Opens Friday: tick, tick…BOOM! at the Kennedy Center 

Starting Jan. 26, the Kennedy Center will put on a new production of tick, tick…BOOM! The play is an earlier work of Rent creator Jonathan Larson, an artist whose life has become inextricably linked to his art. Known not just for Rent but for the fact that he did not live to see its success—he died the night before the musical’s first off-Broadway premiere of a misdiagnosed heart condition. Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM! builds on the connection of art with the artist’s biography. Described in a Kennedy Center press release as a “semi-autobiographical musical about life, death, and the necessity of art,” the story centers on “Jon, a composer struggling to break into New York City’s theater scene.” But this production’s claim to fame is tied to its director: Emmy and Tony laureate Neil Patrick Harris, best known as incorrigible womanizer Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother. Harris’ connection to Larson’s body of work runs deep: He played Mark in Rent’s 1997 national tour and Jon in a 2005 production of tick, tick…BOOM! The D.C. production will also feature new orchestrations, vocal arrangements, and the addition of a small ensemble to the show’s intimate three-person cast: Jon (Tony winner Brandon Uranowitz), Susan (Tony nominee Denée Benton), and Michael (Tony nominee Grey Henson). tick, tick…BOOM! runs Jan. 26 to Feb. 4 at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org. $59–$349. —Allison R. Shely

Saturday: Marc Cary’s Indigenous People at Takoma Station  

Marc Cary is best known for his days as a New York-based pianist who accompanied jazz legends such as Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter, and Roy Hargrove, as well as R&B greats including Erykah Badu. Cary, who also plays synthesizers and organs, has led his own jazz combos and taught music at Juilliard. He can play with subtlety or do dramatic flourishes. But Cary, who now lives near Baltimore in Parkville, grew up in D.C. playing in go-go bands while attending the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Over the years, Cary has combined his love for go-go, jazz, and R&B in his occasional band Indigenous People. They have, with varying memberships, played live and released albums such as 1999’s Indigenous People Captured Live in Brazil. The latest incarnation of that outfit will be joining Cary for his birthday gig at Takoma Station this weekend. For this show, Indigenous People will feature D.C. go-go musicians YML (aka Domo Young Man Lee) on drums, Dre Blalock on bass, and BJ (born Brion Scott)—son of legendary go-go percussionist GoGo Mickey—on congas. Cary’s manager also promises surprise vocalists, and music drawn from the group’s 2021 South Arts Grants Creative Residency at Bloom Bar, as well as their 2003 effort N.G.G.R. Please (which stands for Native Go-Go Rhythms Please, according to the album cover). Such projects mean one can look for the ensemble to energetically meld the nation’s capital’s official brand of funky, party rhythms with noisy post-bebop jazz and earthy Parliament Funkadelic-style grooves. Marc Cary’s Indigenous People play at 7 p.m. on Jan. 27 at Takoma Station Tavern, 6914 4th St NW. takomastation.com. $20–$25. —Steve Kiviat

Closing Sunday: Winter at Multiple Exposures Gallery

To have your work chosen for a photography exhibition with the theme “winter,” you could go the dramatic route, as Van Pulley did with the fog-shrouded peak of Punta Bariloche or as Alan Sislen did with his image of a silvery inlet hugged by ice-covered peaks. But as the 13-artist group show at Multiple Exposures Gallery demonstrates you don’t have to chase towering landforms to leverage the visual power of wintry snow; the humdrum can produce imagery that’s just as compelling. For Tom Sliter, the charm comes from how wet snow fills in the voids of wire lawn flamingos; for Soomin Ham, it’s how a group of ducks forms a line against a misty backdrop. Clara Young Kim captures how a single evergreen stands out against an almost horizonless white expanse, while Fred Zafran focuses on the pairing of a circular-shaped tree perched over a swath of reeds, echoing Jerry Uelsmann’s dreamy 1969 “Floating Tree.” Several photographers make use of strong diagonals to shake up the winter reverie, including Zafran’s abstract expressionist zip of water trickling through accumulated snow and some carefully arranged portrayals of receding fences by Sislen and Matt Leedham; meanwhile, Sarah Hood Salomon adapts her arboreal studies to the season by making them even dreamier. Maureen Minehan makes a rare use of color by documenting a yellow-hued shed within an otherwise monochromatic sweep. But the standout is Irina Dakhnovskaia–Lawton’s tiny (2-by-3-inch) landscape, with a lovely blurring that stems from its eccentric solarplate etching process. The question for all of these artists: Where on earth are they finding so much snow? Certainly not the DMV, had been snow starved in recent years until just this last past week. Winter is on view through Jan. 28 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Closing soon: Walter Plotnick at Photoworks

Walter Plotnick’s pair of exhibits at Photoworks are decidedly inventive—fanciful, even. To create one series about circus performers, Plotnick, a Philadelphia-based artist, begins with vintage photographs, scans them, prints the resulting images onto clear Mylar, then exposes them and other geometric shapes to photosensitive paper in the darkroom, before digitally fine-tuning and printing the works in cool-toned black-and-white. The acrobats and other performers present as dreamily removed from time, but Plotnick’s highly abstracted works most closely evoke proto-surrealist “rayographs,” the cameraless darkroom images that Man Ray experimented with in the 1920s. Plotnick’s second series of works is even more imaginative. It features similarly old-fashioned imagery (swimmers, acrobats, and a whole lot of chinoiserie) projected onto the blank insides of unfolded cardboard boxes, then photographed in black-and-white, with the beige of the boxes’ interiors lending the works a sepia tone. The boxes’ varied flap designs provide geometrical intrigue to the sometimes absurdist photographic arrangements, but the artist has a more straightforward explanation for his choice of material: Depicting imagery on the inside of a box is a “metaphor for anticipation,” he writes, in which the opening of a box exposes the contents, even if the hidden gift in this case is evanescent rather than tangible. The drawback is that, once you accept this metaphor, viewers are prevented from experiencing the reveal as the actual opening of a box. Perhaps that could be rectified in the next project by the creative Mr. Plotnick. Surprise inside series and CIRCUS SERIES is on view through Feb. 4 at Photoworks, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to 7 p.m. glenechophotoworks.org. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Ongoing: Rich in Blessings: Women, Wealth, and the Late Antique Household at Dumbarton Oaks

This gem of an exhibit at Dumbarton Oaks is small—occupying only one room—but mighty, scattered and dripping with exasperatingly old gilded necklaces and bejeweled earrings that, remarkably, seem just as fashionable today as they did when they were first designed more than 2,000 years ago. The gold cuff, for example, featuring two felines—perhaps lionesses—embracing a crown centerpiece of pearls and burgundy stones, looks like it could saunter off the runways of a modern-day Chanel or Cartier show. However, it is the tapestries on display that are especially worth noting: The fragile remnants are one-of-a-kind examples of textiles from the final centuries of classical civilization (200 to 700 CE). For example, the rarely seen hanging of Hestia Polyolbos, from which the exhibit gets its name, is a woolen Byzantine tapestry depicting the goddess of the hearth. She is an image of complexities; perched on a throne, she hands out silver discs etched with Greek “aspirational attributes” such as “festivity,” “advancement,” and “virtue.” Alongside these meditations for a moral home are “wealth” and “mirth,” symbolized by Hestia’s own earthly bling: pearl-laden chandelier earrings. The textile serves as a visual argument for the show’s thesis that connects women, through beautiful objects, to the transfer of wealth, a story of antique agency and power (however framed by patriarchy) that is not often told. Another must-see is the “Marriage Belt,” an expensive cincture of luxe gold medallions that look all too like money, the only other example of which resides at the Louvre. Many of the objects were acquired by women collectors over the years, including Belle da Costa Greene, a prominent librarian who worked for J.P. Morgan. Born in 1879 to a well-known Black family in D.C., da Costa Greene passed as White. An avid collector and fashionista, she may have even worn the 5th-century lavender sapphire drop earrings during a night out. For us beholders today, we can only imagine. But happily, the column-lined courtyard is dimmed, to preserve the delicate textiles, and studded, so you can roam and wander as if you’re whiling away in the interiors of a haute collector’s fabric jewelry box. Rich in Blessings: Women, Wealth, and the Late Antique Household is on view through June 9 at Dumbarton Oaks, 1703 32nd St. NW. Tuesday through Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. doaks.org. Free. —Emma Francois