Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

The five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams returns to the stage in a revival of Eugene O’Neill's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1921 tale of a former prostitute and her troubled romance with a sailor. Hamilton's Thomas Kail directs the production, which also stars Tom Sturridge and that great Broadway everyman Brian d’Arcy James. 

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.

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.

Michael Cerveris, an expert at 19th-century glowering, stars as the miserly and humbug-bashing Ebenezer Scrooge in the returns of Jack Thorne's popular 2017 stage version of Charles Dickens's classic yuletide story. Director Matthew Warchus's 2019 Broadway production swept all four design categories (plus one for Best Score!) at that foreshortened season's Tony Awards; Thomas Caruso shares directing duties for its return engagement at the PAC. Nancy Opel and Crystal Lucas-Perry play two of Scrooge's ghostly guests; other notables in the cast include George Abud, Chris Hoch, Rashidra Scott and Dead Outlaw's Julia Knitel and Dashiell Eaves.

John Kevin Jones goes to the Dickens in this one-hour account of the novelist's classic holiday ghost story, adapted with director Rhonda Dodd. The Merchant's House Museum, formerly the home of a wealthy 19th-century family, provides an atmospheric candlelit setting for Jones's 13th annual engagement. This year, Jones alternates performances with Vince Gatton. Select performances include an optional reception at which the audience sips mulled wine and Jones recites Clement Moore's “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

This hour-long original musical adaptation of Dickens's yuletide fable, created by composer Michael Sgouros and librettist-director Brenda Bell, returns for its 17th year at the West Village's Players Theatre. The updated set is inspired by traditional British panto.

You’ll get a kick out of this holiday stalwart, which still features Santa, wooden soldiers and the dazzling Rockettes. In recent years, new music, more eye-catching costumes and advanced technology have been introduced to bring audience members closer to the performance. In the signature kick line that finds its way into most of the big dance numbers, the Rockettes’ 36 pairs of legs rise and fall like the batting of an eyelash, their perfect unison a testament to the disciplined human form. This is precision dancing on a massive scale—a Busby Berkeley number come to glorious life—and it takes your breath away.

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).

An angel helps a suicidal man see how important he is to the world in Anthony E. Palermo's radio-play–style adaptation of Frank Capra's cherished holiday movie, which includes period music, ads and sound effects. Charlotte Moore directs the production, which the Irish Rep has previously mounted in 2013 and 2017; the cast this time comprises Rufus Collins, Ali Ewoldt, Reed Lancaster, Leenya Rideout and Ashley Robinson. 

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.

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. 

Nazareth Hassan drama takes an incantatory deep dive into the cult of performance that is as disturbing as it is riveting. Expertly directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, with electrifying movement by Camden Gonzalez and an extraordinary ensemble cast, the play’s world premiere at Playwrights Horizons conjures a theatrical experience in which the line between artistic rigor and psychic violation is perilously thin. The lengthy first act serves implicates the audience in the ritualized degradation onstage: a stress test of power and complicity that suggests the lengths to which both performers and spectators will go in the name of “process.”—Marcus Scott

Six sexually nonconforming performers imagine the life of a queer royal in a counterfactual play 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.

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. 

New York Theatre Workshop bakes up a new version of Molière's baguette-crisp comedy about religious hypocrisy and gullibility among the upper crust, freshly adapted by Lucas Hnath (A Dolls House, Part 2) and directed by erstwhile Soho Rep leader Sarah Benson. The cast is a murderers' row: Matthew Broderick plays the conning lead character and David Cross is his principal dupe; joining the fun are Amber Gray, Francie Jue, Emily Davis, Ryan Haddad, Lisa Kron, Ike Ufomadu and RuPaul’s Drag Race's acidulous Bianca del Rio. 

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.

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.