The top things to see, do, hear and read this month

Theatre | Brodsky/Baryshnikov Jan. 24 to 28, Winter Garden Theatre

Mikhail Baryshnikov, the charismatic dancer who made ballet sexy in the ’70s, has segued into acting: he did Chekhov, won a Tony for his role in Metamorphosis and infamously romanced Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. His latest theatrical adventure is an avant-garde reading of poems by the exiled Russian writer and former gulag inmate Joseph Brodsky, whom Baryshnikov befriended at a party in New York in 1974. His works, read in Russian with English surtitles, cover destitution, mortality and the fragility of the natural world. Baryshnikov channels all the gloom and doom he can muster: he bellows, ruminates and twists around a wrought iron, cage-like room as he pays tribute to his late friend.