eighth floor, Chelsea, (212) 463-7770, greenenaftaligallery.com; closes tomorrow. (Cotter). * Let Everything Be Temporary, Or When Is the Exhibition? Some of the best art ever made was meant to fade away, and in these days of serious object-glut, a little ephemerality comes as a relief. Thats the point of this barely-there show organized by Elena Filipovic. To a Felix Gonzalez-Torres pile of freebie candy, she adds Gabriel Kuris display of ripening avocadoes; Joëlle Tuerlinckxs site-specific confetti floor piece; Oksana Pasaikos disappearing soap; and Michel Blazys mashed-potato mural. A wall text by Tomo Savic-Gecan speculates on giving market value to art that is in a constant state of change. The artist Boris Belay is filming the whole disappearing show through tomorrow. Apexart, 291 Church Street, TriBeCa, (212) 431-5270, apexart.org; closes tomorrow. (Cotter) * THE METropolitan museum of art: GLITTER AND DOOM: GERMAN PORTRAITS FROM THE 1920s, The 100 paintings and drawings on display here are by 10 artists, including George Grosz, Christian Schad and Karl Hubbuch, and most conspicuously the unrelentingly savage Otto Dix and his magnificent other, Max Beckmann. In their works the Weimar Republics porous worlds reassemble; we look into the faces of museum directors and cabaret performers, society matrons and scarred war veterans, prostitutes and jaded aristocrats who were watching their world slide from one cataclysm to the next. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org; closes on Monday. (Smith) * The MET: SET IN STONE: THE FACE IN MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE One of those revelatory close-ups at which the Metropolitan Museum of Art excels, This show brings together nearly 80 carved, mostly limestone heads, mostly from the 12th and 13th centuries, mostly torn during bouts of iconoclasm from the sculptures and reliefs that turned Gothic cathedrals and abbey churches into Bibles in stone. There are excellent side trips, into the grotesque, the influence of the antique, the glimmers of the Renaissance and a new isotope-matching technique that helping to divine which heads come from where. The treatments of hair and beard with which medieval sculptors were more at ease than they were with, say, eyes or smiles, are almost a show within a show, as, in their own way, are the haunting, seemingly modernist works that look like nothing else here. (212) 535-7710; closes on Monday. (Smith) * Vera Iliatova For her New York solo debut, the Russian-born artist Vera Iliatova delivers a group of small, detailed, atmospheric paintings in which groups of young women -- all self-portraits of the artist -- gather in bucolic settings that make Eden a place of exile. In one painting we are simultaneously in a Poussinian glade, a Brooklyn tenement and a ruined resort. Autumn trees blaze; fighter planes pass overhead. Two women appear in the poses of Masaccios Adam and Eve after the Fall; others talk, wrestle and wail. Monya Rowe Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Room 605, Chelsea, (212) 255-5065, monyarowegallery.com; closes tomorrow. (Cotter) * Networked Nature This cool little show, organized by Marisa Olson for Rhizome, a new-media organization associated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, filters that old Romantic standby, Nature, through the new-fangled technology. Philip Ross powers hydroponic plant environments with LED lighting; Shih-Chieh Huang creates an inflatable flower through concepts from robotics. A California collective, C5, evokes sublime locales through global positioning systems. Stephen Vitiello has the voices George W. Bush whispering in an ivy bush; Gail Wight, in a video called Creep, makes slime mold look sort of beautiful. Foxy Production, 617 West 27th Street, Chelsea, (212) 239-2758; closes on Sunday. (Cotter) MARIO SCHIFANO: PAINTINGS 1960-1966 All but indivisible in New York for 40 years, the work of this Italian artist, who died in 1998 at the age of 64, receives a stirring welcome back in this exhibition of 20 drawings and paintings. In monochromes on brown paper and in canvases involving the Coca-Cola logo and pieces of Plexiglas, Pop and Minimalism are joined almost before they were invented. The more homegrown influence of Arte Povera is visible in the startling nonchalance and even roughness of some works. Sperone Westwater, 415 West 13th Street, Chelsea, (212) 999-7337; closes tomorrow. (Smith)
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News Roundup and Notes: February 2, 2015
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Drone Strikes Test Legal Grounds for War on Terror.
Carter Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal [27] in December that an authorization to address new threats in North Africa was a ���worthy discussion.��� But what form that would��.
Will the White House ignore the War Powers Resolution?
Kerry told reporters on Tuesday that he was open to debating and passing a resolution in the Senate on Libya, but said he didnt see any enthusiasm from leadership or his caucus to get something done. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said on.. Three wars were launched against Israel prior to its establishment of new borders in 1967. By keeping the burden and thus.. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the list includes: Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the current��.
Hard National Security Choices
ISIS claims that Jordanian airstrikes have killed a U.S. hostage held by the group, the New York Times reports. However. The Wall Street Journal explains that domestic debate over an Iranian nuclear deal is much the same in both the United States.
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