Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Rajiv Joseph, whose Guards at the Taj was a memorable exercise in historical gallows humor, takes an irreverent look at the short life of Gavrilo Princip, the teenage Serbian revolutionary whose 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited the Balkan powder keg and triggered the first World War. >Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) directs the New York premiere for the Roundabout, with a cast that includes Jake Berne, Adrien Rolet, Jason Sanchez, the invaluable Kristine Nielsen and Broadway's favorite baddie, Patrick Page (Hadestown). 

A modernized, female-forward reinvention of a 200-year-old protofeminist classic may sound like a bonnet on a bonnet. But Emily Breeze's irreverent riff on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is a delight. Many of Austen’s plot points are more or less preserved, but the novel’s sense and sensibility are reframed: Using period dress and patriarchal rules but contemporary, profanity-laden dialogue, Breeze’s perceptive version celebrates sisterly, not romantic, love.—Raven Snook 

Three couples from different generations navigate ther changing seas of modern love and marriage in an original comedy by Anne Marilyn Lucas. The play debuted at Theater for the New City last year under the title Party?; this new incarnation, directed by Matt Gehring, stars Audrey Heffernan Meyer,  Alan Ceppos, Pamela Shaw, Molly Chiffer, Brian Mason and Atlantic Theater Company pillar Jordan Lage. 

The estimable Scott Bakula and Ariana DeBose star in a revival of Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein's romantic parable about a French baker who falls into a deep depression when his wife runs off with a younger man. Although the show never made it to Broadway in 1976, it has since become a cult favorite on the strength of such songs as “Meadowlark” and “Proud Lady"; since the original cast album was heavily truncated, this production offers a rare chance to hear the whole score in context. Gordon Greenberg directs for Classic Stage Company.

Laurence O'Keefe, Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming's 2001 cult musical Bat Boy, a horror comedy in the sliced vein of Little Shop of Horrors, gets another chance to fly. Director Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!) has assembled a tremendous cast for the show's two-week gala run at New York City Center: Taylor Trensch as the title character, a misunderstood monster torn from the headlines of the lurid supermarket tabloid Weekly World News; Christopher Sieber and original cast member Kerry Butler as the West Virginia couple that takes him in; Andrew Durand, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Rema Webb and Mary Faber as local townsfolk; and Alex Newell as the satyrical Greek god Pan.  

Matt Rodin stars as a queer country singer-songwriter named Ace who connects with his gruff grandfather—previously believed to be dead—in this original musical with words by Douglas Lyons (Chicken and Biscuits) and music by Ethan D. Pakchar. The storytelling moves between Ace's adult life and the sexually confusing adolescence that he draws on for many of his songs. Josh Rhodes (Spamalot) directs and choreographs the production, which returns for a second run after its successful production this summer.

The Civilians, one of Off Broadway's most consistently searching and original troupes, joins forces with the Vineyard to present a new play written by Anne Washburn and directed by Steve Cosson. This duo's previous collaborations include 2013's mind-blowing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play; this one, set in a self-isolated Northern California community, is tantalizingly described as a story about "a death, a pageant, a rescue, a resurrection, pigs, and the act of saying grace." Casting has not yet been announced.

The very talented David Cromer is directing three NYC productions this fall, including the Broadway revival of Bug. And the first of the three to open is a play that, as fate would have it, stars a cast member of Bug's original 2004 production: Amy Landecker, now best known for playing Sarah Pfefferman on TV's Transparent. Landecker is joined by the always compelling Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie) and newcomer River Lipe-Smith in the world premiere of Preston Max Allen's intergenerational drama about a young woman who must turn to her estranged mother for help, while trying to protect her daughter from their dark family history. 

Ireland's marvelous Druid Theatre Company, a frequent visitor to New York, unpacks a new staging of Samuel Beckett's 1957 masterwork, a darkly funny metatheatrical exploration of existential dread. The director is Druid founder Garry Hynes, whose work on 1998's The Beauty Queen of Leenane made her the first woman ever to win a Tony for directing. Rory Nolan and Aaron Monaghan, respectively, play the blind and domineering Hamm and his long-suffering servant Clov; Bosco Hogan and Marie Mullen (who also won a Tony for Beauty Queen) get canned as elderly garbage dwellers.

Need a little break from the daily drama of current White House? Venture back to a simpler time through this R&B–flavored musical satire of the rise and reign of Barack Obama, as imagined by writer-composer-director Eli Bauman (who was once an Obama campaign staffer). The show has already been a hit with audiences and critics in Los Angeles and Chicago, and now arrives in New York for a limited run. The cast is headlined by T.J. Wilkins and Shanice as the President and First Lady and Chad Doreck as Joltin' Joe Biden.

Before Mean Girls there was Heathers, a pitch-black comedy about how high-school popularity can be murder. Kevin Murphy and Laurence O'Keefe'S 2014 musical based on that film now returns Off Broadway in a revised version, directed by the U.K.'s Andy Fickman, that is likely to appeal to newcomers as well as to the show's loyal fans (known as Corn Nuts, after one character's dying words). Heathers tells the story of a nice girl named Veronica who falls into the bad company of three cruel student dictators and a sociopathic newcomer who wants to rid the school of their ilk. The impressive cast includes Lorna Courtney (& Juliet), Casey Likes (Back to the Future), McKenzie Kurtz (Frozen), Olivia Hardy, Elizabeth Teeter and Broadway comic treasure Kerry Butler (Xanadu).

While being interviewed for an oral-history project, a former British soldier revisits a sinister episode from his 1970s service in Northern Ireland—nobody knows the Troubles he's seen—in this barbed drama by Belfast's Leo McGinn. The New York premiere at the Irish Rep, directed by Matt Torney, stars Michael Hayden, Samantha Mathis and Molly Ranson in the present and Daniel Marconi, Harrison Tipping, Doireann Mac Mahon and Annabelle Zasowski in the past.

An American lobbyist for the oil industry connives to protect his clients from the threat of an international climate-change agreement in Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's historical drama, set in Japan in 1997. Directed by the team of Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin—who also helmed the Joes' The Jungle (as well as Stranger Things: The First Shadow)—the play was a hit in Stratford-on-Avon in 2024 and in the West End earlier this year. New York stage pillar Stephen Kunken reprises his lead performance in Lincoln Center Theater's importation of that production for its U.S. premiere.

Prior to the major developments of her last five years—her TikTok stardom, her transition, her trans advocacy, her Bud Light ad campaign and the hateful backlash and boycott it engendered—Dylan Mulvaney was in the chorus of Broadway's Book of Mormon. So it's no surprise that this autobiographical solo show about her roller-coaster ride of self-discovery incorporates elements of musical-theater fabulousness, including several original songs. Tim Jackson, who directed the show's hit production at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, returns to oversee its Off Broadway debut, along with the impending Broadway premiere of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).

As half of the Coen Brothers, Ethan Coen has been one of the cinematic auteurs behind such classics as Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men—but in his spare time, he likes to write short comedies for the stage. Neil Pepe has already directed two collections of them for his Atlantic Theater Company (2008's Almost an Evening and 2011's Happy Hour) and was set to bring in another in 2020, A Play Is a Poem, before Covid interfered. The company has been mum about the contents of this latest trio of playlets, except to say that their subject is love. Aubrey Plaza headlines a promising cast that also includes Nellie McKay, Noah Robbins, Mary Wiseman, CJ Wilson, Dylan Gelula and Atlantic regulars Chris Bauer and Mary McCann.

The Phantom of the Opera ended its 35-year Broadway run in 2023, but you can't keep a masked man down for long. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical—adapted by the composer and Richard Stilgoe from Gaston Leroux's 1910 horror novel, and featuring lyrics mostly by Charles Hart—is already somehow here again, and in a surprising new form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by a serial killer who lives in the basement. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter at staggered 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other roles are played by one to four actors each; to help sustain the atmosphere, audience members must wear black, white or silver cocktail or formal attire—and, hopefully, comfortable shoes. (Masks are provided for those who do not bring their own.) Don't expect the same old Phantom: This version has been heavily streamlined and rearranged to fit its new form, and material about the Phantom's history has been added. Director Diane Paulus (Pippin), who kick-started the immersive-theater trend with 1999's The Donkey Show, oversees an extremely complicated system of simultaneous performances. The cast includes Hugh Panaro, Jeff Kready, Telly Leung, Nik Walker, Kyle Scatliffe, Clay Singer, Kaley Ann Voorhees, Anna Zavelson, Betsy Morgan, Raymond J. Lee, Jeremy Stole and Phumzile Sojola, though never all in the same track. 

The prolific David Cromer directs Talene Monahon's double-barreled satire, which looks at an Armenian-American family in two time periods: struggling to make it in the 1920s and then living in Kardashians-style hyperpublic luxury a century later. The cast of Second Stage's world premiere includes comic legend Andrea Martin, Susan Pourfar,Raffi Barsoumian, Nael Nacer, Tamara Sevunts and the frequent Cromer crony Will Brill (Stereophonic).

Writer-performer Drew Droege, known and loved for his online impersonations of Chloë Sevigny, has previously skewered modern gay culture in Happy Birthday Doug and the hilarious Bright Colors and Bold Patterns. In his newest comedy, he throws a little Rope down that same well, imagining a Hell's Kitchen brunch hosted a gay couple who have just killed their boyfriend and stashed his body in the furniture. Mike Donahue directs the world premiere with a highly auspicious cast of gay entertainers: Droege, Aaron Jackson, James Cusati-Moyer, Pete Zias and Fire Island hunk Zane Phillips.

Australian-American actor Jamie Jackson plays Rupert Murdoch—the elderly and ruthless international right-wing media magnate whose family was the inspiration for Succession—in a solo show whose script, the show's producer claims, was left for him a manila envelope by an unknown playwright who wished to remain that way. Jackson also portrays more that two dozen other characters in a world premiere directed by Christopher Scott.

Jen Tullock, who plays the unsevered sister on Severance, goes multicharacter onstage in an expressionistic solo show that she co-wrote with Frank Winters. The protagonist is a popular essayist whose critical accounts of the abuse she suffered as a gay child in the Deep South are disputed by an important figure from her past. Director Jared Mezzocchi employs multiple cameras and live looping systems to convey the complexity of the shifting perspectices and narratives. 

Heather Christian's divine musical creation, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, is a sui generis meditation on time and existence: a classical choral masterwork infused with pop, blues and gospel, performed by a dozen superlative vocalists and six marvelous instrumentalists. Librettos are distributed at the door; you can use them as hymnals to follow along, but engaging fully with Oratorio in all its mysterious glory is a transcendent experience. After a sold-out premiere at Ars Nova in 2022, the production returns for an encore at the Signature.—Raven Snook

For 35 years, the comic actor John Leguizamo has played himself—and many colorful side characters to boot—in dynamic solo shows ranging from Mambo Mouth and Spic-O-Rama to Freak, Sexaholix and Latin History for Morons. This time, however, he is surrounding himself with other actors in an old-school ensemble drama about a family waking up from the American Dream. Leguizamo stars as a Latino laundromat owner in 1990s Queens who must own up to old secrets when his mentally unwell son returns to the fold. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs the NYC premiere at the Public; the mostly three-named cast includes Luna Lauren Velez, Rosa Evangelina Arredondo, Sarah Nina Hayon, Bradley James Tejeda, Rebecca Jimenez and, as the wayward son, the director's own son Trey Santiago-Hudson. 

In the manner of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, rotating pairs of veteran actors co-star in Michael Griffo's epistolary two-hander, which traces the long-distance friendship between two women (one American, the other British) over the course of five decades, starting in the 1950s. After a successful winter run, director SuzAnne Barabas's production returns for an encore with some of the same performers. Nancy McKeon (The Facts of Life) and Gail Winar (Trans Scripts) share the stage from August 15 through August 31; after that come Michelle Clunie and Megan Follows (Sept 2–14), original Angels in America costars Kathleen Chalfant and Ellen McLaughlin (Sept 17–28), Kate Burton and Pauletta Pearson Washington (Oct 15–26) and Sharon Lawrence and Maureen McCormick (Nov 12–23). 

Are the prejudices of yesteryear still worth rehearsing today? The esteemed Jewish-Canadian character actor Saul Rubinek stars in Mark Leiren-Young's philosophical metatheatrical solo show, in which an actor cast as the avaricious and bloodthirsty Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice reflects on his situation after a perfomance of the play is canceled midway through. Leiren-Young's script has been tailored to reflect Rubinek's own experience. Martin Kinch directs this NYC premiere, which follows a successful run in Toronto last year. 

Six sexually nonconforming performers imagine life under queer royal rule in a counterfactual metatheatrical comedy by Canada's Jordan Tannahill, directed by the very busy Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Public Obscenities). The ensemble cast comprises K. Todd Freeman, John McCrea, Rachel Crowl, Mihir Kumar, N’yomi Allure Stewart and recent New York Drama Critics' Circle Award lifetime-achievement honoree David Greenspan. After a sold-out summer run for Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons, the production returns for a fall extension at Studio Seaview.

Director David Staller has long borne a torch for George Bernard Shaw, as demonstated in his monthly Project Shaw readings. Now he and his company, Gingold Theatrical Group, present a full staging of the Bearded One’s 1913 parable about English accents, class and power, in which a snooty professor tries to pass off a Cockney lass as an aristocrat. (You may know the story as the basis of My Fair Lady.) Casting has not yet been announced. 

This all-female drama by Martyna Majok (Cost of Living) had a brief run at LCT3 in 2018, but its central themes have become even more urgent since then: Set in a Queens basement, it's about a Polish woman deciding whether to provide shelter for a Ukrainian immigrant. Manhattan Theatre Club brings the play back to the boards in a new version directed by Trip Cullman (Significant Other). New cast members Marin Ireland, Anna Chlumsky, Julia Lester and Brooke Bloom—ringers all—are joined by Sharlene Cruz and three veterans of the LCT3 cast: Nadine Malouf, Andrea Syglowski and Nicole Villamil. 

This diptych of short original musicals, with books and lyrics by Jeffrey Scharf and music by Jimmy Calire, is adapted from a pair of charming one-act plays from 1914: J.M. Barrie's The Twelve-Pound Look, in which a rich knight-to-be is reunited with his working ex-wife, and the Quintero Brothers' A Sunny Morning, in which two elderly ex-lovers meet anew in a park. Bryan Fenkart, Chilina Kennedy and Courtney Reed star in the former, and Chip Zien and Joanna Glushak star in the latter; Daniel Torres appears in both. Gabriel Barre directs. 

The accomplished and busy Michael Urie (Shrinking) essays the title role of Shakespeare's lyrical portrait of the last Plantagenet king, a unfortunate weakling who gets sent to the Tower after making an unpopular land deal—thus setting off a splitting of heirs that eventually leads to the War of the Roses, as chronicled in Shakespeare's other history plays). Craig Baldwin directs his own adaptation of the play for Red Bull, the city's gutsiest classical-theater company. The supporting cast includes Grantham Coleman, Ron Canada, Kathryn Meisle, Ryan Spahn, Emily Swallow and Medea: Reversed's Sarin Monae West. 

Robin Schiff adapts her own screenplay for the 1997 comedy Romy and Michele's High School Reunion—in which a pair of friends retend to be successful inventors to impress their former classmates—into an original musical with songs by Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay. Kristin Hanggi (Rock of Ages) is set to direct, and Laura Bell Bundy and Kara Lindsay are playing the lead roles.

In his frequent visits to Joe's Pub, writer-composer-performer Ethan Lipton has sometimes shared clever, unassuming musicals that compressed big subjects like space travel and AI into storytelling cabarets. He goes wider in scale—and moves to one of the Public's larger stages—with this musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's rule-shattering, Pulitzer-winning 1942 allegory The Skin of Our Teeth, which takes a New Jersey family from the Ice Age to the end of the world. (Kander and Ebb tried for years to adapt the same play, without much success.) Lipton's usual director, Leigh Silverman (Suffs), navigates the transhistorical madness with help and ace cast led by Shuler Hensley, Ruthie Ann Miles, Micaela Diamond, Damon Daunno, Amina Faye, Ally Bonino and Andy Grotelueschen.

Composer Michael Sgouros and librettist Brenda Bell adapt Washington Irving's classic tale of horror and decapitated equestrianism into a spooky 90-minute musical aimed at family audiences. Directed by Bell, the show has had several previous New York runs, most recently in 2021.

Hollywood sweetheart Tom Hanks plays a time-traveling scientist—whose search for true love keeps bringing him back to the same day at the 1939 World's Fair in Queens—in a new play that Hanks has adapted with James Glossman from his own short stories. Kenny Leon (Our Town) directs the Off Broadway premiere at the Shed; the cast of 11 includes Kelli O'Hara, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michelle Wilson and the ever-excellent Jay O. Sanders.

The boundary-busting comedian Natalie Palamides loves a high concept: She dressed as an egg for her first solo show, Laid, and donned hirsute dudebro drag for her astonishing follow-up, the toxic-masculinity lampoon Nate (which was filmed for a 2020 Netflix special). In Weer, which was a hit in Edinburgh last year, she takes he-said-she-said comedy to new extremes: Dividing herself down the middle through makeup and costume, she simultaneously plays both parts of the kind of young couple you might find in a 1990s romcom. The cherry on top: This production marks the official reopening of the Cherry Lane Theatre, a century-old Off Broadway landmark that has been closed for renovation since it was purchased by the film studio A24 in 2023.