Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Along with the full-length musicals that they have written together, including Baby and Big, the highly longevous collaboration between composer David Shire and lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. has yielded two much-loved Off Broadway anthologies of stand-alone songs whose emphasis on craftsmanship and character suits them well to cabaret performance: 1977's Starting Here, Starting Now and 1989's Closer Than Ever. In this new revue, which they claim will be their last, they collect more recent material that addresses getting older. Maltby also directs a six-person ensemble of seasoned pros that comprises Big boy Daniel Jenkins, original Closer Than Ever cast member Lynne Wintersteller, Sally Wilfert, Allyson Kaye Daniel and—trivia alert!—the two gifted actor-singers who successively played Enoch Snow in the 1994 revival of Carousel, Eddie Korbich and Darius De Haas.

As questions of public protest dominate the zeitgeist, the Off Broadway season offers not one but two adaptations of Sophocles's tragic tale of of political resistance in ancient Thebes. One is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other, by the rather similarly named Anna Ziegler, places the action in a less literally modern setting. Tyne Rafaeli (of this spring's Data) directs the world premiere at the Public, which stars Susannah Perkins as Antigone, Tony Shalhoub as Creon and Celia Keenan-Bolger as the Chorus.

Screen stars Owen Teague and Abbey Lee play recovering alcoholics who stumble into a blurry, co-dependent and co-enabling love affair in this one-act two-hander, which marks the U.S. debut of the rising English playwright Joe White. Rory McGregor directs them through the protracted Days of Wine and Roses daze of their romantic drama. 

John Kelly, whose career as a performance artist stretches back more than 40 years, plays the outsider artist and graphomaniac Henry Darger—a Chicago menial worker whose enormous trove of strange and sometimes disturbing paintings, illustrations and literary efforts came to light mostly after his 1973 death—in the word premiere of a work conceived and directed by the dance-theater eminence Martha Clarke (The Garden of Earthly Delights). The show's script has been adapted from Darger's copious writings by the veteran playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart).

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. 

Anna Zavelson, who made a tremendous first impression as Clara in the 2023 Encores! production of The Light in the Piazza, plays an ambitious young corporate financier who unsettles a trio of older businesswomen in a new dark comedy by Alex Lin. Chay Yew (Cambodian Rock Band) directs the world premiere for the Roundabout; in addition to Zavelson, the cast includes Jennifer Ikeda, Jully Lee, Jodi Long and Ben Langhorst. 

Ro Reddick's offbeat comedy with music, set in the days before a 1987 conference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was a standout in last year's edition of the new-play festival Summerworks. Those who missed it then—which is most people, since it ran for only two weeks!—can catch it now in a longer engagement at MCC, co-produced by Clubbed Thumb and Page 73. Alana Raquel Bowers once again plays the central character, a young Black girl in upstate New York, flanked by fellow original cast members Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche, Will Cobbs, Andy Lucien, Lizan Mitchell, Nina Ross and Ellen Winter, along with newbie Crystal Finn. The astute Knud Adams (English) directs.

In Matthew Libby's Silicon Valley thriller, Karan Brar—all grown up since his stints as an immigrant Indian kid on the Disney Channel's Jessie and Bunk'd—plays a computer genius who gets recruited into a potentially sinister data-mining operation. Brandon Flynn, Sophia Lillis and Justin H. Min round out the cast of the play's NYC premiere, which is directed by Tyne Rafaeli (The Coast Starlight). 

Playwrights Horizons launches its Unplugged wing—devoted to minimalist stagings that focus on performance and text—with the world premiere of Jacob Perkins's ensemble drama about a women's recovery group that meets weekly for a period that seems to stretch into forever. Les Waters (Dana H.) directs a wow of an ensemble cast led by NYC stage legends Kathleen Chalfant and Elizabeth Marvel and filled out very nicely indeed by April Matthis, Keilly McQuail, Mallory Portnoy ​​and Maria Elena Ramirez.

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. 

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).

Before he went Munchkin in the Wicked movies, Ethan Slater demonstrated his major gift for physical theater in Broadway's underrated SpongeBob SquarePants. That should come in handy—handy in white gloves—as he plays the great French mime Marcel Marceau in a biodrama that Slater co-wrote with director Marshall Pailet. The play looks at the young Marceau's work with an underground network that rescued fellow Jews from Nazi-occupied France. The fine cast also includes Max Gordon Moore, Maddie Corman, Tedra Millan, Alex Wyse and Aaron Serotsky. 

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

Writer-director Aya Ogawa taps into the mother lode in a carnivalesque exploration of maternity that combines satirical vignettes, music and dance, bouffon-style physical theater and general chaos. Mamma mia! The production features original songs by Leyna Marika Papach and choreography by Catherine Galasso; the all-mom cast of five consists of Cindy Cheung, Maureen Sebastian, Marina Celander, Robyn Kerr and Liz Wisan.

Manhattan Theatre Club proffers the local premiere of writer-director Ngozi Anyanwu's two-person drama, which was commissioned by New Jersey's Two River Theater and premiered there last year. Okieriete Onaodowan (Hamilton) plays a mixed martial arts champion who agrees to train his estranged younger half-sister, played by Aigner Mizzelle (Chicken & Biscuits), as both of them spar with demons from their childhoods.

Lauren Yee has previously explored historical clashes between Communist deologies and Western culture in The Great Leap (set in Beijing in 1971 and 1989) and Cambodian Rock Band (set in Phnom Penh in 1975 and 2008). Her new dark comedy continues that trend: Set in 1992 in St. Petersburg— née St. Petersburg, renée Petrograd, re-renée Leningrad—the play looks at the upended lives of two surveillance agents (and a pop star with a past) as they wrap their minds around free-market thinking. Teddy Bergman (KPOP) directs the production for Signature Theatre, where Yee is a resident playwright. The super cast of four comprises Adam Chanler-Berat, Steven Boyer, Rebecca Naomi Jones and (in drag as Mother Russia herself) David Turner.

Abigail and Shaun Bengson sang about their whirlwind marriage in their autobiographical 2017 concert musical Hundred Days. The Bengsons return to New York Theater Workshop nearly a decade later with another collection about connection, focusing this time on recovering from the pain of a lost pregnancy while isolating with their young son in rural Vermont during the pandemic. The show is directed by the inventive Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown).

Writer-composers Daniel and Patrick Lazour and director Taibi Magar, who gave us the ambitious Arab Spring musical We Live in Cairo in 2024, reunite for a folk-inflected musical inspired by Susan Sontag's contention, in her influencial 1978 treatise Illness as Metaphor, that "illness is the night side of life." The winsome Brooke Ishibashi stars as a Massachusetts woman who discovers an unwelcome mass in her breast, which kicks off a long journey through cancer treatment. Jonathan Raviv and the implacable Mary Testa, who co-starred with Ishibashi in the show's out-of-town premiere last year, return for its Lincoln Center incarnation, which also features Robin De Jesus and Kris Saint-Louis.

Like Robert Icke's Oedipus and Simon Stone's Medea, writer-director Alexander Zeldin's contemporary British psychodrama is adapted from an ancient Greek tragedy—in this case, Sophocles's prototypical protest play, Antigone. Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon) has the central role and Tobias Menzies (The Crown) is the unyielding uncle who refuses to budge on his funeral plans for a relative. The Shed, which frequently serves as a warehouse for luxury-brand English imports, presents a limited run of Zeldin's production, which premiered at London's National Theatre in 2024; Lorna Brown and Ruby Stokes join the cast alongside original stars D'Arcy, Menzies, Jerry Killick and Lee Braithwaite. (A different adaptation of Antigone, by Anna Ziegler, is also opening this season.)

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. Randy Graff and Beth Leavel share the stage through February 1; after that come Brooke Adams and Marilu Henner (Feb 4–15), Carmen Cusack and Gina Torres (Feb 18–Mar 1) and Jodi Benson and Marcia Mitzman Gaven (Mar 4–15). 

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.

In Jake Brasch's memory-themed play, Noah Galvin (The Real O'Neals) plays young man struggling to stay sober who finds that his booze-addled brain helps him relate to the dementia of his elderly grandparents. Well-loved stage vets Mary Beth Piel, Chip Zien, Caroline Aaron and Peter Maloney portray the seniors, joined by Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldívar. Shelley Butler directs the NYC premiere for the Atlantic.

In Shakespeare's political tragedy, which has been enjoying something of a renaissance lately, the hoi polloi of ancient Rome turn against an arrogant war hero (and lifelong mama's boy) when he refuses to show off his scars in the traditional manner. McKinley Belcher III plays the titular general, Roslyn Ruff is his domineering mater and Mickey Sumner is his Volscian nemesis—now a woman!—in Ash K. Tata's modern-minded TFANA production; Jason O'Connell, Barzin Akhavan, Sarin Monae West, William DeMerritt and Zuzanna Szadkowski have the larger supporting roles. 

Elevator Repair Service is best known for Gatz, its brilliant micro-epic eight-hour dramatization of the entire text of The Great Gatsby. The experimental company now returns to the Public Theater, under the aegis of the festival Under the Radar, with another literary-minded adaptation—this time, heavily condensed—of James Joyce's densely witty and allusive 1922 modernist novel, Ulysses, an odyssey through a single day in 1904 Dublin and into the minds of several of its denizens. ERS's John Collins directs an cast of seven: Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Stephanie Weeks, Kate Benson, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Dee Beasnael and principal Gatz man Scott Shepherd (who is also this production's dramaturg and co-director).

Just Sean! Three years after his Tony-winning turn in Good Night, Oscar, Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) returns to the New York stage alone in a solo thriller by David Cale, who specializes in writing one-man shows for himself (We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time) and others (Harry Clarke). Hayes plays a writer on a rural retreat, whose increasing suspicion that he is in danger may—or may not—be a function of cabin fever. The ever-reliable Leigh Silverman (Suffs) directs the world premiere.

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.)

Search Party's Alia Shawkat plays a lost young woman named Mae whose aging father (Succession's Peter Friedman) is being treated for cancer in Clare Barron's extraordinary play, directed in this revival—as in its 2014 Off Broadway premiere—by the highly adept Anne Kauffman (Marjorie Prime). It’s about the denial of death, but it unfurls mostly in the mode of weird character comedy, with detours into gnarly and frustrated horniness; whether Mae tries to escape into banality or fantasy, time’s one-way arrow keeps piercing through. Caleb Joshua Eberhardt, Nadine Malouf, Nina White, Spenser Granese and Misha Brooks complete the promising cast.