David Armstrong’s Probing Gaze

Also: Jennifer Tilly in the surreal world of “The Adding Machine,” New York City Ballet’s spring season, Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in “Mother Mary,” and more.

The photographer David Armstrong, who was based in Brooklyn and died in 2014, at sixty, has never looked as good as he does right now, in a big, smartly installed retrospective at Artists Space (through May 23). That’s partly because this is the first time we’ve been able to grasp his career as a whole. The exhibition, although it includes landscapes, still-lifes, and nudes, is titled “David Armstrong: Portraits,” because that’s where the emphasis lies. With more than ninety works, the galleries are thronged with beauties, many of whom refuse to be pinned down to a gender. Still, men tend to snag the most attention, if only because they return Armstrong’s tender, probing gaze with affection and plenty of heat. Desire defines the work and is impossible to divorce from our response to it.

Without overplaying Armstrong’s key role in the Family of Nan (Goldin; they were lifelong friends and collaborators), the curators Kelly Taxter and Jay Sanders are careful to ground the show in his history of books and exhibitions. The soft-focus color landscapes and interiors from his 2002 book, “All Day Every Day,” had looked minor and imitative at the time. Here, ringing the main galleries like establishing shots in old movies, they suggest a world fading into memory—a misty past with little meaning for the present. On the other side of the scale, in a vitrine at one end of the space, are a group of five small scrapbooks. Only a few open pages are visible (more are included in the show’s catalogue), but they’re as tantalizing as a peek into a friend’s diary—and proof that pictures in separate bodies of work were being made simultaneously.

That everything-at-once approach explodes across a whole wall at the opposite end of the gallery. Here, a collagelike installation of photographs, framed and unframed, color and black-and-white, abut and overlap across twenty-seven feet. The undertow of nostalgia—a tribute to the way we were—is overwhelmed by the celebration of a spirit that has never seemed more alive.—Vince Aletti

About Town

Off Broadway

At the start of “The Adding Machine,” the narrator (Michael Cyril Creighton) announces what viewers are going to see: “a heartwarming tale about modern life crushing the human spirit,” thereby setting the ironic tone. He is himself an addition, introduced into Elmer Rice’s 1923 drama by Thomas Bradshaw, who has revised the text for this New Group production, directed with flair by Scott Elliott. Thank God for the flair, because the characters are satirically tedious. Mr. Zero (Daphne Rubin-Vega) spends his days crunching numbers and his nights henpecked by his wife (a droll Jennifer Tilly), until he’s unceremoniously replaced by the titular machine. The stylishly designed show conjures a world where capitalism supplants all ideals except its own: ruthless optimization.—Dan Stahl (Theatre at St. Clement’s; through May 17.)

Art

What to call objects that bespeak both the three-dimensionality of sculpture and the surface drama of painting? Leonardo Drew’s uncategorizable works are made from dried and cast paper pulp—leaking with fleshy, organic texture—that the artist reconfigures into jagged, rough-hewn sprays of abstraction which protrude from the frame. Some of these are arranged into more staid compositions of geometric bands of color, while others bend and bulge into shapes evoking the baroque ruination of junk-yard findings. The paper suggests a substrate on which to write but also seems to posit itself as its own kind of language, a haywire syntax made of excess and spillage.—Zoë Hopkins (Pace Prints; through April 25.)

Art

Édouard Vuillard was one of those painters whose most evocative work—a prime selection of which can be seen in “Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors”—tends to be small. It’s almost as if the limitations of a scaled-down canvas got the artist going in ways that galvanized his extraordinary use of color, and sense of scale, even further. Looking at such beauties as the extraordinary “The Flowered Dress” (1891) and the mind-blowing “The Lady of Fashion” (circa 1891-92), you marvel not only at the control of Vuillard’s hand but at what made domestic life and female garments so fascinating to the artist: their details say as much about the inner life of the wearer as they do about the cloth.—Hilton Als (Skarstedt; through April 25.)

Sophisti-pop

In 2005, when the singer Niia Bertino was seventeen, she was recognized as one of the top high-school jazz singers in the country. The granddaughter of an Italian opera singer, Bertino, known onstage as Niia, was soon discovered by Wyclef Jean and, in 2007, featured on his hit single “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill).” What initially felt like a meteoric rise tapered off into a slow burn. She performed “James Bond” themes with an orchestra in 2011 before débuting, in 2014, with the EP “Generation Blue”; her first album arrived three years later. You can hear all of her accrued experience in five albums she has released since, easing through their elegant pop production with jazzy vocals.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue Note; April 28-29.)

Dance

For the past two decades, Tiler Peck has been one of New York City Ballet’s most dazzling dancers; more recently, she has revealed herself to be an agile choreographer as well. Her second ballet for her home company uses Édouard Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole,” a sweeping, melodic tour de force that doubles as a showcase for solo violin. (The virtuoso Hilary Hahn will perform on many dates.) The spring season also includes the company première of Christopher Wheeldon’s moody 2002 ballet “Continuum,” set to Ligeti piano pieces, and it closes with a week of performances of the comedic “Coppélia.” On May 24, that work’s plucky heroine will be danced for the last time by the equally plucky Megan Fairchild, who is retiring after twenty-five years with the company.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; April 21-May 31.)

Movies

David Lowery, who directed “A Ghost Story,” returns with another ghost story, “Mother Mary,” with the feeling of a filmed play, starring Anne Hathaway as the titular pop star, who’s been offstage for a few years, and Michaela Coel as Sam, a fashion designer who used to make the singer’s costumes. Though they’re long estranged, Mary barges in on Sam to ask for a new dress for a concert comeback; their tense dialectical wrangle in Sam’s churchlike studio is the bulk of the film. Brief flashbacks to Mary’s earlier concerts are merely informational; another flashback, to a séance at which Mary yielded to self-harming mysticism, is far more consequential, leading to violence in Sam’s studio. The resulting catharsis—spiritual and sentimental—is both flimsy and fascinating.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Bar Tab

Taran Dugal samples experimental cocktails in Long Island City.

Cocktail bars operate by the “Anna Karenina” principle: great ones are all alike; average ones are average each in its own way. Take 25 Hours, in Long Island City, for example, which is freighted with a depressing ambience that is equal parts chemistry lab and subterranean grotto. On a recent weeknight, two first-timers stopped by with high expectations: 25 Hours, which opened last November, is the brainchild of Ray Zhou, a former head of R. & D. at the hip Lower East Side bar Double Chicken Please. The drinks here correlate with different hours of the day—plus an additional “twenty-fifth hour,” which, according to Zhou, is “more of a mind-set, a futuristic kind of thing.” The depth of thought that went into the menu was not reflected in the space; the visitors found themselves in a small room with exceptionally dark lighting, a wall of haphazardly mounted clocks of various shapes and sizes, and modernist chrome furniture that made the already bleak interior even less inviting. They took seats beside a monstrosity of dark gray plastic, affixed to a wall, designed to look like a sheer rock face. “This must be what Purgatory feels like,” one of the visitors whispered. Thankfully, their cocktails were closer to heavenly. The 17:00—a foamy mixture of mezcal and pineapple, topped with habanero tincture—packed a sweet-and-sour punch, and the 23:00, made of rum and barley-tea-infused whiskey, arrived with biscotti, for a sugary reprieve between sips. Their last order of the night, the 19:00, was also the most experimental: a sharp mix of grape juice, tomato water, gin, and blue-cheese liqueur, with a pungent aftertaste. Drinks downed, the guests’ gazes landed on the horological wall in front of them. It was time, they decided, to head out—after all, the clocks were ticking.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Sand, up close and personal
• A weekend aboard the Modest Mouse cruise
• Hailey Bieber enjoys proving people wrong