A globular light show flickered behind the piano at 54 Below on Monday evening as Nellie McKay resurrected the cheerfully embattled spirit of the hippie counterculture in her new show, “Nice Try, ’60s.” The performance celebrated the release of her wonderful album, “My Weekly Reader,” devoted to vintage psychedelia and period protest songs.
True to Ms. McKay’s idiosyncratic sensibility, her concert, like her album, bypassed the musical monuments of the period (there were no references to Woodstock) to exhume lesser-known songs like the Small Faces’ euphoric “Itchycoo Park,” the Kinks’ wistful “Sunny Afternoon” and Donovan’s phantasmagoric “Sunny Goodge Street.”