THEATER: It would be pretty boss if The Cherry Orchard Sequel – a long-overdue follow up to Chekhov’s play about downwardly mobile Russian aristocrats – involved the titular clear-cut orchard rising from the ashes to go on a rampage against their axe-wielding oppressors. But playwright and director Nic Ularu took things in a different direction, and the result sounds just as interesting. His story picks up again 18 years after Chekhov’s play ends, and......

THEATER: Multi-talented and multi-gender performer Justin Bond – the beloved Tony-nominated Kiki from Kiki & Herb – vows to heat up the frigid East Village with Lustre, A Midwinter Trans-Fest. The cabaret show, which opened last night, promises to be a "fast and loose" night of music, dance and monologues for, by, or about transgender people, with a smattering of "neo-pagan revolutionary Appalachian-inspired folk songs." Bond's joined in the festivities by musical director Our......

READING: Olympia Dukakis, who you know from such films as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, will be at Barnes & Noble tonight. She'll be reading from a brand spakin' new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. She recently put down the Oscar and picked up a pen to write the forward to the antiwar classic. 7pm // Barnes & Noble [1972 Broadway] // Free EVENT: Tonight the Raw Word Reading hits Galapagos,......

SPA: FreeNYC tells us that "in honor of their 20th Anniversary, Nina's European Day Spa is offering up some free and discounted treatments!" Get there before 7pm and you'll get a free eyebrow threading or waxing, free mini microdermabrasion, and free hand treatments. Free: it's a beautiful price. 12 to 7pm // Nina's European Day Spa [5 W 35th St] // Free PERFORMANCE ART: Remember how in 2005, during a visit by England’s cricket team......

SHOPPING: Everyone needs a little Betsey Johnson flair in their closet, and this week you can get some designer dresses without dropping too much dough. There's a two day Betsey Johnson warehouse sale starting now, 80% off! 10am to 8pm (through October 5th) // 263 W 38th St READING: We may prefer listening to, rather than reading about, jazz, but John Coltrane had a whole world of things going on that led up to his......

MOVIE: In the unlikeliest of scenarios, rapper (and jeweler) Paul Wall, his grills, Reggaetón king Tego Calderón and Wu-Tang's Raekwon traveled to Sierra Leone. The outcome is an informative documentary called Bling: A Planet Rock which focuses on "the flashy world of commercial hip-hop jewelry played a significant role in the ten-year civil war" in West Africa. 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm // BAM Rose Cinemas [30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn] // $12 ART: Photographs by Lisette Model,......

Earlier this month ASCAP was making headlines with their lawsuit against some of New York's (and the nation's) venues. To clear things up on how the company works, and why they do what they do, we asked the senior vice president of licensing and the director of general licensing some questions. How do you find out if bars/clubs/restaurants/venues are playing ASCAP bands without a license? First we know which establishments are licensed. ASCAP does not......

Like Jay-Z's 40/40 Club before them, the NY Post reports that two more Manhattan clubs are now being drawn into a lawsuit for playing music they didn’t have a license to play. With the music industry in an increasingly sad state, you would think getting the tunes out to the public (not for downloading or stealing but for the pure enjoyment of listening) would be a good thing. However bars are finding they have to......

Courtney Love Performs at Hiro, Doesn't Cause a Scene After GBH announced that Courtney Love was to play a free show at Hiro Ballroom, the biggest question besides what she'd sound like or how badly would Hiro screw up the crowd control, was what type of raucous scandal would Love cause during the set. Would she be trashed? Would she get into a fight? Would she show at all? Well, to the pleasant surprise of......

MUSIC: Courtney Love makes her return to the New York stage tonight for a little birthday celebration show at Hiro Ballroom. The rocker turned 43 on Monday of this week, and there's only one way to see if she's acting her age! Last time she got a little crazy at a suprise show at Plaid, and when she turned 40 she took a trip to Bellevue. 10pm // Hiro Ballroom [371 W 16th St] //......

THEATER: System of Units, a performance group from Siberia, begin their site-specific collaboration with the local “interventionist performance group” TRYST outside today starting at 12:00pm, when the temperature will transcend 90°. So if you think it’s stinking hot, just wait ‘til you see how the Siberians hold up in this six-hour performance. Called Security Zone, the two groups will create "a mock construction site that plays with perceptions of labor and public space, expectations of......

Manu Chao Beats the Rain We never realized exactly what a force Manu Chao was live until experiencing him ourselves at Sasquatch several weeks ago. The man has the power to move people. To incite hysteria and completely dominate his entire audience. It is something any music fan should experience at least once in their life, because there is really nobody else like him performing today. Earlier this week, He did two nights at the......

EXHIBIT: Apparently there's an exhibit of Anna Nicole Smith photographs starting tonight. We can't find much info on it, but What's Up NYC says there's a "reception and exhibit of portraits and candid photographs of, wait for it, Anna Nicole Smith." 6 to 8pm // Gallery of Fine Arts [511 W 25th St] // Free PARTY: It's Prom time at Unisex Salon. Tonight put on your best formalwear and head to the basement of the......

River to River Booked! One of our favorite things to do in the city once the weather gets nice is to head down to the South Street Seaport after work on Friday to watch one of our favorite bands play for free as the sun goes down. Its an infinitely enjoyable experience. The River to River Festival is responsible for this and a whole bunch of other free concerts around Lower Manhattan every summer, and......

READING: The BRIC Rotunda Gallery and New York Magazine are having another of their Stoop Series tonight. New York Magazine's contributing editor, Logan Hill, will talk with New York's newest young filmmakers: Ramin Bahrani, Julia Loktev and Chris Zalla. What else? Free drinks! Beer and Johnny Walker Blue Label, to be exact. 7pm // Rotunda Gallery [33 Clinton St, Brooklyn] // Free THEATER: Charles Mee’s Orestes 2.0 is at HERE again (a 2001 production was......

Black Lips Trash Bowery One of the nice things about being a music fan in New York City is that you rarely have to wait very long to see a band you're recently missed. The Black Lips famously played about 6,000 shows at SXSW this year, yet despite our interest in checking them out, we managed to catch them exactly zero times (with our final chance being cut short by that whole collapsing balcony thing.)......

The Brazilian street artists have landed, and we're tracking their every move as they get ready to launch Ruas de Sao Paulo: A Survey of Brazilian Street Art at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery this Saturday. Here’s an account of the movements of Boleta, Fefê, Highraff, Kboco, Onesto, Speto, Titi Freak, and Zezão. Feb. 14 – The Installation: The artists installed their work at the gallery. Flavio Samelo captured some moments of the installation at his......

DISCUSSION: Noam Chomsky will be taking questions on US foreign policy tonight, following a screening of Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Get your questions ready, smartypants. You can watch the video of Pinter's speech here, too. 6pm // Columbia University, Miller Theater [Broadway @ 116th St] // $5 THEATER: Isabella Rossellini with be playing Lotte Lenya in a one-night only performance at the New-York Historical Society called Kurt and Lenya: Two Great Artists......

EVENT: Tonight is the "Taxi 07: Transforming and Icon" event, marking the 100th anniversary of the New York taxi. The Design Trust for Public Space have gathered together members of the city’s design community and tonight they discuss ideas for the redesign the yellow cab. The idea of a redesign was announced back in 2005. 6:30pm // Cooper Hewitt Design Museum [2 E 91st St] // $10 THEATER: Cherry Lane Theatre is reviving Amiri Baraka's......

Video for An Open Letter to NYC - The Beastie Boys Tomorrow night is the "GIMME SHELTER: Rock & Rescue NYC" Benefit. The night will bring together rockers in support of homeless animals. Details: WHO: BEASTIE BOYS, BLUE OYSTER CULT, THE CHOKE, THE DUELLING BANKHEADS, JOE HURLEY AND THE GENTS, MARSHALL CRENSHAW, the band MORE, MURRAY WEINSTOCK NELLIE MCKAY, SIC F*CKS, THE STAR SPANGLES, AND MORE GUESTS T.B.A. With special appearances by DEBBIE HARRY......

THEATER: P.S. 122’s Fall Season opens tonight with the U.S. premiere of “Tower of Babel” by Dutch artists Lidy Six and Robert Steijn. Running four nights only - for only 25 audience members at a time – the event is described as “a one-of-a kind, full immersion theatre experience”. Each audience member will be personally welcomed with tea and tucked into one of twenty-five individual beds (complete with nightstands). A live VJ and DJ will......

THEATER: Untitled Intentional Exercise #1, a "wild trip through desire and isolation" that combines the talents of Stuck Pigs Squealing, http://www.stuckpigs.com.au/ an Australian theater collective, with those of Mac Wellman, Oliver Butler, and Banana Bag and Bodice, http://www.bananabagandbodice.org/ has a fascinating show-specific website http://stuckpigs.multiply.com/ where the creators have been posting rehearsal videos and notes; check it out for a taste of the improvisational whirlwind you'll enter if you go, though even thus prepared it will......

THEATER: The River to River Festival isn't just about outdoor concerts, and Canadians not only have great indie bands, they also have theatre troupes breaking into the experimental downtown scene. Bluemouth Inc.'s What the River Said, which is in both R2R and the Sitelines series, is a case in point; the play, which evokes "the struggle for acceptance in the calm before the family storm" is the third part of a trilogy originally performed along......

Tonight San Francisco rockers with the middle class rasp, Two Gallants, come to Bowery Ballroom. We interviewed them last week, and you should really check them out while they're in town. For serious. Opening up for them are Sam Champion (the actual NY weatherman still comes up first in a Google search) and Cold War Kids. Elsewhere in the city, Pela is playing with Project Jenny/Project Jan (at the Delancey). There's already ex-Art Bruter's and......

Tonight is Le One Night Stand's One-Year Anniversary Party! What does this mean? First off it means that Melody Nelson will be singing Serge Gainsbourg covers with Die Romantik, now that's something you don't see everyday. Melody Nelson, of course, is a monicker taken from Gainsbourg's concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. The night is subtitled J'aime Serge, a little tribute to one of French pop's greatest. There will be complimentary Macau Beer from 11-12am,......

Last week I didn't tell you about the show Beck played at Hiro Ballroom Friday night (one night before his appearance on Saturday Night Live). That's because the "secret" show wasn't even announced until Thursday. Beck is known for playing last-minute small-venue shows, and I was lucky enough to score a ticket to this one. Here are the pictures. In February, Beck played another secret show in Los Angeles. The opener was none other than,......