Jim Poniewozik
Everybody Back to Work at Lumon IndustriesThe dystopian thriller “Severance” premiered in 2022, telling the story of an alternative reality in which workers can have their brains surgically “severed” into two consciousnesses, one for work hours, one for off-work hours. Nothing has matched it since — including “Severance” itself, which went on a hiatus that was long even by the standards of modern TV’s between-season breaks. It finally comes back in January, with a second season that promises to build on the dark humor and offbeat world-building. (Will we finally learn more about the goats?) This is one return-to-office plan we can all get behind.
cowboy slotsZachary Woolfe
A Landmark 20th-Century Opera at the MetThe best show of the Metropolitan Opera’s fall season was a revival of Strauss’s sprawling, opulent “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” the success of which has only raised expectations for the company’s upcoming new production of another Strauss classic: his earlier opera, “Salome.” The soprano Elza van den Heever, a shining star of “Frau,” and its conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, reunite in this lusciously overripe score, a landmark of early-20th-century Symbolism with its collision of religious fervor and sexual awakening. The director Claus Guth, a veteran of the European opera scene, makes his Met debut, updating the story from biblical times to the Victorian era.
Jon Pareles
Latest Transmission From the Weather StationImageThe Canadian songwriter Tamara Lindeman leads the Weather Station, a band that supplies a jazzy, riffing, electroacoustic, evolving backdrop to Lindeman’s lyrics; the songs seem to bubble up out of live jams. Lindeman shows influences from Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple, Beth Orton and Van Morrison, among many others. But the perspective in the songs is entirely her own, full of the 21st-century experience in all its disorientation and fleeting epiphanies. The album “Humanhood” is due on Jan. 25, and the songs should open up even further on tour. The Weather Station plays Bowery Ballroom on April 1 and Music Hall of Williamsburg on April 2.
But increasingly, the responses to those messages are not written by the doctor — at least, not entirely. About 15,000 doctors and assistants at more than 150 health systems are using a new artificial intelligence feature in MyChart to draft replies to such messages.
Jason Farago
New York Welcomes Back a Trio of MuseumsThe old joke about New York — a nice city, one day, when they finally finish it — has not seemed such an exaggeration lately in the art world, where expansions and renovations have left Manhattan three museums short of a full deck. In 2025, the hard hats come off and the pictures go back up. First to reopen, in April, will be the Frick Collection, where visitors can at last enter the private living quarters on the Gilded Age mansion’s second floor. (Still no public access, I’m afraid, to Mr. Frick’s basement bowling alley.) Later in the year should see the reopening of two of the city’s leading contemporary art museums: the New Museum, with a cunning extension by the architecture firm OMA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, moving into its first purpose-built home since its opening in 1968.
Gia Kourlas
Taking Ballet to the ExtremeThe Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger pushes the body to extremes, and in “Tanz,” she delves into well-known, increasingly beloved territory: ballet horror. The work, which has its North American premiere at NYU Skirball on Feb. 14-15, opens with a ballet class led by Beatrice Cordua, a German ballerina in her 80s; the cast, all female, ranges in age from 30 to over 80. Soon clothes come off. It gets witchy. But the female part of this dance equation, especially as it relates to the suffering experienced by dancers, is full of possibility. How much can a body endure until it attains mastery? Performers, instructed on masturbation, are suspended in the air as they rock and writhe on suspended motorbikes. One gives birth to a rat. There will be blood.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.betfil
