New TV shows, museum openings, film releases and concerts — it’s a lot to keep track of. Let us help you. For the week of Dec. 17, seven events in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere not to be missed:
Theater: ‘As You Like It’ Composer at Joe’s Pub
Dec. 19; publictheater.org.
It sounds like a recipe for a train wreck: a star with vocal troubles lip-syncing her way through a live performance that had to go on. But last Labor Day weekend, when the Public Theater staged a joyous musical adaptation of “As You Like It” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, it tapped just the right vocal understudy to avert disaster — Shaina Taub, the show’s prodigiously talented composer-lyricist, who was already playing the character Jaques. When Rebecca Naomi Jones opened her mouth to sing as Rosalind, Ms. Taub’s voice came out. And instead of being a distraction, it added to the show’s charm.
There may be no such thing as too much Shaina Taub. It’s bittersweet, then, that she has just one show left in her residency at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, where she’s been performing once a month all year, playing old songs and trying out new ones, fusing pop, jazz, gospel and Broadway influences into her singularly buoyant sound. Last call is Tuesday, Dec. 19, and if you’re in the room, you’ll know you’re lucky to be there. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Pop Music: Lady Gaga at the Forum
Dec. 18; fabulousforum.com.
For a time — say, between “Poker Face” (2008) and “Born This Way” (2011), both ubiquitous No. 1 hits — Lady Gaga stood at pop’s forefront, embodying the dance-pop trends of the moment and pointing toward the high-concept videos and eccentric styles that would later be in vogue.
Today, a few years past that peak, she remains an engaging personality. The best songs on her most recent album, last year’s “Joanne,” appear to have benefited from her gently scaled-back ambitions, suggesting a possible future as an understated balladeer.
In the meantime, Lady Gaga has spent much of 2017 touring North American arenas with a show that splits the difference between intimate individuality and all-out spectacle. The tour’s final U.S. stop, on Monday, Dec. 18, at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., is an opportunity to see her at a turning point, before she takes her show to Europe in 2018 and figures out her next move. SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
Dance: MacArthur Award-Winning Tap
Dec. 19-31; joyce.org.
One thing to know about Michelle Dorrance is that her mind is as nimble as her feet. The MacArthur Award-winning tap dancer, joined by her eclectic company, Dorrance Dance, winds down the year at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan with two works that celebrate the agility of the body and brain.
Continue reading the main storyIn “Until The Real Thing Comes Along (a letter to ourselves),” part-improvised and part-choreographed, Ms. Dorrance dances with three stellar guest artists — alternating among Jillian Meyers (Dec. 19-27), Melinda Sullivan, Josette Wiggan-Freund and Hannah Heller (Dec. 28-31) — in a showcase of their contrasting tap styles.
The program also features the reimagined and extended version of “Myelination,” Ms. Dorrance’s infectious work for 12, originated in 2015, that is named after the anatomy term describing how a myelin sheath forms around a nerve to allow impulses to move more quickly. That’s apt. “Myelination,” set to music composed and performed by Gregory Richardson and Donovan Dorrance (the choreographer’s brother) and the vocalist Aaron Marcellus, zips by. GIA KOURLAS
TV: ‘A Christmas Story Live!’ on Fox
Dec. 17; fox.com.
“Fragile” spoken with an Italian inflection. That deliriously tasteless leg lamp. And the repeated warning that “you’ll shoot your eye out.” Fans still can’t get enough of “A Christmas Story,” the beloved 1983 movie about Ralphie Parker, a bespectacled 9-year old in 1940s Indiana who’ll do almost anything to get a Red Ryder air rifle in his stocking.
On Sunday, Dec. 17, Fox will add the holiday classic to its arsenal of live productions — “Grease” aired in 2016; “Rent” is scheduled for 2019 — by way of the Tony-nominated 2012 Broadway musical it inspired.
Padded with new songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “La La Land”), “A Christmas Story Live!” stars Matthew Broderick as the narrator, Maya Rudolph as Ralphie’s mother, Jane Krakowski as his teacher and Andy Walken as Ralphie, the role made famous by Peter Billingsley. It also tags along with the actors as they zip from scene to scene via golf carts in this three-hour Los Angeles-based production on the Warner Bros. lot. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Classical: Niblock’s Winter Solstice; Lang’s ‘Little Match Girl’
Dec. 21; roulette.org. Dec. 22; metmuseum.org.
Two contemporary seasonal traditions are on offering in New York this week, providing austerely minimalist but wholly distinctive aesthetic experiences.
On Dec. 21 at Roulette, the composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock curates his annual Winter Solstice concert. The director of the loft series Experimental Intermedia, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018, Mr. Niblock is a fixture of the downtown avant-garde, and the performance will provide a multimedia immersion in his drone-based work, unfolding over six hours on the longest night of the year.
Across the river the next evening, the Metropolitan Museum stages David Lang’s “The Little Match Girl Passion” — a haunting, Pulitzer Prize-winning reimagining of the Hans Christian Andersen tale in the style of Bach’s passions — which the museum has made a holiday ritual. Featuring a quartet of stellar freelance singers, including the bass-baritone Dashon Burton, the Met performance will also include a participatory component: the audience will sing three hymns interspersed through the concert, including one newly composed for the occasion by Lang. WILLIAM ROBIN
Art: East Village, 1978-1983
Through Feb. 11, aldenprojects.com.
You may have already been to the first definitive institutional show on Club 57, the influential gallery, dance club, movie house, and performance space located in a St. Marks church basement from 1978 to 1983, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. (If not, you’ve got till April.)
But this week you can head downtown for the opening of a small related show at Alden Projects, whose walls will be plastered with more than a hundred samizdat posters and Xerox fliers advertising “lurid” film screenings, shows of Keith Haring’s personal collection of found art and a Velvet Underground tribute band, plus a number of the Monster Movie Club’s “nooseletters.” The collection conjures a time when the city was gritty, but art was still fun. WILL HEINRICH
Film: ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’
Dec. 20; jumanjimovie.com.
Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock, as a teenage nerd prone to weeping fits who can’t quite fathom the killer bod fate has bestowed on him? Believe it — along with Karen Gillan as his bookish crush turned martial arts master, Kevin Hart as a gridiron powerhouse knocked down to size and Jack Black as a queen bee trapped in a middle-age man’s body.
That’s the cast of “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” opening Wednesday, Dec. 20. It’s a rollicking, often hilarious sequel to the 1995 fantasy starring Robin Williams, sucked into a treacherous board game. Only this time the sinister element is in video form, unearthed during detention by a high school foursome (played by Alex Wolff, Madison Morgan Turner, Ser’Darius Blain and Madison Iseman) thrust into a far-flung wilderness after choosing their adult avatars.
Each player has a unique skill set without which the others can’t survive to finish the game. There’s also a kid-friendly moral: “You should be thinking about who you are,” their principal warns, “and who you want to be.” KATHRYN SHATTUCK
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