Your weekly guide to staying entertained any day of the week

January 17, 2025

Welcome back to The Big To-Do. There’s snow in the forecast for the long weekend, so buckle up. Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Globe correspondent Haley Clough rounds up nine holiday observations and activities. It’s a big week for sports, with the NFL playoffs down to eight teams, Australian Open plots thickening, and Northeastern and BU in the Women’s Beanpot final on Tuesday. In the immediate future, whether your weekend is short or long, the Globe’s experts have lots of suggestions for making the most of your time. And looking ahead to the rest of the season, the Winter Arts Guide is here with abundant remedies for cabin fever.

Winter Arts Guide

Nolan Almeida as Peter Pan, Cody Garcia as Captain Hook, Hawa Kamara as Wendy, with the cast of "Peter Pan." Matthew Murphy

When temperatures plummet, the worlds of arts and entertainment heat up, and this list of 50 fun events is sizzling. On the classical music calendar, A.Z. Madonna finds everything from youth orchestras to a four-hands piano program. The season’s dance offerings are all over the place — flamenco! Irish dance! tap! “Swan Lake”! — and Jeffrey Gantz has the details. Maura Johnston’s pop music picks span a variety of genres, with room for Dropkick Murphys and their regular Boston bookings on and around St. Patrick’s Day. Modern classics and recent favorites dot Don Aucoin’s theater selections, which include August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” and Yasmina Reza’s “Art.” Notable museum shows spotlight up-and-comers, international stars, and Boston-area stalwarts, and Murray Whyte gives you the lowdown.

The post-holiday film landscape tends to be as barren as, well, the actual landscape around these parts, and Odie Henderson pulls out “some repertory and first-run choices for you to consider.” Among the new releases, which include a spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh and Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to “Parasite,” is something called “Heart Eyes.” In it, a “killer wears a mask with two glowing hearts for eyes. ... Nice to see that romance isn’t dead.”

The return of “The White Lotus” is the highest-profile event on the winter TV slate, which also includes not one, not two, but three broadcast series that make Lisa Weidenfeld’s list of 10 new shows. Among them is “Watson,” starring Morris Chestnut as Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick.

The “paranoid thriller” “Zero Day” has a lot going for it — intriguing premise, sterling cast — but if you’ve heard about it, that’s not why. The story of the aftermath of a deadly cyberattack stars Robert De Niro, “trying his hand at US television for the first time,” writes Stuart Miller.

Burt Bacharach songs “create a soundtrack of wistful vulnerability and longing” for Mark Morris Dance Group’s “The Look of Love.” Bacharach’s music is “very specifically notated and mathematically fascinating, always surprising,” Morris says in an interview with Karen Campbell.

Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton plays a chamber concert in Boston this month, returning in April for Boston Lyric Opera’s “Carousel.” “After doing years of classical and opera ... I’m really happy to finally come back around and reunite with my musical theater love,” she tells A.Z. Madonna.

Touring behind her first solo album, CHVRCHES singer Lauren Mayberry reaches Boston next month. The band, she tells Marc Hirsh, “got to a point where we know what we’re doing well enough that we’re not uncomfortable, and in a way, that’s not positive creatively.”

Playwright-actor Kate Hamill’s take on “The Odyssey,” which takes time to consider what Penelope was up to while Odysseus was adventuring, “isn’t just a grand, fantastic adventure. It’s also an intimate exploration of trauma and what it takes to heal.” Alyssa Vaughn previews the ART production.

“Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver,” at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, focuses on the “brilliantly enigmatic” Surrealist painter. “From an early age she was a rebel,” curator Gannit Ankori, the museum’s director, tells Murray Whyte. “She refused to be put in a box.”

Film & Movies

An Oscar statue outside the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles for the Academy Awards in 2015. Matt Sayles/Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

When the Academy Award nominations come out Thursday, look for lots of “Wicked,” “Emelia Pérez,” and Bob Dylan. Globe film critic Odie Henderson handicaps the fields in 11 top categories, offering a mix of sure things (”the Academy loves a comeback”) and burning questions. Jamie Lee Curtis fans, look away.

January is “where bad movies go to die,” but “One of Them Days” is not a bad movie. In fact, the “frantic race-against-time comedy” starring Keke Palmer and SZA earns 3½ stars from Henderson. “At almost two hours, ‘One of Them Days’ does lag a bit. But even when it gets sluggish, there’s still a sisterly moment to enjoy or a laugh to be had.”

“Diane Warren: Relentless” portrays the iconic songwriter, warts and all — sorry, [BLEEP] warts and all. The 15-time Oscar nominee is “on intimate terms with the F-word in all its wonderful forms,” Henderson writes in a 3-star review. In Bess Kargman’s documentary, “[g]reat stories ... pour out of people,” including Cher, Common, and Gloria Estefan.

Director David Lynch died Thursday at 78. “Like any great artist, Lynch meant different things to different people,” writes the Globe’s Brooke Hauser. She unites a team of Globe writers for “a kaleidoscopic appreciation of a one-of-a-kind filmmaker.” Add your thoughts in the comments.

Werewolf movies like the new “Wolf Man” perpetuate a storied tradition of “full moons, ancient curses, silver bullets, hideous transformations.” In Globe correspondent Chris Vognar’s “highly subjective rundown of five personal, streamable favorites,” you’ll find some familiar tropes, big names, and even “a garden-munching rabbit monster.”

TV & Streaming

The writers' room in "SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night." Peacock

In its 50th season — the actual anniversary is Oct. 11 — “Saturday Night Live” has created a “frenzy of interest.” Oversaturation aside, the docuseries “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night″ is “excellent, not at all the nostalgia trip or tedious account of the show’s evolution over five decades that I expected,” writes the Globe’s Mark Shanahan.

“All Creatures Great and Small” is back, “the televisual equivalent of a warm mug of tea.” The PBS “Masterpiece” favorite “tackles matters of family, love, and duty,” writes Globe correspondent Caroline Framke. “I’ve never experienced a single doubt about this show.”

Museums & Visual Art

George Critcherson & John L. Dunmore, "Castle Berg in Melville Bay, Over Two Hundred Feet High," 1973. New Bedford Free Public Library

Two “deeply humbling” exhibitions, “Arctic Voices” and “Nebulae: The Universe Unveiled,” are on view at the New Bedford Art Museum. “All art aspires to the condition of timelessness,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes. “What’s shown here of the polar north and interstellar space transcends timelessness and lets museumgoers glimpse eternity.”

Textile artist Baylee Schmitt doesn’t weave in the ends of the yarn she uses in her nostalgic crochet pieces. “Schmitt started out as a painter, and sees them as callbacks to drips on canvas,” Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid writes of this week’s Working Artist. She reimagines her childhood bedroom in her installation at LaiSun Keane in the South End, “We settle into corners with the dust and mites.”

Theater

Grant Evan as Peaches in "Ain't No Mo.'" Nile Scott Studios

Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’” “delivers a combination of knockabout comedy, stiletto-sharp satire, and scalding fury.” The “wildly inventive work” is set in a world where “the federal government has offered all Black Americans a one-way ticket to Africa,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin. The production “gets off to a fast start and never really lets up.”

The touring production of “Peter Pan” that flies into Boston next week stars 2024 Emerson College grad Hawa Kamara as Wendy. “Knowing this was a more contemporary version made me more comfortable,” she says of Larissa FastHorse’s revised book. FastHorse, who is Sicangu Lakota, tells Globe correspondent Terry Byrne her script “focuses on the magic in each scene.”

An early work by Lynn Nottage, “Crumbs From the Table of Joy” is “at its core, an intimate memory play.” Boston Conservatory senior Madison Margaret Clark leads a “terrific cast,” Byrne writes. But the Lyric Stage production directed by Tasia A. Jones “struggles to sweep the disparate elements of ‘Crumbs’ together.”

Music

Safiya Leslie is one of the performers honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at ArtSpark's "Radical Heroes" showcase this Monday. A. Davis

The lineup for the MFA’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming has a Massachusetts accent. Radical Heroes, “a musical tribute to Dr. King’s vision for racial justice,” features Safiya Leslie, DREION, and Kiernan Ceide, Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. Ceide, 15, a multi-instrumentalist from Malden, says music is “as close to my calling as it could be.”

Part of this year’s Boston Celtic Music Festival is honoring the late Brian O’Donovan, “champion and ambassador of Boston’s Celtic music scene.” The event sees the launch of the Brian O’Donovan Legacy Fund grants. “It’s exciting to feel like Brian’s legacy is helping other musicians,” his widow, Lindsay O’Donovan, says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley.

In a decade, the Elovaters have gone from playing a Plymouth sports bar to selling out the 5,000-seat the MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Lead singer/guitarist Jackson Wetherbee tells Globe correspondent Noah Schaffer he and drummer Nick Asta wanted the band “to be kind of in the reggae, Sublime, Stick Figure genre. We thought that would be a lot of fun.”

Grammy winner Robert Glasper has a plan for his three-night Boston gig: “Every set’s different.” The “jazz pianist who is also deeply rooted in hip-hop and R&B,” in Globe correspondent Eric Danton’s words, says of his genre, ““The true spirit of the music is to be cutting-edge and new and to deal with your generation and your surroundings, and make something out of nothing.”

Books

Nnedi Okorafor and the cover to her book "Death of the Author." Colleen Durkin/HarperCollins

“Death of the Author,” by Nnedi Okorafor, “brings brainy material down to earth in the best way.” The “sci-fi-adjacent” novel intertwines the story of Zelu, a paraplegic writer, with her novel-within-a-novel and “interviews with Zelu’s family and friends after something has gone wrong following Zelu’s decision to get exoskeletal robotic legs,” writes Globe reviewer Chris Vognar.

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