With November comes the onset of 4 P.M. darkness, not to mention the cold—but venues across the city this winter will emanate light and heat. If you’re in the mood for romance, the cozy season has plenty to offer, including Bradley Cooper’s movie “Is This Thing On?,” set in the world of standup comedy; the lush crooning of the alt-country star Brandi Carlile; TV’s favorite housewives, the real ones of Salt Lake City; and, on the creepier side, Tracy Letts’s edgy thriller “Bug,” on Broadway, starring his wife, Carrie Coon, as a lonely waitress. Alvin Ailey brings several new pieces to its annual City Center encampment, plus a revival by the great Judith Jamison; the Met Opera promises epic drama in “Porgy and Bess” (set in nineteen-twenties Charleston) and “Andrea Chénier” (French …
With November comes the onset of 4 P.M. darkness, not to mention the cold—but venues across the city this winter will emanate light and heat. If you’re in the mood for romance, the cozy season has plenty to offer, including Bradley Cooper’s movie “Is This Thing On?,” set in the world of standup comedy; the lush crooning of the alt-country star Brandi Carlile; TV’s favorite housewives, the real ones of Salt Lake City; and, on the creepier side, Tracy Letts’s edgy thriller “Bug,” on Broadway, starring his wife, Carrie Coon, as a lonely waitress. Alvin Ailey brings several new pieces to its annual City Center encampment, plus a revival by the great Judith Jamison; the Met Opera promises epic drama in “Porgy and Bess” (set in nineteen-twenties Charleston) and “Andrea Chénier” (French Revolution-era Paris); and, in the art world, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois, along with the sculptor Carol Bove and the painter Ceija Stojka, all get their day in the sun.
New Yorker subscribers enjoy access to our full seasonal cultural previews directly in their inbox. Thank you for your support.—Shauna Lyon
Jump to: Television | Art | The Theatre | Movies | Dance | Contemporary Music | Classical Music
Television
“Game of Thrones” Prequel, Women’s Worlds
For the past six years, winter television has belonged to “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” which has revitalized the long-running reality franchise through creative insults, explorations of religious trauma, and the gloriously demented fashions of women who insist on wearing high heels in the snow. (Season 6 is currently under way; John Oliver, the host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” recently said of “R.H.O.S.L.C.,” “I don’t know if there’s a funnier show on TV, and I work for a comedy show.”) Unsurprisingly, then, “Salt Lake” has inspired bandwagoners. The similarly premised—though far less satisfying—“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” returns to Hulu for its third season on Nov. 13, and a more dedicated look at spiritual abuse will be undertaken by Bravo’s “Surviving Mormonism with Heather Gay” (Nov. 11), to be hosted by the “R.H.O.S.L.C.” star.
On the scripted side, there will be no shortage of formidable mothers this season. Claire Danes headlines “The Beast in Me” (Netflix; Nov. 13), playing a woman who lost her only child to a car accident and finds herself drawn to a sharklike businessman (Matthew Rhys), who intuits the dark impulses that she harbors toward the young man whom she blames for her son’s death. Danes’s character is a kindred spirit to Sarah Snook’s panicked mother in Peacock’s “All Her Fault” (Nov. 6), a thriller in which a young boy’s disappearance casts suspicion on the various women in his life. Motherhood gets yet more complicated in Kurt Sutter’s Western drama “The Abandons” (Dec. 4), which finds a woman (Lena Headey) in eighteen-fifties Oregon creating a makeshift family with four orphans and fending off attempts by a mining heiress (Gillian Anderson) to take their land.
Solidarity is a recurring theme. In BritBox’s “Riot Women” (Oct. 22), from the “Happy Valley” creator Sally Wainwright, a group of menopause-aged women fight against the invisibility common to their demographic by forming a rock band. A more glamorous sort of sisterhood emerges in “All’s Fair” (Nov. 4), Ryan Murphy’s campy legal drama on Hulu—starring Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, and, uh, Kim Kardashian—about unhappy wives and the female divorce lawyers committed to getting them all that they deserve.
Notably, the male-centric fare in the next few months skews historic. Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen square off, as President James Garfield and his grandiose assassin, Charles Guiteau, respectively, in Netflix’s “Death by Lightning” (Nov. 6). The Revolutionary War gets the Ken Burns treatment with PBS’s “The American Revolution,” a six-part, twelve-hour documentary to début on Nov. 16. And the new year will bring another “Game of Thrones” prequel: the humbly titled “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (Jan. 18). Peter Claffey stars in the HBO drama as the lowborn Ser Duncan the Tall, who gains a squire in a Targaryen prince. A trailer for the series hints at a more lighthearted tale, but, in Westeros, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an appendage in some horrific fashion.—Inkoo Kang
Art
Mozart’s Treasures, Indigenous Painting
This season, several storied institutions are looking toward fashion for a winter pick-me-up. The Hispanic Society leads the way with “Spanish Style: Fashion Illuminated, 1550-1700” (opens Nov. 6), which uses garments, illuminated manuscripts, funerary sculptures, and more, to examine the relationship between clothing and power in early modern Spain. The Frick Collection offers a complement with “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” (Feb. 12), taking viewers to eighteenth-century England to consider Thomas Gainsborough’s sensitive portraits through a social, materialist lens. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art digs into a collection mainstay—nineteenth-century Western Europe—for evidence of “Fanmania” (Dec. 11), a craze for handheld fans that artists of the time embraced.
If you can’t get enough of European history on the cusp of modernity, the Morgan Library & Museum has “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg” (March 13). The exhibition, a collaboration with the organization that stewards Mozart’s legacy, contextualizes the composer in his day and age through his own instruments, letters, and possessions—all of which are coming to New York for the first time. If you prefer musical vibes to close study, check out Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s “Art of Noise” (Dec. 12; although, as of this writing, the museum is closed because of the federal-government shutdown). The show is a grab bag of sonic design, from Haight-Ashbury concert posters to early jukeboxes to custom listening rooms.
In the realm of contemporary art, two museums continue to shine a long-overdue spotlight on Indigenous artists. “Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass,” at the National Museum of the American Indian (Nov. 15, although as of this writing, the museum is also closed because of the federal-government shutdown), surveys the ways that Native artists have made the medium their own—a story that begins, surprisingly, with the kitschy populist Dale Chihuly. Grey Art Museum mounts “Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from the Australian Desert” (Jan. 22), which gathers a hundred and thirty-four cosmic and meditative works by the members of Papunya Tula Artists, Australia’s first Aboriginal art coöperative, founded in 1971.
Meanwhile, four of contemporary art’s grandes dames are getting solo presentations, the biggest of which is “Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep,” at the Museum of Modern Art (Nov. 18). Curiously, this mini-survey is happening in the museum’s vast atrium, where it may be hard to appreciate the nuances of Frankenthaler’s saturated abstractions. David Zwirner celebrates one of her Abstract Expressionist peers with “To Define a Feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960-1965” (Nov. 6), which focusses on a period when Mitchell began concentrating color in her canvases more centrally, inspired by her time on the Mediterranean. In nearby Chelsea galleries, Hauser & Wirth presents late, psychologically charged abstract works by Louise Bourgeois in “Gathering Wool” (Nov. 6), and Pace shows a late, lighthearted Agnes Martin series, with “Innocent Love” (Nov. 7).
After giving its current Rashid Johnson exhibition a very long run, the Guggenheim brings in Carol Bove (March 5), whose scrap-metal sculptures should punctuate the rotunda playfully. But the honor of most timely exhibition of the season goes to the Drawing Center’s “Ceija Stojka: Making Visible” (Feb. 20). The self-taught Stojka began making art when she was nearly sixty, channelling her Roma upbringing and her experience surviving the Holocaust. The exhibition gathers her paintings and drawings alongside archival material to tell a story that’s at once sobering and inspiring.—Jillian Steinhauer
The Theatre
British Romance, Carrie Coon in “Bug”
Winter falls softly on Broadway; and so only a few shows are tiptoeing in after the autumn rush. The two-person British musical “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” (Longacre; begins previews Nov. 1), written by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, hops across the pond hoping to make a romantic splash; the great June Squibb appears in Jordan Harrison’s 2014 wistful sci-fi drama “Marjorie Prime” (Hayes; Nov. 20); the short-story writer Simon Rich’s anthology show “All Out: Comedy About Ambition” features a rotating suite of big-name comedians (Nederlander; Dec. 12); and the revival of “Bug,” Tracy Letts’s 1996 thriller, stars Namir Smallwood and the incredible Carrie Coon, who is scratching her theatre itch after too long away (Friedman; Dec. 17).
Off Broadway, beloved actors appear in familiar tales: Michael Urie plays the deposed “Richard II” (Astor Place Theatre; in previews, opens Nov. 10), in Craig Baldwin’s Shakespeare adaptation, and the playwright Alex Lin modernizes a different Shakespeare tragedy for “Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear” (59E59; Nov. 1), featuring the tremendous Cindy Cheung as a restaurateur in a succession crisis. Nicholas Braun and the two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young star in Rajiv Joseph’s 2012 toxic-relationship drama, “Gruesome Playground Injuries” (Lucille Lortel; Nov. 7); Lucas Hnath’s version of Molière’s “Tartuffe” features beaucoup Tony awardees, including Matthew Broderick and Francis Jue (New York Theatre Workshop; Nov. 14); and the five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams sails into Eugene O’Neill’s toughest romance, the 1921 “Anna Christie” (St. Ann’s Warehouse; Nov. 25).
To beat the winter chill, try hot-hot-hot innovation among the experimental vanguard: Else Went’s “Initiative,” a five-hour marathon about teen-age life, plays from Nov. 4 at the Public; Hannah Kallenbach’s “Mikey Maus in Fantasmich” satirizes a certain squeaky icon at the Brick from Nov. 7; Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s musicalization of Larry Kramer’s 1977 novel “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions” (Park Avenue Armory; Dec. 2) comes to New York; and the gonzo troupe Das Besties début their dance-theatre exploration of addiction, “Das Rauschgift” (Box of Moonlight; Dec. 4). Festivals including Under the Radar (Jan. 7-25), Prototype (Jan. 7-18), and the Exponential Festival (Jan. 5-Feb. 8) also light up the new year—all three are embarrassments of riches.
In 2026, our theatre-makers look at politics, if obliquely: Shakespeare’s coup-adjacent drama “The Tragedy of Coriolanus” may feel disturbingly relevant (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Feb. 1); Lauren Yee débuts “Mother Russia” (Signature; Feb. 3), a spy dramedy about post-Soviet intra-Russian surveillance; Wallace Shawn reunites with his “My Dinner with André” companion, André Gregory, who directs Shawn’s play “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” about love and middle-class values, starring Hope Davis and John Early (Greenwich House; Feb. 4); and the playwright Anna Ziegler takes on Sophocles’ classic with “Antigone (This play I read in high school),” starring Tony Shalhoub as Creon and Celia Keenan-Bolger as the titular revolutionary (Public; Feb. 26).
Early March sees two star vehicles drive onto Broadway: John Lithgow plays an embattled Roald Dahl in the West End import “Giant,” by Mark Rosenblatt (Music Box; March 11), and two of the tough-talking sweethearts from “The Bear,” Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, team up for “Dog Day Afternoon,” a Stephen Adly Guirgis adaptation of the Sidney Lumet film about a 1972 bank robbery (August Wilson; March 10). At this point, the Broadway schedule goes berserk, because millions of plays must open before the Tony deadline in late April—in this and other ways, Guirgis’s thriller will serve as the spring season’s starting gun.—Helen Shaw
Movies
A Shakespeare Tale, a Ping-Pong Champ
There will be music in the frosty air, starting with songs by Stephen Schwartz in “Wicked: For Good” (Nov. 24), the sequel to last year’s “Wicked: Part One,” both directed by Jon M. Chu. Cynthia Erivo returns as Elphaba—now called the Wicked Witch of the West—and Ariana Grande reprises her role as Glinda, now Glinda the Good. “Merrily We Roll Along” (Dec. 5), directed by Maria Friedman, a film of the Tony-winning 2023 Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical, about three friends’ interlinked destinies—seen in reverse over the course of twenty years—stars Daniel Radcliffe, Lindsay Mendez, and Jonathan Groff. In Óliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” (Nov. 17), a Spanish man (Sergi López), accompanied by his young son (Bruno Núñez Arjona), searches the Moroccan desert for his daughter, who disappeared while attending a rave there; the movie features a techno score by Kangding Ray. Mona Fastvold’s bio-pic “The Testament of Ann Lee” (Dec. 25), which she co-wrote with Brady Corbet, stars Amanda Seyfried as the titular Shaker evangelist, who, in 1774, emigrated from Manchester, England, to New York; the drama features choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall and music by Daniel Blumberg, based on Shaker hymns.
Real-life artists and their famous work get their time in the spotlight. The title character of “Hamnet” (Nov. 27), Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is the son of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley); the drama involves the boy’s death and Shakespeare’s writing of “Hamlet,” in response. Craig Brewer’s “Song Sung Blue” (Dec. 25) is a bio-pic, based on a 2008 documentary of the same title, about Mike and Claire Sardina (Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson), who performed as a Neil Diamond tribute band called Lightning & Thunder.
Political fantasy embraces a wide range of emotions this season. In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” (Nov. 26), which is set in Brazil, mainly in 1977, when the country was a dictatorship, Wagner Moura stars as a scientist who’s hunted by the regime’s paramilitaries and is aided by an underground resistance network. Toni Servillo stars in Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia” (Dec. 5), as a President of Italy whose major decisions just before leaving office include whether to sign a bill allowing euthanasia. “Ella McCay” (Dec. 12), directed by James L. Brooks, stars Emma Mackey as a lieutenant governor who ascends to the governorship while dealing with family problems; Jamie Lee Curtis and Woody Harrelson co-star. In Park Chan-wook’s satirical comedy “No Other Choice” (Dec. 25), based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, an unemployed executive (Lee Byung-hun) whose job applications are turned down decides to kill off his competitors.
Romance is, as ever, a cinematic energizer, as in “Is This Thing On?” (Dec. 19), a comedic drama directed by Bradley Cooper, in which Laura Dern and Will Arnett play a newly separated couple who remain emotionally connected; in a supporting role, Cooper plays their friend. “Marty Supreme” (Dec. 25), Josh Safdie’s first film since “Uncut Gems,” shares that movie’s frenetic energy, in a period drama, set in 1952, about a Ping-Pong hustler (Timothée Chalamet) who sustains relationships with two women (Odessa A’zion and Gwyneth Paltrow) while pursuing a world championship. Jodie Foster stars in Rebecca Zlotowski’s melodrama “A Private Life” (Jan. 16), as a psychologist in Paris who reconnects with her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil) in an effort to prove that a deceased client was murdered.—Richard Brody
Dance
Pam Tanowitz’s Pastoral, Ailey Does Joni Mitchell
In the dreary month of January, summer makes a brief but welcome appearance via Pam Tanowitz’s “Pastoral” (Rose Theatre; Jan. 11-13). It’s a bucolic work, a peaceable kingdom of serene, sometimes quirky dances, set within a landscape of vibrantly colored fabric panels by the artist Sarah Crowner. Dancers move with bracing clarity as Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony wafts across Caroline Shaw’s musical collage, which also suggests the buzzing of insects, bird calls, rain.
Balmy breezes blow through Maija García’s new dance for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (New York City Center; Dec. 3-Jan. 4) as well. “Jazz Island” is the Cuban American choreographer’s first collaboration with the Ailey dancers, after years of working on Broadway (“FELA!”) and in movies (“BlacKkKlansman”). It draws its inspiration from a folktale about the Haitian vodou goddess of love, Erzuli, collected in a volume of stories by the late dancer Geoffrey Holder, “Black Gods, Green Islands.” Alicia Graf Mack’s first season as artistic director, abundant in new works, also includes the revival of Judith Jamison’s poignant duet “A Case of You.” This intimate dance is set to the eponymous Joni Mitchell song, in a soulful recording by Diana Krall.
Telephone noises and birdsong compete for attention in John Cage’s musical setting for Merce Cunningham’s cheeky “Travelogue,” from 1977. The Trisha Brown Dance Company (BAM; Feb. 26-28) performs this witty, sometimes surreal dance—its first foray into the Cunningham catalogue—alongside Brown’s “Set and Reset,” a cool, seductive work from 1983, rendered even cooler by the sonic backdrop of Laurie Anderson’s silvery vocal-and-electronic score “Longtime No See.” Both productions include memorable designs by Robert Rauschenberg: a video collage and scrims for “Set and Reset,” bicycle wheels and chairs for “Travelogue.”
Both of New York City Ballet’s resident choreographers, Justin Peck and Alexei Ratmansky, will produce new works for the winter season (David H. Koch Theatre; Jan. 20-March 1). After a period of focussing on contemporary music, Peck takes on Beethoven’s “Eroica”; and Ratmansky delves into satire in a new staging of the 1936 ballet “Le Roi Nu,” based on the Hans Christian Andersen folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The season also sees the return of much-loved works such as George Balanchine’s nostalgic “Diamonds” (keep an eye out for the dancer Mira Nadon). And, a rarity: Jerome Robbins’s quiet “Antique Epigraphs,” a dance for eight women set to enigmatic Debussy, which was inspired by a group of Roman statues, bronze with enamel eyes, housed in the Archeological Museum in Naples.—Marina Harss
Contemporary Music
Illustrations by Joanne Joo
Lorde, Clipse, Sudan Archives
There’s a little something for everyone sprinkled across this winter’s slate of shows in contemporary music. Those looking for ambience should catch the sound-design pioneer Suzanne Ciani at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity, where the accomplished composer will improvise on her modular synthesizer inside the grand cathedral (Dec. 6). The following week, the indie-pop instrumentalist Jay Som unwraps her first LP in six years, “Belong,” at Warsaw (Dec. 11). The producer and performer Cate Le Bon leans into the latter of her musical skill sets at Irving Plaza, her amorphous indie rock dreamier than ever (Dec. 16). Anyone seeking tunes with more bite should try the post-punk band Dry Cleaning, who play Brooklyn Steel on Jan. 29. For something airier and more wistful, there’s the haunted folk of Marissa Nadler, which is as eerie and spectral as it is pretty (Le Poisson Rouge; Feb. 18).
’Tis also the season for dense, wordy rappers. On Dec. 1, the prodigy turned seasoned grand master Earl Sweatshirt brings the newfound wisdom of fatherhood to Terminal 5. At Elsewhere, three of indie rap’s most underrated figures, the roistering oddball $ilkmoney, the deadpan lyricist Quelle Chris, and the eccentric Virginian Fly Anakin join forces (Dec. 7). The duo Clipse, two brothers from only a bit further down the Virginia interstate, fresh off the runaway success of their comeback album, “Let God Sort Em Out,” unload a metric ton of coke bars at Brooklyn Paramount, on Dec. 30.
In the new year, several R. & B. artists blossom into their pronounced, updated styles. The violinist Brittney Parks, performing as her experimental project Sudan Archives, unveils a new cybernated, dance-focussed album, “The BPM,” at Webster Hall (Jan. 29). The singer Mariah the Scientist pulls apart smooth, beaming eighties touchstones for “Hearts Sold Separately” (Radio City Music Hall; Feb. 27). At Brooklyn Steel, Amber Mark occupies an even sunnier space with her soft-strummed release, “Pretty Idea” (March 4-5).
In February, progressionists of Americana take Manhattan, all with new albums in tow. On Feb. 13, the decorated alt-country singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile sets off on the Human Tour, supporting “Returning to Myself” at Madison Square Garden. On the 19th, the roots fusionist Margo Price revisits the sound of her early recordings for “Hard Headed Woman,” at Webster Hall. On the 20th, Jason Isbell retreats into the acoustic world of “Foxes in the Snow,” at Radio City Music Hall.
Meanwhile, the pop-music scene welcomes stars settling into their niches. At Hammerstein Ballroom, Halsey commemorates the tenth anniversary of their début album, “Badlands” (Dec. 13-15). On Dec. 16-17, Lorde stops by the city again for her Ultrasound World Tour, this time closing its American leg, at Barclays Center. And, at Brooklyn Paramount, JADE, a former member of the U.K. girl group Little Mix, is reborn as a solo star interrogating the very notion of showbiz (Feb. 19).—Sheldon Pearce
Classical Music
Tallis Scholars Mass, Star Pianists
England, the insult goes, is “a land without music.” Of course, where there are people, there is music—but it’s true that, for a century or two, English composers played mostly in the minor leagues. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, at David Geffen Hall, showcases two works, both from 1910, that helped to change that. First, Vaughn Williams’s lambent “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” programmed alongside the local première of John Williams’s Piano Concerto, played by Emanuel Ax, puts the sparse tonalities of the Reformation through a lush folk-inflected filter (Feb. 27-28, March 1 and 3). Then, Elgar’s fiendishly difficult Violin Concerto is played by Vilde Frang in concerts that also feature Schumann’s First Symphony and Weinberg’s Fifth (March 5-7).
With Christmas in the air, the Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Philips, let a mass by the group’s namesake composer speak for itself in their annual advent at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (Dec. 4). Les Arts Florissants, under William Christie, perform Charpentier’s “Pastorale de Noël” (BAM; Dec. 5-7). The Skylark ensemble and the Clarion Choir both sing at the Met Cloisters (Dec. 15 and 20). The Chamber Music Society leans into feel-good Baroque favorites, with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” (Dec. 6-7), Bach’s “Coffee” Cantata (Dec. 9), and Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos (Dec. 12, 14, and 16). And the Metropolitan Opera marks the season with its annual hangover-friendly abridged “Magic Flute” (opens Dec. 11).
The tenor Frederick Ballentine, fresh from reviving his unctuous Sportin’ Life in Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” for the Met Opera (opens Dec. 2), explores Black and L.G.B.T.Q. experience in a recital at 92NY, accompanied by Kunal Lahiry (Feb. 3). Also at the Met Opera, the threat of the guillotine hangs over the buoyant aristocrats of Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier” (opens Nov. 24). Massanet’s “Manon,” set under the ancien régime, shares a similarly torrid atmosphere: Heartbeat Opera presents a foreshortened adaptation at the Irondale Center (Jan. 27-Feb. 15).
In January, Carnegie Hall begins its semiquincentennial series “United in Sound: America at 250.” Some of the most interesting entries run over three nights at Zankel Hall. Timo Andres and Aaron Diehl play pieces of their own, plus Duke Ellington’s “Tonk” (Jan. 28); the string quartet Brooklyn Rider dedicates its program, which includes a transcription of “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” to the ideal of democratic citizenship (Jan. 29). And on Jan. 30, Davóne Tines and the genre-bending early-music group Ruckus stretch the American songbook to include a Handel aria: “Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage?”—Fergus McIntosh
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: