Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Demimonde demigod Joey Arias and puppet master Basil Twist return to HERE—and to outer space, a jungle garden, the underworld and a 1930s nightclub"—in a  reprise their trippy 2008 pageant, which Time Out called "an eye-popping, delightfully transgressive lysergic fantasia." The production is as fabulously overstuffed as ever, and if Arias is a little creakier in body and in voice, that feels perfectly in tune with the show's combination of the nostalgic and the outré.—Adam Feldman 

Words are wounding in Matthew Freeman's taut two-hander, an entertaining and empathetic examination of generational and philosophical differences that divide the political left—as represented by a savvy liberal sexagenarian and a young, nonbinary rep for the ACLU. Inspired by his own long tenure as a fundraiser, Freeman gives this extended power play an uncomfortable verisimilitude. After a successful downtown run in 2024, the show returns at a different location, still directed by Jessi D. Hill but now starring Marilu Henner and Shannon Purser (who played the unlucky Barb on Stranger Things).—Raven Snook

Bobby Conte (Company) rides out a twists and turns of Victorian friendship, love, work and loss as the titular David Copperfield in this ambitious musical adapation of Charles Dickens's weighty, much-loved crypto-autobiographical 1850 bildungsroman. The book, music and lyrics are all by Jeffrey Scharf, while Gabriel Barre (The Wild Party) handles the direction and choreography. Seventeen other actors help fill out the roster of Dickens's famously vivid side characters, from the headstrong aunt Betsey Trotwood and the eternally optimistic Mr. Micawber to the unctuous yet treacherous Uriah Heep.

Andrew Durand plays the title character, who is born an old man and ages into a child, in Jethro Compton and Darren Clark's musical adaptation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's whimsical 1922 short story. This British version moves the setting from 19th-century America to 20th-century Cornwall, and its acclaimed 2024 West End production won the Olivier Award for Best Musical last year. Co-author Compton also serves as the show's director and scenic designer; the rest of the London creative team is also on board for its U.S. premiere at the Public Theater, which co-stars Kelsee Kimmel as the love of Button's backward life. 

In this spooky-seasonal variation on the long-running Drunk Shakespeare, five actors gather to perform a vampire-in-New-York story loosely adapted by Lori Wolter Hudson from Bram Stoker's gothic thriller. The twist? One of them gets plastered before the performance and it's up to the four remaining cast members to keep the show from going batty. (Audience members can buy alcoholic drinks of their own to get into the spirit.)

Audible Theater's productions are recorded for later audio release, but rarely if ever has that aspect it been so central as in this two-man horror play written and directed by Six co-director Jamie Armitage, featuring sound design by Ben and Max Ringham (who scored double Tony nominations in 2023 for A Doll's House and Prima Facie). Audience members are outfitted with headphones as they take in this tale of a ghost story that seems to spill out into the recording studio where a hired performer is reading it. Lucas Iverson (The Pitt) and Owen Campbell play the actor and engineer, respectively. 

What's it all about, you ask? As Alfie could tell you, Going Bacharach is all about the time-tested, beloved songs of composer Burt Bacharach, mostly written with lyricist Hal David. The pop craftsmanship of songs like "Anyone Who Had a Heart" or "I Say a Little Prayer" invites and supports multiple interpretations, and their signature shifts of time signature help them suprise listeners even after all this time. Directed by David Zippel, this encore run of the musical revue finds the cast performing such neostandards as  “That’s What Friends Are For," "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose." Musical director and arranger Adrian Galante leads the five-piece band.

You gotta have heart, as the baseball team sings in Damn Yankees, and this new musical is all about it: Adapted from Maylis de Kerangal's 2014 novel Réparer les vivants, the show centers on the family and medical team of a dead young surfer and their efforts to transplant one of his vital organs to a middle-aged stranger in dire need. The score is by Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath, with additional lyrics by book writer Kait Kerrigan. Christopher Ashley (Come From Away) directs a cast that includes Joaquina Kalukango, Jason Tam, Heidi Blickenstaff and Drew Gehling. 

By rights, Dylan MarcAurele’s raunchy musical spoof of HBO's skate-away success about gay hockey players should not be nearly as funny as it is. But as directed by Alan Kliffer, this scrappy show is an unexpected delight in the irreverent camp tradition of Silence! The Musical! and the original Asylum production of Titanique. Writer-composer MarcAurele rolls out a seemingly inexhaustible series of double entendres, and the high-spirited cast of five actors—led by grade-A cuties Jimin Moon and Jay Armstrong Johnson as the central couple—score with nearly every shot they take. Most of the show’s comedy stems from the tonal clash between the steamy subject matter and the earnestness of traditional musical theater, and it wouldn’t work if the cast (which also includes Ryann Redmond, Ryan Duncan and Cherry Torres) weren’t experts at the latter. It’s knowingly silly but also, sneakily, just a little sexy, too. It knows how to wink both ways at once. Read the full review. 

Mixed-up men find glorious release in the backroom of a rural bar in Max Wolf Friedlich's strange and suggestive upstate New York fairy tale, directed by Michael Herwitz. Bubba Weiler—who has recently won acclaim as the playwright of Well, I'll Let You Go and The Saviors—returns to acting as the bartender of a hole in the wall with a possibly holy secret; Tina Benko and Jack Mulhern play local patrons, and Grantham Coleman is a city slicker with big plans for the place.

A 16-person choir of classically trained singers performs a first-person monologue in this unconventional musical by Mona Pirnot (I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan), in which a woman in her 30s grapples with the question of whether or not to have children. The music is by Jack D. Coen, who also colloborated with Pirnot on the lyrics. Sarah Benson (Fairview)—who demonstrated great deftness with avant-garde material during her 15-year leadership of Soho Rep—directs the world premiere for Atlantic Theater Company.

Lauren Yee, who scored with the dark comedy Mother Russia earlier this year, continues her Signature Theatre residency with this metatheatrical and quasi-autobiographical work about a playwright whose father disappears into the history and mystery of San Francisco's Chinatown. Kelly Marie Tran (The Last Jedi) stars as the authorial surrogate and the priceless Francis Jue reprises the role of her dad that he originated in the play's 2017 Chicago premiere, which was also directed by Joshua Kahan Brody. Jon Norman Schneider, Maureen Sebastian and David Shih roujnd out the cast.

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

New York audiences have watched Sophia Anne Caruso grow up onstage, from the Girls of Lazarus and Blackbird to the creepy teens in Beetlejuice and The Grey House. Now she steps into her leading-lady era in a musical adapted from Moyoco Anno's biographical manga about the racy early years of a woman named Colette during the Belle Époque. The score is by Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening)—who died unexpectedly last month—and the book is by Leah Nanako Winkler. Broadway director-choreographer Rob Ashford (Promises, Promises) steers the premiere production, whose quite large cast also includes Cory Jeacoma, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Marc delaCruz and Jenny Powers.

Todrick Hall has kept very busy in the past two decades, rising from chorus boy to early YouTube star, RuPaul's Drag Race judge, recording artist and Broadway leading man. His latest project certainly doesn't lack for ambition: It's an original musical that tells the stories of 12 characters, half of them white and the other half Black, whose lives intersect in the 19th-century American South. Hall not only leads the cast of 20 actors and nine swings—a huge ensemble by Off Broadway standards—but is also the show's writer, composer, director, choreographer and lead producer. After two developmental runs in London, he is ready to unveil his creation in NYC. 

Frank Sinatra is back, baby—sort of. The original creators and performers of Our Sinatra, Eric Comstock, Christopher Gines and Hilary Kole, reunite for a 25th-anniversary revival of the hit Off-Broadway musical celebration. Rather than doing impressions, the trio revisits Sinatra’s greatest songs across the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, from torch songs and standards to swinging classics, with plenty of wit, romance and old-school glamour. 

Two snooty and suspiciously close Ivy Leaguers hold a dinner party around a chest that contains the body of a classmate they have murdered in Patrick Hamilton's 1929 thriller, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film and was itself loosely inspired by the infamous case of Leopold and Loeb. This new incarnation, adapted by Gordon Greenberg and directed by Scott Elliott for his New Group, stars Corey Fogelmanis and Cameron Monaghan as the nasty boys, Jason Butler Harner as their Nietzsche-loving former housemaster and James Waterston as the dead man's father. 

Writer-performer Milo Kramer's one-act, one-person show uses their experience as a private tutor for NYC tweens who hope to qualify for elite schools as the inspiration for fictionalized musical portraits of ten children in various states of angst—and of the teacher who watches them cope with the pressures of parents and peers. The show generated considerable enthusiasm in 2023, when it briefly ran in rep with two other solo works at Playwrights Horizons; it now returns at the Cherry Lane, where it alternates performances with the extremely different Two Girls.

In this outrageous satirical metamusical by songwriter Andrew Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky, a hyperwoke theater company reimagines the story of Anne Frank as an inspirational Afro-Latin hip-hop tuner that centers postcolonial and genderqueer identities. Following a developmental run at Asylum last season that generated enough buzz to electrocute an elephant, the production now moves to the East Village's Orpheum Theatre for a proper run, still directed by Sam LaFrage. The cast includes Asylum cast members Olivia Bernábe, Alex Lewis, Austen Horne, Rocky Paterra, John Anker Bow, Jaz Zepatos and Walker Stovall, as well as newcomer Amelia Louise Barr. 

Nick Blaemire's indie-pop chamber musical, performed in an intimate living-room setting, concerns an East Village shut-in who is convinced that she has only a few months left to live and the lovestruck delivery guy who challenges her to rejoin the world outside. Will Blum directs for Out of the Box Theatrics; the cast of four comprises Ava Delaney, Mike Millan, Broadway regular Mylinda Hull and TikTok singer-songwriter Oliver Richman.

Two girls. One cup. What could go wrong? Eliya Smith's potentially shocking two-hander, developed with the Goat Exchange and inspired by the viral scat-porn clip that scandalized and titillated the world in 2007, does not try to dramatize the experience of Karla and Latifa, the stars of the Brazilian fetish film Hungry Bitches. Instead, it is drawn verbatim from conversations with men who have watched their scene—which inspired countless reaction videos online—and explores what they remember about it and how much about their own sexuality they are willing to share. Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass play all the roles in what sounds like both an exercise in docutheater and a subversion of it; Claudel also co-directs it with Mitchell Polonsky.

The always compelling Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) returns to the stage in a new play by Nick Payne (Constellations) that premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre last year. Ambrose plays the increasingly unhinged mother of a teenage boy who has disappeared; the supporting cast includes Tom Riley and Hadi Tabbal as her two ex-husbands and Nina Ross and Elizabeth Yeoman as her daughters. Knud Adams (English) directs the American premiere for Manhattan Theatre Club.

Puppet master Jonathan Rockefeller's kaleidoscopic adaptation of Eric Carle’s classic children’s stories is a pure, kid-pleasing joy. The ravenous larva doesn’t appear until the final quarter, but there are plenty of colorful puppets, dancing and music to entrance youngsters until then. Along with the main story, the show dramatizes three of these seven other Carle books: 10 Little Rubber Ducks, The Very Lonely Firefly, The Very Busy Spider, Mister Seahorse, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, Dream Snow and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See. (A different combination of stories is performed at each show.)