Theater

The Oscar nominee Ian McKellen, mixed-reality glasses and a 47-minute show — that’s what’s drawing me to “An Ark,” a “radically intimate reimagining of live theater” from the Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens. The show begins its seven-week run at the Shed at Hudson Yards on Jan. 9.

The fandom convention BroadwayCon returns for another year of “Hamilton” cosplay and show-tune belt-offs (Jan. 23-25). Most events are at Palladium Times Square, with additional programming and its popular marketplace at the New York Westin at Times Square.

Jazz

Amongthe headliners set to tear up this year’s Winter Jazzfest (Jan. 8-13) is the drummer Marcus Gilmore, whose “Journey to the New” was named one of the best jazz albums of 2025. A Jazzfest pass lets you indulge in show after show at clubs in Manhattan (Jan. 9) and Brooklyn (Jan. 10).

Comedy

ComedyUO, a producer of pop-up comedy shows at laundromats and other unorthodox spaces, is presenting the “Big Small Business Tour,” a series of sets at enduring Manhattan restaurants and appetizing spots (Jan. 12-16). For $75, you get stand-up, drinks and eats, like latkes at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side and pierogi and borscht at Veselka in the East Village. The first round of tickets has sold out, but there is a wait list.

Pop Music

This month’s concert picks by generation: Baby boomers, the hip-hop pioneers Sugarhill Gang are at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, N.J. (Jan. 10). Gen X, the proto-emo band Sunny Day Real Estate performs at Irving Plaza (Jan. 30). Millennials, Jessie J returns to music after a breast cancer diagnosis with a show at Irving Plaza (Jan. 28). Gen Z, the electronic duo Snow Strippers is at Terminal 5 (Jan. 10).

History Lessons

Breakfast University is a new lecture series at New York Historical in which history professors lead “original, provocative” one-hour talks and Q&As. Lectures are at 9 a.m. once a month on a Monday and come with a light, period-specific breakfast. In-person tickets are $250 for the semester (Jan. 5-April 13). The series begins with a kick in the pants: In “Are We Rome? Are We Repeating Their Rise and Decline?,” Caroline Winterer, a professor of history and American studies at Stanford University, discusses the Roman Empire and its lessons for Trump-era America.

Art

Starting this month, MoMA PS1, the contemporary art museum in Long Island City, Queens, is free for everyone to visit. I’m eager to check out “Magnificent Product,” an exhibition of genre-bending works by the multidisciplinary drag “Blacktress” Vaginal Davis on view through March 2.

“Presented with remarkable frankness, the model seems to be offered to us for examination, akin to the overripe fruit he holds” is how the Morgan Library & Museum explains what’s going down in “Boy With a Basket of Fruit,” the painting at the center of its new Caravaggio exhibition opening on Jan. 16.

Cabaret

Matthew Morrison, who melted hearts as the original Link Larkin in “Hairspray,” performs his new show, “Rhythms & Revelations” (Jan. 5-8), at 54 Below in Midtown.

Film

The Museum of Modern Art’s “To Save and Project” series returns with a roster of newly preserved classics and rediscovered gems (Jan. 8-Feb. 2). Opening day features a restoration of Russ Meyer’s lurid 1968 sex romp “Vixen!,” and there’s a doozy of a reason to linger in the theater on Jan. 11: Victor Fleming’s 1927 silent drama “Hula,” starring the original “it” girl, Clara Bow, at 1:30 p.m., and Michael Almereyda’s scrappy vampire film “Nadja” (1994) at 6:30 p.m., which is followed by a conversation with the director.

Classical Music

If you work in Midtown and Carol in accounting is getting on your last nerve, take a breather at St. Malachy’s Church, also known as the Actors’ Chapel, for one of its free Thursday afternoon concerts presented by Gotham Early Music Scene. On Jan. 22, the Pandora Consort, a Boston-based early music ensemble, plays a 1:15 p.m. show featuring music by the German composer and abbess Hildegard von Bingen and illuminations from the artist Cate Duckwall. It is also streaming on the Midtown Concerts YouTube channel.

Performance

A scream is the only sound in “Mami,” an adults-only dance-theater piece from the choreographer Mario Banushi. At NYU Skirball from Jan. 7 to 10, it’s among the many out-there works in this year’s Under the Radar festival (Jan. 7-25).

Another outré night can be had at one of several opera, music and theater performances presented by the Prototype festival at venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn (Jan. 7-18). A highlight: “What to Wear,” a restaging of the comedic “post-rock opera” from the composer Michael Gordon and the maverick theater maker Richard Foreman, who died last year. The singer St. Vincent is a guest performer during the show’s run from Jan. 15 to 18 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Dance

Compagnie Hervé Koubi returns to the Joyce Theater in Chelsea with “What the Day Owes to the Night,” a blend of capoeira, martial arts and contemporary dance inspired by the Algerian author Yasmina Khadra’s novel (Jan. 6-11).

Get Organized

If your home library needs a “Hoarders”-style intervention, mark your calendar for the Book Swap Extravaganza at the New York Public Library’s Jefferson Market branch in the West Village (Jan. 10-11). As the library puts it: “Bring your books! Bring your friends! Bring a tote bag and take some books to go!”

Kids

On Jan. 18, the American Museum of Natural History and the group OrigamiUSA are holding Folding Fun Sessions, kid-friendly origami classes designed mostly for beginners and little hands. Make it a day at the museum with “Life at the Limits: Nature’s Superheroes,” an immersive exhibition, through Jan. 19, that looks at how species have survived and adapted on Earth.

Children ages 10 and older are welcome aboard the yacht Manhattan II for the Classic Harbor Line’s Urban Naturalist Tour. On select weekend days starting on Jan. 11, the sunset cruise heads through the Buttermilk Channel and along the coast of Staten Island to Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, offering views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island along the way. This one’s a splurge: Tickets start at $112 for adults, and $86 for children.

Last Call

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s season at City Center wraps on Jan. 4 with a repertory program that includes its beloved 1960 ballet “Revelations.” At the James Earl Jones Theater on Broadway, Bess Wohl’s new play, “Liberation,” about a feminist consciousness-raising circle in the 1970s, is set to close on Feb. 1. That is also the last day to go to the Center for Jewish History in the West Village to view “Anne Frank the Exhibition,” which features a full-scale re-creation of where she hid with her family.