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.

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. 

Libby Carr's achingly humane drama is set in a sweltering Texas barn where the cattle aren’t the only ones feeling penned in. Five teenage girls are competing to win prize money by raising calves for their Future Farmers of America projects; they bond and bicker as they tend to their heifers and haltingly discuss their faith, relationships and futures. The young women are acted with compassion, humor and heartbreak; in a powerful piece of double casting, the five performers also play the calves, underlining parallels between their circumscribed existences.—Raven Snook

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). 

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).

Old secrets and resentments get dug up as four squabbling Korean-American sisters—played by Tina Chilip, Christine Heesun Hwang, Laura Sohn and Shannon Tyo—meet up in Orange County to perform a ritual in honor of their late father. Mei Ann Teo directs the world premiere of Jeena Yi's debut play for Ma-Yi Theater Company, which is currently in residence at the Public.  

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.

Two erstwhile juvenile leads from Disney musicals on Broadway, Adam Jacobs (the original Aladdin!) and Sierra Boggess (the original Little Mermaid!), play the trouble-tossed romantic couple at the heart of this new musical adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père's epic 1846 novel about a swashbuckler who reinvents himself to avenge a terrible betrayal. Musical-theater stalwarts Norm Lewis and Karen Ziemba grace the supporting cast in the show's world premiere, directed by Peter Flynn for that reliable new-musical incubator the York Theatre. The book and lyrics are by Peter Kellogg (Desperate Measures) and the music is by Stephen Weiner.

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.

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.

During the Obama Adminstration, Julissa Reynoso served as a key advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Caribbean and Central Americas issues; she went on to serve as Ambassador to Uruguay and, under Biden, to Spain. Her experience forms the basis of this autobiographical drama, co-written with Michael J. Chepiga, which makes a case for the value of diplomacy, foreign aid and public service. The highly experienced Doug Hughes (Translations) directs the Public Theater's world premiere production. Zabryna Guevara, as Reynoso, leads a cast of eight that also includes Dan Domingues and Marinda Anderson as oither real-life State Department figures and Barbara Walsh as the wife of an American man imprisoned in Cuba. 

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.

The Elizabethan equivalent of a slasher film, Titus Andronicus is the Bard's goriest horror show, in which cycles of violence and revenge leave no body part unhacked: The title character serves his enemy a pie that is stuffed with the flesh of her sons, and that's just the tip of the viceberg. Broadway's favorite baddie, the deeply sonorous Patrick Page (Hadestown), stars in a production directed by Jesse Berger for his often bloody-minded classical company, Red Bull Theater. The company also includes McKinley Belcher III, Francesca Faridany and Enid Graham.

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. 

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.)

The Encores! concert series's 2026 season continues with a very welcome staging of one of best-scored musicals of the 2000s: Michael John LaChiusa's adaptation (co-written with George C. Wolfe) of Joseph Moncure March's poem about a Jazz Age fête that goes terribly out of tune—not to be confused with Andrew Lippa's Off Broadway version of the same poem, which debuted the same year and which Encores! presented in 2015. Boop!'s Jasmine Amy Rogers continues her meteoric rise as Queenie, the party's hostess, and Tina's Adrienne Warren is Kate, the frenemy who throws the night into mayhem by bringing a too-attractive date; the large ensemble also includes Jordan Donica, Jelani Alladin, Lesli Margherita, Claybourne Elder, Andrew Kober and—in a brilliant stroke of casting—Tonya Pinkins (the original cast) in the role first played by Eartha Kitt. The Chicago-based director Lili-Anne Brown oversees the mounting mayhem, and Daryl Waters (Pirates!) is the guest conductor.

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, Paul Cooper and Misha Brooks complete the promising cast.