Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

The New Group's Scott Elliott directs a revival of Elmer Rice’s 1923 gimlet-eyed expressionist classic about the soul rot of conventionality, newly revised by the willfully perverse playwright-provocateur Thomas Bradshaw (Burning). Its antihero, Mr. Zero, is a craven, bigoted, sexually repressed number cruncher who is incapable of creative thought—a willing cog in the same social machinery that is grinding him to paste. The announced cast so far includes Jennifer Tilly, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Only Murders in the Building's Michael Cyril Creighton and And Just Like That… survivor Sarita Choudhury. 

Experimental theater doesn't get much goofier, peppier and more joyful than this hour-long stunt by the Australian quintet Pony Cam, which is returning for an encore after running at St. Ann's Warehouse for a month in 2024—and running is very much the right word. Four performers on treadmills sweat and strain as they rush to complete a wildly ambitious set of tasks that range from the ordinary (getting dressed, cooking a meal) to the less so (writing a grant proposal, reenacting a core memory). Audience participation is offered enthusiastically by members of a crowd that can't help getting swept up in the moment and the motion. 

As a character actor, Wallace Shawn has an adorably unthreatening persona. But as a playwright, he bites savagely at the hands that have fed him all his life: the high-minded class of culturati that includes exactly the kind of person who is likely to attend a trenchant Off Broadway play about the disease of capitalism—and pay richly for the privilege. (He’s like a guest at a dinner party who distracts you with talk of literature and dance, then stabs you in the ribs with his salad fork.) On Sunday and Monday nights during the run of his latest play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, he performs his purgatory 1991 monologue The Fever, last seen in NYC in 2021, the tale of an American traveler in a war-torn country who comes to understand the hidden costs of first-world comfort. 

Classic dance numbers from Broadway history return to life in a revue conceived by American Dance Machine's Nikki Feirt Atkins, who co-directs the show with Randy Skinner (who also contributes text and additional choreography). The lineup includes showstopppers from West Side Story, A Chorus Line, Pippin, Singin’ in the Rain, White Christmas, Contact, Gypsy, An American in Paris, The Act, Bubbling Brown Sugar and more, by dance makers including Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Susan Stroman, Stanley Donen, Christopher Wheeldon and Gene Kelly.

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).

Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, the show’s admirers have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is, albeit significantly revised to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is stalked by the killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off. It’s a blast.—Adam Feldman

As controversy continues to rage about immigration from the U.S.'s southern border, this ambitious musical two-hander revisits a time when the pipeline ran in the other direction, and thousands of Black Americans fled slavery for the safety of Mexico. Writer-actors Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson have performed the show across the country and, last fall, at Audible Theater's Minetta Lane Theatre; now they bring it back for a longer Off Broadway run. David Mendizábal directs.

Wolf whistles are bound to ensue as Austin McCormick and his risqué neobaroque dance-burlesque troupe Company XIV present their latest dazzling spectacle: a lavish erotic reimagining of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. Along with the dancers, you can expect circus performers, singers and titillating costumes. Leave the kids at home.

Russian expat Alexander Molochnikov, who moved to New York in 2022 after speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, directs Eli Rarey's dark comedy—inspired by real events—about a Russian director who moves to New York in 2022 after speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, only to find that America is not quite as welcoming as he'd hoped. Molochnikov is also billed as the creator of the piece, which was part of the Under the Radar festival last year and returns now for as a Public offering.

Danny Mefford directs a revival of William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin's beloved 2005 musical about six weird kids on a quest to be letter-perfect. Recent Broadway breakout stars Jasmine Amy Rogers (Boop!) and Justin Cooley (Kimberly Akimbo) are two of the grown-ups playing adolescents, joined by Autumn Best, Philippe Arroyo, Leana Rae Concepcion and Glee's Kevin McHale. 

Woody Harrelson headlined the 2023 London revival of David Ireland's 2018 dark comedy about an oafish American actor who has traveled to the U.K. for a stage role but proves utterly ignorant about its subject, Northern Ireland. Fresh from a strint as the title character in Tartuffe, Matthew Broderick stars in the play's NYC premiere at the Irish Rep, which directed by the company Ciarán O’Reilly. Max Baker co-stars as Broderick's flustered English director, and Geraldine Hughes is his increasingly frustrated playwright. 

The unassuming-looking but keenly incisive playwright Wallace Shawn's on-again, off-again 50-year collaboration with the director André Gregory has yielded, among other things, the fascinatingly unconventional films My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street and the dystopian 2000 masterpiece The Designated Mourner. They reunite for Shawn's newest work: a sharp-elbowed look at a successful writer and the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle on his wife, their son and the writer's longtime mistress—played, respectively, by the very auspicious quartet of Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Hope Davis. (On select Sunday and Monday nights throughout the run, Shawn performs his dark 1991 monologue The Fever.)