Fun-derground
It’s not often you get to party on the subway — legally. But you’ll get a chance Wednesday at the New York Transit Museum’s karaoke night. It’s a celebration of “Album Tracks: Subway Record Covers,” an exhibition of subway-inspired album art ranging from Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” to Billy Joel’s “Turnstiles’’ and Kool & the Gang’s ‘‘Jungle Boogie.” The Golden Boyz will perform an array of songs, many transportation-related, with party-goers on vocals. And, says museum education coordinator Virgil Talaid, the staff will “open the museum’s vintage subway-car collection, provide instruments and costumes to use as props, and take photographs [for visitors to] make their own subway album covers.” The celebration includes refreshments from Brooklyn Brewery. 6 p.m. at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn; 718-694-1600, mta.info/museum. Tickets, $15. — Charlie Heller
Stop the presses
One of the funniest comedies ever made, Howard Hawks’ “His Girl Friday’’ (1940) is the second film based on the famous 1927 stage farce “The Front Page’’ — with a gender twist. The unscrupulous editor (Cary Grant) and the star reporter he’s trying to keep from quitting, both men originally, are ex-husband and wife — and she’s engaged to a dull insurance man from Albany “who looks like that actor . . . Ralph Bellamy’’ (and is, in fact, played by Ralph Bellamy). Rosalind Russell — who got the reporter role after it was turned down by Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers and Claudette Colbert — admitted in her memoirs to hiring a writer to craft her “improvised’’ lines, which are hilarious. A 35mm archival print is showing at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue and 36th Street, Astoria, Queens. Info: movingimage.us. — Lou Lumenick
Marvelous
To 92-year-old artist Al Jaffee, the biggest surprise in the comic book industry is that it ever made money. “I was in the wrong part of the business,” he says. “I should’ve chose to be a publisher.” Jaffee, whose 70-year in the business has included drawing animal comics for Marvel’s predecessor, Timely Comics, and then creating Mad’s famous fold-ins, will be at a release party Saturday for the new book “The Secret History of Marvel Comics” by Blake Bell and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo — it coincides with this weekend’s New York Comic Con. Artwork will also be on display, as will more stories about Jaffee’s war-years creations. “It was a strange mix to have these essentially little pigs and little rabbits fighting Nazis,” he says. 7 p.m. at the Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St.; societyillustrators.org. Tickets: $20, $10 students and seniors. — Tim Donnelly
Culture shock
Ugly! Vulgar! Crude! And those were some of the milder words critics hurled at the Armory Art Show of 1913, which gave Americans their first brush with abstraction. But the show that launched a thousand jokes — someone described Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” as “an explosion in a shingle factory” — also made New York, overnight, a major force in the art world. Now, a century later, the New-York Historical Society’s “The Armory Show at 100,” opening Friday, shows how Matisse, Picasso & Co. rocked our pre-WWI world. Here, along with more than 100 works from the original show, are posters and films of 1913 New York: immigrants arriving from Ellis Island, suffragettes marching in the streets. New York may not have been ready for cubism, but the cubists were ready for New York, which Francis Picabia hailed as “the futurist city.” Still is. 170 Central Park West; 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org. — Barbara Hoffman
NY loves Tony
The music industry has changed beyond recognition, but one thing remains: Everybody still loves Tony Bennett. On Friday, the 87-year-old will play Radio City Music Hall, and as usual, it’ll be filled with people of all ages. “I think record labels made a big mistake when they began marketing to just young people,” the Queens crooner says. “I learned a lot from Bing Crosby, and he was someone who always played to the whole family.” It’s a demographic that has served him well. By Bennett’s estimate, this latest Radio City show is his fifth or sixth appearance there. “Back in the 1950s when I was beginning to be successful, I remember someone who was associated with Radio City Music Hall telling me I would play there many times. I guess he was right!” 8 p.m., 1260 Sixth Ave.; 212-247-4700, radiocity.com. Tickets start at $61. — Hardeep Phull