Spooky-Season Theatre to Chill You to the Bone

When it comes to horror, I’m a wimp. But, as a theatre critic, I’m fascinated by what catches on with audiences, and this season the genre is, unusually, front and center. The flagship production is Broadway’s “Paranormal Activity” (at the August Wilson, through Feb. 28), whose popularity recently prompted an eight-week extension of its run. Cunningly adapted by Levi Holloway from the hit movie franchise, the play follows Lou and James, a young couple who have moved to London from Chicago, hoping that the change will improve Lou’s mental health. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

Off Broadway, Danny Robins’s “2:22: A Ghost Story” (Lucille Lortel; through Jan. 17) also features a couple beset by troubles in their new home; the wife’s claim of a nightly haunting is put to the test when dinner guests stay up with them to witness it. Jamie Armitage’s “A Ghost in Your Ear” (Minetta Lane; through Dec. 12) equips audiences with headphones at the top of the show, literally plugging them into what happens onstage: an audiobook-recording session in which the story of a sadistic father seeps into the sound booth.

If that’s not immersive enough, try Candle House Collective’s “claws,” by Evan Neiden, who specializes in remotely staged shows. In this one, you, the sole audience member, receive a phone call from a teen-ager begging for help, and it’s up to you to advise him. Still insufficiently realistic? Consider a ghost tour of Merchant’s House, a residence turned museum where supernatural phenomena have been reported since the death of its last occupant, in 1933. When the building closed to the public during COVID, researchers investigated. Now one of them leads a 9:30 P.M. tour, in which he shares findings that suggest—wait for it—paranormal activity.—Dan Stahl

Alternative R. & B.

The singer-songwriter Yebba spent much of her initial breakout in mourning. A soloist in the classic soul and gospel traditions, she possesses a commanding and hypnotic voice that feels unignorable. But just as a performance of her original song “My Mind” was going viral, in 2016, her mother died. The elegant, sumptuous 2021 début she released in the aftermath, “Dawn,” dealt in processing that loss, rather than developing her personal style. This March, Yebba returned with the album “Jean,” and with a new directive: more reined-in, inward-looking music that is just as vulnerable yet focussed less on the power of her voice than on its character.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; Nov. 2-3.)

Dance

About a decade ago, Oona Doherty, an Irish choreographer of rare and risk-taking honesty, made a name for herself with danced portraits of Belfast lads. Reacting to sudden fame, she swerved in other directions, but she has since swerved back with “Specky Clark.” A dance with dialogue, fuelled by the punkish sound of the Irish folk band Lankum, it takes the story of her great-great-grandfather working in an abattoir as a child and pushes it into Lynchian fantasy horror. On Samhain, the Gaelic festival during which boundaries between the living and the dead blur, he follows a pig into the spirit world. “Specky Clark” comes to the Irish Arts Center in time for Halloween.—Brian Seibert (Oct. 25-Nov. 15.)

Dance

American Ballet Theatre’s fall season is short and sweet, with three mixed bills plus a gala (Oct. 29). The latter includes both Frederick Ashton’s poetic male solo “Dance of the Blessed Spirits”—danced by the equally poetic Daniel Camargo—and Michel Fokine’s rococo “Le Spectre de la Rose.” In one program, Ashton’s undeniably magical “The Dream” (based on Shakespeare) will be performed alongside a new sextet, “Trio Élégiaque,” produced by a young dancer in the company, Brady Farrar. Another program is anchored by Natalia Makarova’s suite from the nineteenth-century Spanish-themed ballet “Paquita,” a tour de force of classical dance. And yet another offers a glimpse of Kyle Abraham’s stylish ensemble work “Mercurial Son,” in which the men of the company, in particular, have a chance to shine.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch; Oct. 21-31.)

Off Broadway

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a stunner—a gorgeously performed, gloriously staged, philosophically perverse fairy-tale musical that left me swooning. You may know the premise even if you haven’t read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story: a baby is born as an elderly man and ages backward; along the way, he struggles, has worldly adventures, and falls in love. Andrew Durand, with his handsome crab-apple features, makes a perfectly quizzical Benjamin; Kelsee Kimmel is stirring as his true love, who shares his age just once. The harmony-singing, instrument-playing ensemble is terrific, and the show’s strong score, by Darren Clark and Jethro Compton (who also wrote the book and directed), has a touch of “Hamilton” and a streak of “Come from Away.” Everything clicks: even the moon, swinging from a green net above the clever nautical set, stole the show.—Emily Nussbaum (Public Theatre; through Dec. 6.)

Art

A terrible weight hangs over “Burning in the Eyes of the Maker,” an exhibition of recent paintings by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer. The heaviness comes from the fact that the artist died in April, at age forty-six, but it’s also embedded in the paintings on view—in the bursts of fire and swirling floods that mark them. Dupuy-Spencer had a reputation for clear-eyed renderings of both the tenderness and the brutality of our world; here, darker forces prevail. Mythical beings hover over apocalyptic scenes crowded with tiny, ghostly figures, which seem to emerge from the paint. The monumental four-panel piece “The Shape of the Rock That’s Hurling Towards the Sea” (2022) is a parable in which only the rich seem to survive. But there’s one saving grace: the yellows, oranges, and reds of Dupuy-Spencer’s fires are achingly beautiful.—Jillian Steinhauer (Jeffrey Deitch; through Oct. 31.)

Movies

The historical drama “Fatherland,” written and directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, zeroes in on an intriguing literary byway: the elderly, Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Thomas Mann’s trip to Germany in 1949, sixteen years after his self-exile upon Hitler taking power. The tale is energized by the thoughtful performances of Hanns Zischler, as Mann, and Sandra Hüller, as the author’s daughter Erika, who accompanies him while reviving conflicts from her own past. But the story, set amid Cold War tensions, and involving Mann’s vain belief in the importance of his visit to reconciling East and West, along with his nostalgic dream of a politics-free realm of art, is told with restrained images and a terse script that leave little room for dramatic complexity.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

Michael Schulman on downtown entertainers making grand returns.

1. The sui-generis musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” originated as a gender-flouting, genre-busting phenomenon at the Jane Street Theatre, in 1998, performed by John Cameron Mitchell as the titular bewigged East German rocker. Mitchell wrote, directed, and starred in a movie version in 2001. (The songs are by Stephen Trask.) To celebrate the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Mitchell is touring the country with 4K screenings, followed by Q. & A.s and acoustic performances. The tour hits the Beacon Theatre on Nov. 16. Wigs welcome.

2. The dearly departed Hulu sitcom “Difficult People” ran 2015-17, starring the comedians Julie Klausner (its creator) and Billy Eichner as snarky show-biz aspirants. The series was thick with pop-culture barbs, including ahead-of-the-curve digs at Kevin Spacey. Klausner and Alex Scordelis wrote an unproduced screenplay, “Difficult People: The Movie,” which she and other members of the original cast—including Eichner, Andrea Martin, James Urbaniak, and Gabourey Sidibe—will read at The Town Hall on Nov. 3, along with such special guests as Paul Walter Hauser, Cecily Strong, and Michael Urie.

3. The drag king Murray Hill has the look of a mustachioed Atlantic City lounge lizard and the shticky comic delivery of Don Rickles. In his moving new memoir, “Showbiz! My Life as a Middle-Aged Man,” Hill recounts his abusive childhood; his self-acceptance as a trans man; his breakout in New York’s downtown cabaret scene in the nineteen-nineties and then the burlesque revival of the two-thousands; the fire that destroyed his apartment on his fiftieth birthday; and his role as the bon vivant Fred Rococo on the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere.”

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Nathan Fielder, cover star
• How well can you mow a lawn?
• We see you, TikTok