5 Things to Do This Weekend

Something wonderful is in the air.

After so much worrying about dangerous pathogens floating among us, it’s refreshing to be diverted, however briefly, by what the New Victory Theater is unleashing into its atmosphere: feathers, balloons, umbrellas, flowing fabric, shiny particles and, especially, joy.

All have roles in “Air Play,” a mixture of circus, science, comedy and music to savor in person through March 6, or virtually through March 20. (Tickets are $20 to $45; on-demand online viewing is $25.) Presented by Seth Bloom and Christina Gelsone, the married duo known as Acrobuffos, this delightful hourlong revival — the show first ran here in 2018 — relies on its performers’ kinetic energy and Daniel Wurtzel’s air sculptures to keep both objects and spirits aloft.

What’s an air sculpture? It results from combining carefully positioned electric fans with materials that can soar. You’ll see silken swaths dance, balloons coyly sway, and orbs and glitter form a whirling, starry universe.

All the while, Bloom and Gelsone, expert clowns, play with each other, their props and their spectators, who shouldn’t expect to remain completely anchored themselves.
LAUREL GRAEBER

Betty White’s death at 99 on New Year’s Eve prompted not only national mourning, but also renewed nostalgia for “The Golden Girls,” the NBC sitcom White starred in that aired from 1985 to ’92.

That sentimentality could extend to “That Golden Girls Show!” as well. The puppet parody, which originally ran Off Broadway in 2016, is back on the road for what is billed as the “Final Farewell” tour. With Miranda Cooper as Sophia, Dylan Glick as Dorothy, Lu Zielinski as Blanche, and Samantha Lee Mason as Rose, the show reimagines classic moments from the sitcom in which Sophia schemes, Blanche flirts, Rose evokes St. Olaf and Dorothy flings lots of insults.

Recommended for ages 13 and older, “That Golden Girls Show!” is the first production to reopen Queens Theater. Performances are at 3 and 7 p.m. on Sunday, and tickets start at $20. If you miss the tour this time, it will circle back to the city with a four-week run at Theater Row beginning on April 29.
SEAN L. McCARTHY

“It’s my nature now, to record — to try to keep everything I’m passing through,” Jonas Mekas says in voice-over in “Lost Lost Lost.” First shown in 1976, this diary film is a compilation of footage Mekas shot from 1949 to 1963 capturing his life and friends in a changing New York, along with his feelings of displacement from his native Lithuania.

A writer, filmmaker, champion of the avant-garde and a founder of Anthology Film Archives, Mekas died at 96 in 2019; he would have turned 100 this year. A retrospective of his major cinematic works starts on Friday at Film at Lincoln Center and includes “Lost Lost Lost” (on Saturday and Wednesday). A related exhibition, “Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running,” opens the same day at the Jewish Museum, which is showing Mekas’s films in a prismatic, 12-screen installation format, and where Mekas ran a film series in the late 1960s.

On Sunday, Film at Lincoln Center will show Mekas’s nearly five-hour “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty,” which stretches from 1970 to 1999. In his narration at the beginning, Mekas says he spliced together rolls of film “by chance, the way that I found them on the shelf.”
BEN KENIGSBERG

Art & Museums

Reinventing Appalachia

Last summer, the singer-songwriter and artist Moses Sumney held a concert in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It resulted in a 14-track album, “Live From Blackalachia,” and a 70-minute film that is simply titled “Blackalachia,” a portmanteau of “Black” and “Appalachia.”

Sumney performed without an audience, unless you count the lush greenery that created the backdrop for his concert. At one point in the film, while lying in a tub full of flowers, Sumney says, “I’ve needed a space to articulate my own loneliness.” He does find some sense of connection in the Appalachian region, reinventing a place that bears few traces of the history of the Black people who once migrated through there.

“Blackalachia,” along with Sumney’s self-portraits, will be on view through March 5 at Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea. The film will be screened six times a day during the gallery’s hours from Tuesday to Sunday. Details can be found at nicolavassell.com.
MELISSA SMITH

Jazz

Stars on the Hudson

These have been a maddeningly tough two years for festival planners, but with Covid-19 cases on the decline and statewide restrictions lifted, the Hudson Jazz Festival’s organizers can count themselves among the lucky ones.

Two hours upriver from New York City, in an old opera house on the main drag of Hudson, N.Y., the festival culminates this weekend with nightly performances from some of straight-ahead jazz’s finest. The vibraphonist Warren Wolf will pay tribute on Friday night to Chick Corea and Gary Burton’s historic duets; the rising-star vocalist Jazzmeia Horn leads a quartet on Saturday; and the tenor saxophonist Jimmy Greene closes things out with a Sunday matinee.

For most of the weekend’s performances, tickets are still available for tables of two and four, and start at $70. Can’t make it in person? Each night’s program can be livestreamed free, if you reserve a space ahead of time, at hudsonhall.org.
GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO