(Photo: Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO (Game of Thrones); Jan Versweyveld (The Crucible); Courtesy of Starz Entertainment (Outlander); Anna Hanks/Flickr (Deerhunter); Margot Schulman (Dear Evan Hansen))

Theater
1. See The Crucible
Bewitching.
Arthur Miller’s brilliant demonstration of the hysteria to which a repressive society is susceptible can sometimes come off as medicinal in straight-ahead productions. Not so in Ivo van Hove’s gripping, emotional revival, which despite plenty of avant-garde flourishes does everything possible to foreground the human questions. Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo are devastating as the tortured Proctors, whose private unhappiness goes viral, even in 17th-century Salem. —Jesse Green
Walter Kerr Theatre, through July 17.

Movies
2. See Green Room
You’ll see a lot of red.�
If you’re up for being kicked around and brought down hard, submit to Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to his arty but unnerving Blue Ruin. Green Room, about a luckless band trapped in a white-supremacist biker bar, is basically a high-grade hack-’em-up siege movie, but good luck keeping your distance as people you care about die. Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots are among the bloodied and besieged; Patrick Stewart’s patriarch is a chillingly low-key depiction of evil. —David Edelstein
HBO, April 24 at 9 p.m.

TV
3. Watch Game of Thrones
At a crossroads.
The sixth season of the juggernaut fantasy series represents a test of faith for its audience: David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have essentially run out of material from novelist George R.R. Martin, who’s finishing his long-delayed The Winds of Winter. We could be looking at two roads diverging into a snowy wood here. —Matt Zoller Seitz
HBO, April 24 at 9 p.m.

Art
4. See press ++
Thomas Ruff’s philosophical photographs.�
Since the early ’80s, Thomas Ruff has used various photographic genres, often employing archival images; now the photographer has moved from portraiture and nudes to surveillance and star charts. For this show, Ruff scanned the fronts and backs of U.S. press photos of early space exploration; the results are forensic, formal, elegant, and edgy. —Jerry Saltz
David Zwirner, through April 30.

Pop
5. Listen to Human Performance
Parquet Courts hit an ace.�
That Parquet Courts took a year to put out their latest record is an anomaly: The erudite Brooklyn punks typically turn their albums around in a couple of weeks. The title track, in which singer Andrew Savage goes for the gut in a tale of emotional paralysis post-breakup, might hint at one reason for the wait, but Parquet Courts also sound like a newly assured band eager to experiment.�
Rough Trade.

Books
6. Read My Struggle; Book Five
Onward, with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The logorrheic Norwegian diarist has been at his best when spanning the terrain of the personal and theoretical. This entry is his most structurally conventional but also one of his most compelling: a pointillist portrait of the artist as a bumbling striver, spanning the 14 years during which he found a way into his craft. —Boris Kachka
Archipelago Books.

TV
7. Watch Outlander
Off to France!�
In the age of very serious dramas, Outlander is a beautiful hybrid: part romance, part fantasy, part historical drama. Its premise speaks for itself — WWII nurse accidentally time-travels to 18th-century Scotland — and it doesn’t take long to charm. In season two, expect more intrigue and intimacy, this time among French high society.
Starz, Saturdays at 9 p.m.

Opera
8. See Hopper’s Wife
If Ed and Hedda got together …�
What if the painter Edward Hopper had gone to Hollywood and wed gossip columnist Hedda, um … Hopper? Out of that imaginary union, composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie fashioned a chamber opera the L.A. Times described in 1997 as clever, exciting, and “horribly crude.” Now New York City Opera uses the work to help in its struggle for resurrection. —Justin Davidson
Harlem Stage, April 28 through May 1.

Pop
9. See Deerhunter
A live surprise.
In 2013, Atlanta rock quartet Deerhunter made a memorable Late Night appearance: As the band wrapped up a wild take of “Monomania,” front man Bradford Cox, rocking a Ramones wig and bloody bandages, walked offstage to wait for an elevator. Last year, the group put out the softer, poised Fading Frontier; given their shape-shifting nature and boisterous live reputation, their Webster Hall audience should expect the unexpected.
Webster Hall, April 30.

Movies
10. See New Voices in Black Cinema
An antidote to #OscarsSoWhite.
Don’t just complain about the absence of black voices in film — see the sixth “New Voices in Black Cinema” series: 11 features plus two nights of short films. It kicks off with the grimly powerful Mediterranea, centered on two men from Burkina Faso who try to immigrate to Italy, and How to Tell You’re a Douchebag, a romantic comedy about a Brooklyn blogger with seriously douchey tendencies. —D.E.
BAMcinématek, April 21 through 24.

Theater
11. See Dear Evan Hansen
The next big step?�
New Yorkers have been getting to know the team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul for a few years now through their scores for A Christmas Story and Dogfight and their songs for TV’s Smash. Their new musical, about social media and social anxiety, could be their breakthrough. Michael Greif directs; the book, based on an incident from Pasek’s youth, is by the playwright Steven Levenson. —J.G.
Second Stage Theatre, through May 22.

Art
12. See The Secret Agent
Stan Douglas, revealed.�
Douglas big-foots into two galleries with a giant film adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel about political terrorism, alongside drop-dead-brilliant large-scale photographs. These intricately set-up pictures are like modern Dutch still lifes of endless detail, the eye erotically sifting through everything, mesmerized. And no matter what part of the film you catch, it’s riveting. —J.S.
519 W. 19th St., through April 30.

Classical Music
13. Hear Matthias Goerne
An enterprising baritone.�
With his thick woolen suits and owlish look, the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler must have had a hard time acclimating to 1940s L.A. There, he wrote his Hollywood Songbook and (using texts by fellow exile Bertolt Brecht) Hollywood Elegies. The marvelous Goerne interweaves Eisler’s lieder with those of his forebears in the genre, Schumann and Hugo Wolf. —J.D.
Alice Tully Hall, April 20.

TV/Pop
14. Watch Sweet Micky for President
One of the best music docs you’ve never heard of.
Sweet Micky for President follows Pras Michel, a founder of the Fugees, as he goes home to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake, finds the country paralyzed by corruption and incompetence, and decides to help organize a presidential campaign by another beloved musician, Michel Martelly, a.k.a. “Sweet Micky.” Music and politics don’t always mix well, but they do here, and this real story has as many twists as a good potboiler. —M.Z.S.
Showtime, April 21 at 8:30 p.m.

Pop
15. See Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires
The Screaming Eagle of Soul comes home.
Onetime James Brown impersonator Bradley is a major player in the ongoing soul revival, and on his third album, Changes (named for his inspired Black Sabbath cover), his famously rough voice is as magnificently ragged as ever. Bradley’s high-energy shows
never disappoint; this night should be no different.
Beacon Theatre, April 23.

Books
16. Go to PEN World Voices Festival’s Literary Quest
Like Sleep No More without masks!
PEN’s annual international literary festival tops itself this year with a brilliant idea: a site-specific reading, in which eight authors will install themselves in the Tenement Museum’s exhibit-apartments, reading work with some connection to their assigned room. Richard Price, Colm Tóibín, Eisa Davis, and Veronica Gonzalez Peña, among others, will read in pairs (two to a floor); grab a ticket early to ensure you’ll fit in. —B.K.
Lower East Side Tenement Museum, April 27.

Opera
17. See Dido and Aeneas
Mini Light in the Piazza reunion.�
Kelli O’Hara plays the tragic Carthaginian queen, and Victoria Clark the sorceress who tricks Dido’s lover Aeneas into abandoning her, in this new production of the Henry Purcell opera. MasterVoices, under Ted Sperling, offers the 17th-century masterpiece here with a new prologue (the original is lost) by Michael John LaChiusa. —J.G.
New York City Center, April 28 and 29.

Pop/Theater
18. & 19. Listen to Love Has Come for You and So Familiar
Edie and Steve, before Broadway.
Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s musical, Bright Star, is buoyed by bluegrass songs — some merely pleasant, others transportive — many of which already existed in some form on these two records. Broadway’s Carmen Cusack has star power to spare, but it’s worth revisiting the earlier versions of songs like “Asheville,” “Sun’s Gonna Shine,” and “I Had a Vision” to hear them in Brickell’s haunting voice, with Martin on banjo.�
Rounder Records.

Dance
20. See American Rhapsody
Wheeldon’s back at the ballet.
Christopher Wheeldon won a Tony for his Gershwin-set dances in An American in Paris; now he returns to New York City Ballet with a premiere that could match Broadway’s epic scope. Set to Gershwin’s symphonic score for Rhapsody in Blue, it stars two Wheeldon favorites — Paris leading man Robert Fairchild and Tiler Peck (his wife) — plus the great Amar Ramasar and up-and-comer Unity Phelan. —Rebecca Milzoff
David H. Koch Theater, starting May 4.

Classical Music
21. Hear Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
A tall order to fill.
If you’re a composer of expansive symphonic music and an orchestra asks you to write a companion piece for Brahms’s sublime German Requiem, you might pause to consider the meaning of chutzpah. Instead, Jonathan Leshnoff wrote an ecstatic 25-minute oratorio based on the mystical Jewish text of the Zohar. Conductor Robert Spano brings his heaven-storming style and impeccable command. —J.D.
Carnegie Hall, April 30.

Theater
22. Hear A Tribute to Boublil and Schönberg
One day more.
The third Broadway incarnation of Les Miz closes soon, but the New York Pops gives the warhorse a grand send-off with a concert tribute to Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, who wrote the book and music. Patti LuPone, Stephanie J. Block, Jeremy Jordan, Norm Lewis, and Lea Salonga are among the performers belting out the show’s big numbers, along with some from Miss Saigon and even (heaven help us) The Pirate Queen.��������� —J.G.
Carnegie Hall, May 2.

Pop
23. Listen to Djungelns Lag, Mors Mors, and Kom Tillsammans
Don’t worry about the pronunciation.
As any dedicated crate digger will tell you, a lot of obscure rock bands are obscure for a reason: They weren’t that good. That’s not the case with Träd, Gräs och Stenar, a Swedish psychedelia collective whose previously out-of-print early-’70s recordings are bundled in this mind-bending three-album boxed set. Sounding like a more slovenly Grateful Dead or a rural Velvet Underground, this band slipped through the cracks only because its sound was too mercurial and wild.
Anthology Recordings.

Art
24. See Harvest
Shades of gray.
Adam McEwen transforms this gallery into a reverent dead zone of zombie objects — sparsely outfitted, recognizable things made of graphite (airport-security trays, models of early IBM computers). McEwen’s sculptures become ghosts of themselves, strangling us with some truth beyond words about modern life — a language of ruin and beauty. —J.S.
Petzel Gallery, through April 30.

Books
25. Read The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks
Igort’s devastating graphic memoir.
Journalist-illustrator Igort smashes together more than just words and pictures. Stalin’s deliberate starving of Ukraine forms the first, oral-historical half of his memoir; the second delves into the work of a murdered Russian journalist who reported on atrocities in Chechnya; connecting them is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a new episode of Russian barbarism. Igort’s images can be brutal, but they’re also clever, rich in both reference and flair. —B.K.
Simon & Schuster, April 26.