Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

You can head to Central Park to see the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park, or you can wait for the Public to come to you as its Mobile Unit travels through all five boroughs with a stripped-down version of Shakespeare's ardent comedy about the forest romps of an ousted duke, his cross-dressing daughter and her lovestruck swain. Emma Rosa Went directs a cast of 10. The tour begins at Astor Place (June 4–6) before wending its way through the rest of the city and concluding in Prospect Park (June 27, 28); a full schedule is on the Public's website.

In this ambitious and timely exploration of American, which spans 18 years in three acts, Jonathan Spector (Eureka Day) depicts the evolving opinions, relationships and fracture points within a group of six friends who have visited Israel together in 2006. Teddy Bergman directs the New York premiere, which stars Hale Appleman, Molly Bernard, Eli Gelb, Nate Mann, Molly Ranson and Zoë Winters as the sextet, plus Liz Larsen as a mother. 

Writer-comedian Morgan Bassichis unearths the oeuvre of the openly gay queer comic Frank Maya, who broke ground in his industry but died of AIDS before he could fully break out. Bassichis's tribute at the Maya temple includes archival material as well as new meditations on queer culture, loss and survival. Directed by recent Tony winner Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!), the show had a successful trial run at La MaMa, and now decamps to SoHo Playhouse for a longer go. 

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. 

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).

The National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) gives Shakespeare's early Henry VI trilogy a rare airing in this stylishly designed, tautly epic two-part production, adapted and directed by Stephen Brown-Fried. The first half concerns the loss of England's foreign territories in the 15th century; the second chronicles the internal bleeding engendered by the War of the Roses, as various factions of Lancasters and Yorks agitate for or against the pious king (played with touching restraint by Jon Norman Schneider). NAATCO approaches the piece with invention and economy, enacting battle scenes with gusto and treating even the vilest plotters with some degree of sympathy.—Adam Feldman

British actor Jack Holden plays nearly three dozen characters in a true-crime play that takes a panoramic view of the notorious 1981 death of one Kenneth Rex McElroy, a brutal man who was so loathed by his neighbors in small-town Missouri that when he was shot on the street, none of the many witnesses would identify the killer. Holden wrote the show with its director, Ed Stambollouian; John Patrick Elliott wrote the original score and performs it. The production makes its New York debut for a limited time after several well-received London runs. 

City Center's invaluable Encores! series concludes it 2025–26 season with a look back at the Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's groundbreaking 1983 musical, adapted from Jean Poiret's French stage play. In this all-Black version, directed by Robert O'Hara (Bootycandy), Billy Porter and Wayne Brady star as a middle-aged gay couple in St. Tropez—proprietors of a popular drag nightclub—who must go back into the closet to meet the arch-conservative parents of their son's fiancée. James Jackson Jr. plays their flamboyant maid and Tonya Pinkins is their friend, a swanky restaurateuse; Alaman Diadhiou and Rachel Webb are the younger couple, and Peter Francis James and Sharon Washington are the mean in-laws-to-be. Joseph Joubert is the visiting musical director.

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

Romeo and Juliet, the earliest of Shakespeare's major tragedies, is the timeless story of teenagers who, in rebellion against their disapproving parents, have sex and then die after scoring drugs from a local priest. This version is helmed by the Public’s associate artistic director, Saheem Ali, whose credits include last year's Twelfth Night in the Park as well as Broadway's Buena Vista Social Club. Daniel Bravo Hernández and Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens play the star-crossed lovers; the supporting cast includes Deirdre O'Connell, Francis Jue, LaChanze, Glenn Fleshler and Caleb Joshua Eberhardt. Tickets are free, as always; see our complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park tickets for details.

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. 

The superb Quincy Tyler Bernstine stars as a Midwestern woman navigating the ruins of her life in Bubba Weiler's elegantly gorgeous play, which combines suburban marital mystery with elements of Our Town and classical tragedy. The very sharp director Jack Serio (Grangeville) has assembled a knockout ensemble cast to support her: Emily Davis, Constance Shulman, Amelia Workman, Will Dagger, Danny McCarthy, Cricket Brown and—for this run—the distinctive Matthew Maher. Go. Read the full review here.