NJPAC in Newark will celebrate the beginning of the Year of the Snake, Jan. 25.
NJPAC in Newark will welcome the Year of the Snake with a Lunar New Year Celebration, Jan. 25 at 7:30 p.m. at its Prudential Hall, with New Jersey Symphony (conducted by Xian Zhang), joined by pianist Min Kwon, tenor Michael Fabiano, The Peking University Alumni Chorus, The Starry Arts Children’s Chorus (directed by Rebecca Shen), and The Edison Chinese School Lion Dance Team.
The program will include Li Huanzhi’s Spring Festival Overture; selections from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23; Arirang (traditional, arr. Patricio Molina); “Yuan Ri” (traditional); “The Red Dragonfly” (traditional, arr. Nicholas Hersh); and Puccini’s “E Lucevan le stelle” (from Tosca) and selections from Turandot.
Here is a roundup of other arts events taking place around New Jersey, through Jan. 30.
THEATER
• Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn will present “Mystic Pizza,” with previews starting Jan. 29, the official opening night on Feb. 2, and the last show on Feb. 23. A 2021 musical adaptation of the 1988 Julia Roberts movie, it features ’80s pop songs such as Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m the Only One,” John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” and Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”
MATTHEW MURPHY
Scott Barrow in “Here There Are Blueberries.”
• “Here There Are Blueberries,” a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist play, will be presented by Tectonic Theater Project at The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, from Jan. 24 to Feb. 9. It is co-written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and, according to a press release, it “is focused on a mysterious album featuring Nazi-era photographs that arrive at the desk of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist in 2007. As curators unraveled the shocking truth behind the images, the album soon made headlines and set off a debate that reverberated far beyond the museum walls. Based on actual events, the play tells the story of these historical photographs, and what they reveal about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and our own humanity.”
Conversations featuring various scholars, diplomats and community leaders will take place following the matinees on Jan. 26 and Feb. 1-2 and 8.
• Two River Theater in Red Bank will present a family-friendly, abridged version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” titled “A Little Shakespeare: The Tempest,” Jan. 24-26 and 31 and Feb. 1. According to the theater’s website, the production is “directed and designed by theater professionals and performed and supported backstage by high school students.”
Willie Nile will perform at Light of Day’s “Songwriters in the Round” show at Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair, Jan. 25.
MUSIC
• This year’s Light of Day WinterFest is mostly over, but there are two more shows.
The first, Jan. 24 at 7:30 p.m. at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, will feature Tusk‘s Fleetwood Mac tribute, along with Late for the Sky, a Jackson Browne tribute starring Jake Thistle.
• Thistle will perform again at the Light of Day’s 7:30 p.m. Jan. 25 “Songwriters in the Round” show at The Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair, hosted by Joe D’Urso and also featuring Willie Nile, Danielia Cotton, Glen Burtnik, Williams Honor, Rick Winowski and Jon Caspi, and the duos of Amanda Cross & Derek Cruz, and Deni Bonet & Chris Flynn.
Light of Day, now in its 25th year, raises money and awareness for the fight against Parkinson’s Disease and related disorders.
• Avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra died in 1993, but his Philadelphia-based Sun Ra Arkestra still tours, under the leadership of saxophonist Marshall Allen, who is now 100 and has a new solo album, New Dawn, coming out in February. (Saxophonist John Gilmore led the group from 1993 to 1995, and Allen took over following Gilmore’s 1995 death.) It will perform at The Berlind Theater at The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, Jan. 30 at 7:30 p.m.
For a chance to win two tickets, send an email with “Sun” in the subject line to njartscontest@gmail.com by 10 a.m. Jan. 27.
• A “Woody Guthrie Song Celebration” at 503 Social Club in Hoboken, Jan. 30 at 7 p.m., will raise money for The American Civil Liberties Union. The show will be hosted by Elena Skye and Boo Reiners of Demolition String Band, and feature them along with Cole Quest, Queen Esther, Lisa Gutkin, Glenn Morrow, Jon Fried and Deena Shoshkes of The Cucumbers, Gene D. Plumber, Sean Kiely and others.
• Gustav Holst’s The Planets will be presented as an “HD Odyssey” with projected NASA images at concerts by New Jersey Symphony at The State Theatre in New Brunswick, Jan. 30 at 7:30 p.m.; Prudential Hall at NJPAC in Newark, Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 at 8 p.m.; and The Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, Feb. 2 at 3 p.m. New Jersey Symphony music director Xian Zhang will conduct and violinist Nancy Zhou will join the orchestra, as will the Montclair State University vocal group Prima Voce, directed by Heather J. Buchanan. In addition to The Planets, the program will include Caroline Shaw’s The Observatory and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.
MOMIX will present “Alice” at NJPAC, Jan. 26.
DANCE
• The MOMIX dance company will perform “Alice” — with choreography by MOMIX founder and artistic director Moses Pendleton, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic 1865 children’s novel “Alice in Wonderland” — at Prudential Hall at NJPAC in Newark, Jan. 26 at 7 p.m.
“I don’t intend to retell the whole Alice story,” Pendleton has said, “but to use it as a taking off point for invention. I’m curious to see what will emerge, and I’m getting curiouser and curiouser the more I learn about Lewis Carroll, who like me was a devoted photographer. … I want to take this show into places we haven’t been before in terms of the fusion of dancing, lighting, music, costumes, and projected imagery.”
WORDS
• Author and critic Will Friedwald, whose books include “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers” and “The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums,” will offer a presentation titled “An Afternoon With Ella and Duke,” with discussion and film clips about Ella Fitzgerald’s time with Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, Jan. 26 at 2 p.m. at The Metuchen Borough Public Library.
• Singer-songwriter Neko Case, who has published a memoir titled “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” will appear in conversation with Princeton University creative writing professor A.M. Homes, Jan. 29 at 7:30 p.m. at The Berlind Theater at the McCarter Theatre Center on the Princeton campus. Following the conversation, there will be a question-and-answer session.
Emory Douglas’ “All Power to the People: Paperboy” is part of the “Carrying On” exhibition.
VISUAL ARTS
• The Rowan University Art Gallery in Glassboro will offer an exhibition titled “Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy,” Jan. 27 to March 15. Works by Gayle Asali Dickson, Emory Douglas, Malik Edwards and Akinsanya Kambon will be featured. There will also be an opening reception and artists panel, Feb. 8 at 3 p.m.
According to the Rowan website, the four artists were all teenagers or young adults in the ’60s and worked on the Black Panther newspaper, and since then, “each artist expanded their ways of using figures to represent realities and communicate aspirational ideas. … Carrying On presents the artists’ lifelong commitments to people, justice, liberation, and the freedom to express their creative visions.”
FILM
• The spring edition of the biannual New Jersey Film Festival will begin on Jan. 24, with screenings taking place in person at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and well as online. And it will end on Feb. 21 with an “audio-visual concert” featuring singer-songwriter Renee Maskin. For a complete list of offerings, click HERE.
• The Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee will screen “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (watch trailer below), a documentary about Liza Minnelli in the ’70s, Jan. 26 at 4 p.m., with a question-and-answer session with director Bruce David Klein following.
REVIEWS
“Something to Hold On To: Art and the Carceral System” at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit. (Through Jan. 26)
“Small,” presented by George Street Playhouse at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center. (Through Feb. 2)
“New Sculpture/New Jersey” at Morris Museum, Morris Township. (Through Feb. 2)
“First Impressions: Pro Arts New Members Exhibition” at Art150 Gallery, Jersey City. (Through Feb. 2)
“Morven Revealed: Untold Stories From New Jersey’s Most Historic Home” at Morven Museum & Garden, Princeton. (Through March 2)
“Bony Ramirez: Cattleya” at Newark Museum of Art. (Through March 9)
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