Fun Things to Do in NYC in February 2025

‘Margaret’s Gay Sons Featuring Dylan Adler and Sam Oh’

Jan. 31 at 9:30 p.m. at Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan; publictheater.org.

As part of her residency at Joe’s Pub, the comedian Margaret Cho has been presenting artists whom she finds inspirational. Next in Cho’s lineup is a show featuring her latest unofficial adoptees, the comedians Dylan Adler and Sam Oh, who will each have a half-hour to present their own jokes and songs this Friday.

Recently, Adler and Cho were panelists on the CBS game show “After Midnight,” where Adler, a former writer and performer on “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” also appeared with his fall tour mate and dance partner, Atsuko Okatsuka, in September. Around that same time, Cho performed with Oh’s alter ego, Gay Virgin, on a NSFW hyperpop tune. Oh is set to release an EP featuring that song and others soon. He also has a role in Greg Daniels’s upcoming follow-up to “The Office,” which is centered on a failing Midwestern newspaper attempting to save itself.

Tickets are $25 on the Public Theater’s website. SEAN L. McCARTHY

Pop & Rock

070 Shake

Feb. 1 at 9 p.m. at Kings Theater, 1027 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn; kingstheatre.com.

The singer and rapper 070 Shake is a haunting presence, her bruised, plaintive voice a reliable source of emotional heft. Many first heard it in her soaring guest turn on Kanye West’s 2018 track “Ghost Town”; even more were introduced to Shake via “Escapism,” the 2022 hit in which her verse is a sobering interlude in the British singer Raye’s epic of heartbreak-fueled hedonism.

In her own music, Shake is similarly drawn to melodrama, often returning to stories about tortured romance, late-night breakdowns and self-medication. Her third album, “Petrichor,” also reveals a growing experimental instinct. The record, which was released in November, stitches together hip-hop, arena rock and orchestral pop in an unpredictable patchwork that reflects the erratic nature of love.

Tickets for Shake’s show in Brooklyn on Saturday start at $55 on Kings Theater’s website. OLIVIA HORN

Classical

‘Histories V: The Viennese School’

Feb. 2 at 5 p.m. at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn; brooklynartsongsociety.org.

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven — these are the giants of the Classical era, from roughly 1750 to 1825, which was known for massive compositional outputs, outsize personalities and musical works on a grand scale. But in the ivory-miniature world of the art song, their names don’t loom quite as large.

This Sunday at Roulette, Brooklyn Art Song Society re-examines the smaller works of these classical titans, tracing the development of the lieder form into the 19th-century Romantic era. The concert begins with characteristically elegant and slightly cheeky pieces from a mature Mozart, sung by the soprano Maggie Finnegan, before turning to English works by Haydn, sung by the soprano Ashley Emerson. Haydn’s compositions are dramatic showcases for singer and pianist alike, especially his intense “The Spirit’s Song.” The concert closes with Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte,” the composer’s only song cycle, which served as inspiration for later ones by Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert, here sung by the baritone Michael Kelly. A piece replete with Romantic longing, this work may be short, but it casts an imposing shadow.

Tickets are pay-what-you-wish, with a suggested price of $35, at the society’s website. GABRIELLE FERRARI

BAMkids Film Festival

Feb. 1-2, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., at BAM Rose Cinemas, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn; bam.org.

Children are often excluded from a whole world of cinematic art that you don’t have to be an adult to visit: independent short films.

Such works, however, are the staple of the BAMkids Film Festival, presented all weekend by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in association with the Melbourne International Animation Festival. But don’t let the name of the partnering organization fool you. This year’s festival, the academy’s 27th, offers live-action movies, too, and projects from more than 20 nations, including the Czech Republic, India, Taiwan, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan.

The shorts are grouped according to age-appropriateness and thematic similarities, with two programs for preschoolers, three for children 6 to 8 and one for an often neglected audience: kids 9 and older. Some films contain no dialogue; others have subtitles. But all feature intriguing characters, such as clouds, a raindrop, spirits, animals and, of course, young people themselves. (A full schedule is on the website.)

Have a yearning for live performance? Parallel Exit, a troupe combining theater and circus, will offer free fun in the BAM Rose lobby from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Tickets to the screening programs start at $10. LAUREL GRAEBER

Snubbed Forever: Great Actors, No Nominations

Feb. 1-March 9 at the Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Avenue, Queens; movingimage.us.

Complaints that certain actors missed out on Oscar nominations last week inevitably seem small when measured against the careers in this series, which honors performers who never received — or, at least, have yet to receive — a single nomination. First up is John Cazale, who starred in only five movies before his death at 42, but all of them are enduring classics of the 1970s, including the first two “Godfather” films and “The Deer Hunter.” The museum is highlighting his nervy work as Al Pacino’s bank-robbing partner in “Dog Day Afternoon” (showing on Saturday and Sunday), a tightly wound role easy to overlook beside Pacino’s loudmouth virtuosity.

It’s hard to believe that the academy has completely ignored John Turturro and John Goodman, who play neighbors at a seedy Los Angeles hotel in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” (on Saturday and Sunday): Goodman is the supposed embodiment of “the common man,” a group Turturro’s self-important playwright presumes to write about. Next weekend, the museum will salute Mia Farrow (“Rosemary’s Baby,” on Feb. 7 and 8), Maureen O’Hara (“The Quiet Man,” on Feb. 8 and 9) and Joseph Cotten (“The Magnificent Ambersons,” on Feb. 8 and 9). BEN KENIGSBERG

Last Chance

‘Cult of Love’

Through Feb. 2 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Second Stage leans right into holiday-season angst with this dramedy by Leslye Headland (“Russian Doll”) about a dysfunctional clan gathering for Christmas in Connecticut at the home of their parents (David Rasche and Mare Winningham), where the only harmony is in the carol singing. Trip Cullman, who staged the play last winter at Berkeley Rep, directs a strong cast that includes Zachary Quinto and Shailene Woodley. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Oh, Mary’

Through June 28 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; ohmaryplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

Channeling the deliriously outrageous, emphatically queer downtown spirit of Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, this comedy by Cole Escola (“Difficult People”) began as a fizzy Off Broadway hit. Escola stars as a sozzled, stage-struck Mary Todd Lincoln — a very loose cannon largely ignored by her husband (Conrad Ricamora), the president, who is otherwise occupied with assorted sexual exploits and the bothersome Civil War. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Gypsy’

At the Majestic Theater, Manhattan; gypsybway.com. Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes.

Grabbing the baton first handed off by Ethel Merman, Audra McDonald plays the formidable Momma Rose in the fifth Broadway revival of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s exalted 1959 musical about a vaudeville stage mother and her daughters: June, the favorite child, and Louise, who becomes the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Directed by George C. Wolfe, with choreography by Camille A. Brown, the cast includes Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Jordan Tyson and Lesli Margherita. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Hell’s Kitchen’

At the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; hellskitchen.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

Alicia Keys’s own coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical, which won two Tonys. Studded with Keys’s songs, including “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” it’s the story of a 17-year-old girl (Maleah Joi Moon, last year’s winner for best actress) in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, growing into an artist. Directed by Michael Greif, the show has a book by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Read the review.

Last Chance

‘Edges of Ailey’

Through Feb. 9 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; whitney.org.

A major institutional tribute to the American choreographer and performer Alvin Ailey (1931-89), this show is also a relatively rare example of a traditionally object-intensive art museum giving full-scale treatment to the ephemeral medium of dance. But if you anticipated, as I did, that this would mean a display of documentary photographs, some archival materials (costumes, stage designs), and — best — extensive examples of dance on film, you’ve got a surprise in store. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now’

Through Feb. 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.

This unusual and audacious exhibition spotlights a propensity in American culture hiding in plain sight: the attachment, among Black artists, musicians and intellectuals, to ancient Egyptian culture, myth and spirituality. Rambling across a century and a half, with nearly 200 artworks, it explores the colonial roots of modern Egyptology, the Pharaonic motifs of the Harlem Renaissance, the Egyptian iconography of Black Power and other movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and sphinxes and pyramids in the work of everyone from Kara Walker to Richard Pryor. Read the review.

‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy’

Through March 16 at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Manhattan; theshed.org.

This reconstruction of a fair held in Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987 — complete with carnival rides decorated by artists such as Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, which are unfortunately cordoned off — reserves its greatest pleasures for visitors with more art-historical tastes. Crammed with informative wall texts, this event — or is it an exhibition? — documents, but barely recreates, a long-lost cultural experiment that “blurred the lines between art and play.” Thirty-seven years later, at the Shed, those lines stay largely well defined. Most everything stays ensconced on the “art” side. The whole thing feels weirdly peaceful, hardly the midway I expected. Read the review.