THIS YEAR: 2023

THIS YEAR: 2023

The movies, books, art, theater and food to know for the year ahead.

Jessica Chastain | Facebook

THEATER

OPENING FEBRUARY 2023
A Doll's House
Dir. by Jamie Lloyd; Starring Jessica Chastain

It's been over a decade since the now Academy Award-winning actor Jessica Chastain has been on Broadway–but that's about to change with a revival of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. The three-act drama, which debuted to acclaim and controversy in 1879, centers on a housewife on Christmas Eve as she makes the decision to leave her husband and family. A Doll's House has since become something of an early feminist work and a classic of theatrical repertoire, exactly the kind of territory the Juilliard-trained Chastain is familiar with. Jamie Lloyd is directing the new production with a script adapted by lauded playwright Amy Herzog.

NOON Projects

ART

OPENING MARCH 31, 2023
Travis Boyer Solo Exhibit
NOON Projects

Following his inclusion in a group show at LA-based NOON Projects at the end of 2022, Travis Boyer is returning to the gallery with a solo outing in the spring. Details remain scarce but expect the artist's signature textural works depicting the intricacies of fungi and other plants to make an appearance.

OkDongsik | Moonhee Kim

FOOD

THROUGH APRIL 2023
OkDongsik
Chef Ok Dongsik

A little bit of Seoul has landed in NYC. Done in collaboration with HAND Hospitality, Chef Ok Dongsik transported his eponymous restaurant (listed an impressive six times in Michelin's Bib Gourmand guide) from the Korean capital to Manhattan for a limited time. Though the menu has many dishes to relish, the standout may be the gukbap, a bowl of traditional hot soup with cooked rice made from an especially clean, umami-rich broth.

Mollie Burkhart (center), with her sisters Annie (left) and Minnie, both of whom were killed in the Osage murders. | Doubleday

FILM

OPENING MAY 2023
Killers of the Flower Moon
Dir. by Martin Scorsese

Just about any new movie from one of America's most revered filmmakers could earn a spot on a list like this. But Martin Scorsese's forthcoming adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon has more significance than usual. Based on the 2017 non-fiction thriller of the same name, the film is set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts one of the first investigations by the then-newly formed FBI into a series of murders committed against the state's Osage tribe. After vast oil reserves were discovered beneath Osage-owned territory, dozens of members were slain leading to a period of terror all too familiar to Indigenous Americans. Though the movie version includes frequent Scorsese collaborators like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, it also stars Indigenous actors like Lily Gladstone (Certain Women) in lead roles that mark an important shift for major studio movies that rarely attempt Indigenous representation.

HarperCollins

LITERATURE

RELEASING MAY 2023
Yellowface
By R.F. Kuang

Six months before its release, New York Times best-selling author R.F. Kuang's new book is already controversial in some circles. In the darkly humorous satire, writers Athena Liu and June Hayward are classmates at Yale and should both, theoretically, be literary rising stars. But Liu's career has flourished while Hayward's is barely off the ground. When Hayward witnesses Liu's death in a freak accident, she steals her late rival's newest (brilliant) completed manuscript "about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I" and passes it off as her own. She allows her editors to give her the ambiguous-sounding pseudonym Juniper Song, and it isn't long before emerging evidence threatens to undue Hayward's ruse. Kuang's book is a skewering of Asian American erasure by white society while tackling issues surrounding diversity, cultural appropriation in the arts and racism in modern times.