Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Marisa Tomei and Arliss Howard play successful music producers whose world is rocked by a new A&R employee, played by Gracie McGraw, who challenges the way things have gone down in their business. Scott Elliott directs the New York premiere of Jessica Goldberg's three-person drama, which marks the beginning of the New Group's 30th-anniversity season. The seasoned alt-rock trio BETTY provides original songs. 

Playwright Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) concludes her multiyear Signature Theatre residency with a world premiere co-produced by Manhattan Theatre Club. Tiffany Nichole Greene directs this culture-clash tale of a first-generation Haitian-American woman who journeys to Port-au-Prince to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish that she reconnect with her cousin. Pascale Armand, Kelly McCreary, Fedna Jacquet, Andy Lucien and Jude Tibeau consitute the cast of five.

The ever-commanding Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager) headlines the North American premiere of Nancy Harris's about a celebrated Irish artist with a possibly shady past involving the circumstances of her widowhood. Zach Appelman, Sean Bell, David Mattar Merten and Ayana Workman round out the cast of this Irish Rep production, directed by Marc Atkinson Borrull.

On The Rocks Theatre Co., which is currently in residence at Ars Nova, proffers a genre-noncomforming new work that is tantalizingly if enigmatically described as "a twistedly comedic puppet pageant of consumption, corruption and the end of humankind." The piece is written by Christopher Ford and Dakota Rose; Rose also directs a cast composed of Marc Bovino, Cornelius Loy, Rebeca Miller, Gil Perez-Abraham, Phillip Taratula, Ellen Winter and Jeena Yi. The Austrian theremin specialist Dorit Chrysler adds to the weirdness. (Music supervisor Ellen Winter contributes additional compositions.)

On the high heels of her grand success as Celine Dion in Titanique, the delightful actor-writer Marla Mindelle has created another campy star vehicle for herself: a Schmigadoon!-ish musical about a modern normie who wakes up from a bender to find herself trapped in a 1940s-style Broadway musical. In addition to starring, Mindelle has co-written the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the score with Philip Drennen; her costars include Titanique co-creator Constantine Rousouli as well as Natalie Walker, Paris Nix and the charming SNL alum Alex Moffat. Connor Gallagher serves as director and choreographer.

While Lincoln Center Theater presents Ayad Akhtar's McNeal in its Broadway venue, it is devoting its Off Broadway house to the New York premiere of a play by another recent Pulitzer Prize winner: Katori Hall's 2015 drama about four half-sisters who gather in Georgia to sew a quilt in honor of their late mother, but soon wind up testing the limits of their family bond—especially after the dead woman's will is read. Resident Director Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Skin of Our Teeth) directs a cast of five women: Crystal Dickinson, Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore, Lauren E. Banks and Susan Kelechi Watson.

Eric William Morris and Noah Weisberg play the ambulance-chasing celebrity lawyers Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes—who became household names in the early 2000s thanks to a catchy jingle and an extremely simple phone number—in this very goofy romp by Michael Breen and David Rafailedes. The general outline of the story is factually based, but the overall approach is sketch comedy, not biography. Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse share directorial duties.

Anthony Edwards, Amy Warren and Susannah Flood make up the cast of Meghan Kennedy's heartfelt play about a small-town diner where a regular customer asks a surprising favor of a waitress. The always astute David Cromer (Prayer for the French Republic) directs the world premiere for the Roundabout.

Brenda Bell narrates her own anthology of spookish playlets, poems and dance pieces inspired by the writings of women from the 1890s through the 1930s, including Emily Brontë, Edith Wharton and Mary Howitt. Michael Sgouros provides live accompaniment with original music. 

Playwright David Finnigan performs a solo show that weaves a dramatic account of the 2019 bushfires in his native Australia together with a karger survey of the historical turning points that have brought the planet to the verge of ecological catastrophe. His monologue won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at Edinburgh in 2022; its run at the Public is its North American premiere.

New York theater's most dedicated Shavian, David Staller, directs a stripped-down and re-gendered adaptation of George Bernard Shaw 1897 melodramedy, a Tale of Two Cities–ish adventure set amid the fervor and clamor of the American Revolution. Five women—Nadia Brown, Susan Cella, Tina Chilip, Teresa Avia Lim and Folami Williams—play all the roles. 

The witty drag empress Alaska Thunderfuck stars in her own original musical comedy, co-written with Tomas Costanza and Ashley Gordon, about a wigged-out war between a pair of rival drag houses bent on domination. The cast features popular drag performers (Jujubee, Jan Sport, Luxx Noir London, Lagoona Bloo) alongside significant traditional-musical-theater talents (Nick Adams, J. Elaine Marcos, Eddie Korbich, Bre Jackson). Through November 24, the token straight man is played by Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block. Prepare to be properly gagged.

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 batty 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 down for the Count. (Audience members can buy alcoholic drinks of their own to get into the spirit.)

This ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama, conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs, depicts the true story of a teenager who reported his right-wing extremist father to the FBI after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The entire script is drawn directly from public statements, case evidence and court transcipts from the 2022 jury trial The United States vs. Guy Wesley Feffitt. Ron Bottitta, Patrick Keleher, Anna Khaja and Larry Poindexter reprise the roles they played in the show's Los Angeles premiere earlier this year.

Broadway's loyal opposition, Gerard Alessandrini, returns with a new edition of his beloved satirical revue Forbidden Broadway, which has ribbed the Great White Way since 1982. Hell’s Kitchen, The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby, Back to the Future and Merrily We Roll Along are among the targets this time; the cast includes Jenny Lee Stern, Chris Collins-Pisano, Danny Hayward, Nicole Vanessa Ortiz and Fred Barton at the ivories.

The longevous Ensemble Studio Theatre mounts a new work commissioned by company: a comedy by Lloyd Suh (a Pulitzer finalist last year for Far Country) that imagines the difficulties of being the only son of great American writer, inventor and tonsorial cautionary tale Benjamin Franklin. Chika Ike directs a cast of three that includes Noah Keyishian, Mason Reeves and downtown-theater MVP Thomas Jay Ryan. 

Theater review by Raven Snook

The queer coming-of-age memoir of a self-declared "two-hit wonder," F*ck7thGrade is a charmingly laid-back musical chronicle of Jill Sobule's divalution from middle school through middle age. Even if you don't recognize her name, you may have heard her snarky song "Supermodel" from the movie Clueless. Its absence from this theatrical concert demonstrates how the undersung singer-songwriter values storytelling above success. 

Book writer Liza Birkenmeier supplies vivid details and poignant punchlines to connect the musical dots of Sobule's eclectic folk-rock catalog. Starting in seventh grade, Sobule realized she wasn't like the other girls. While they obsessed over horses, clothes and boys, she loved her chopper bike, her guitar and Suzi Quatro.  ("Everyone had secrets: Me, my mom, Nixon.") After growing up, landing a record deal and releasing the 1995 single "I Kissed a Girl," Sobule still felt like an outsider who wasn't even out; she recalls hearing music execs talking smack about Melissa Etheridge and Tracy Chapman and then saying, "Thank God Jill's not gay."

Sporting an adorable pixie cut and an Orange Crush tee, and belting in fabulous voice, Sobule fronts a badass band of women—Kristen Ellis-Henderson on drums, Nini Camps on bass and the invaluable musical director Julie Wolf on keyboards—who also play small but pivotal roles in this journey of self-acceptance. With battered lockers behind her, Sobule plays guitar and even drums on "Bitter," arguably her masterpiece. Although that song was released in 1997, she smartly uses it to dramatize the kerfuffle that ensued when Katy Perry’s teasing 2008 hit "I Kissed a Girl" (no relation) skyrocketed up the charts and put Sobule back in the pop-culture consciousness.

Loosely directed by Lisa Peterson, F*ck7thGrade feels almost like a fan meetup: episodic and casual, with Sobule talking directly to the audience and even chatting with friends from the stage. It doesn't dig very deep; Sobule is stingy on personal details about her current life, preferring to amuse rather than analyze. But it's warm and fuzzy fun. Like Sobule’s artistry, the show is unsentimental, humorous and gently weird: a tribute to all the oddballs still haunted by former selves.

F*ck7thGrade. The Wild Project (Off Broadway). Music and lyrics by Jill Sobule. Book by Liza Birkenmeier. Directed by Lisa Peterson. Starring Sobule. Running time: 1hr 30 mins. No intermission. 

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Elevator Repair Service's jaw-dropping literary installation—in which 13 actors in a crummy office, led by Scott Shepherd, read every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—is thoroughly aural, even musical, but also acts upon the eye. Directed by John Collins and Steve Bodow, the show opens up a space between Fitzgerald’s writing and real life in all its silliness, randomness and banality.—David Cote

Soho Rep bids farewell to its longtime digs on Walker Street with a metathetrical collaboration between big-shot playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins—whose brilliant An Octoroon premiered at Soho Rep in 2013—and performance artist Alina Troyano, who has been doubling as Latin spitfire Carmelita Tropicana since the 1980s. The play imagines what ensues when Jacobs-Jenkins offers to buy the character from Troyano, and takes off from there into a larger conversation about avant-garde art and generational change. The cast, directed by Eric Ting, include Tropicana as well as Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Ugo Chukwu, Will Dagger and Keren Lugo.

Kenneth Lonergan's shaggy but engaging down-home dramedy, about a narcissistic country star whose life falls apart after the death of his mother, got a handsome premiere production at the Atlantic in 2016. Now it returns at the West Village's Lucille Lortel Theatre, directed again by Neil Pepe but with a different leading man: Star Wars baddie and Girls boy Adam Driver, returning to his Off Broadway roots. Three actors from the original cast—Keith Nobbs, Adelaide Clemens and CJ Wilson—are back for another go, this time joined by Heather Burns and Frank Wood. 

Sarah Mantell's dystopian queer adventure tale, which ollows a group of queer warehouse workers down a California coastline ravaged by climate change and unbridled capitalism, won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize last year. Now it hits the stage for the first time at Playwrights Horizons (which commisioned it) in a production directed by Sivan Battat and featuring a multigenerational cast that comprises Barsha, Sandra Caldwell, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Ianne Fields Stewart, Deirdre Lovejoy, Tulis McCall and Pooya Mohseni.

Kenneth Branagh plays the foolish title character, one of the great tests of stage mettle—one might say it's the Mama Rose of classical theater—in Shakespeare's great tragedy of being, nothingness and elder abuse. The rest of the cast is made up of fledgling graduates from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; Branagh himself shares directing duties with Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck. As in London last year, the production is set in prehistoric Britain, so expect a lot of fur pelts. 

Audience members choose their own paths through a specially designed multifloor complex in the Financial District in this all-new immersive theatrical experience from Emursive, the producers of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. Dozens of performers evoke life in the Gilded Age through narratives loosely inspired by real New York City history as well as literary sources like the Faust legend and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Teddy Bergman directs the show, which is written by Jon Ronson and features scenic design Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and costumes by Emilio Sosa.

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It's been more than two decades since Marissa Jaret Winokur, Laura Bell Bundy and Kerry Butler shared the stage as the teen queens of the original Broadway cast of Hairspray. Reuniting for a theatrical cabaret show at New World Stages, they stare stories and songs from that musical, plus a sprinkling of mashups, medleys and parodies. Andrew Byrne is their musical director. 

Writer-director John Fisher's musical farce takes us backstage at a campy musical version of Euripides's kill-the-kiddies tragedy, where mayhem ensues when the production's gay star unexpectedly falls in love with his leading lady. Decades after its acclaimed runs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the show finally makes its New York City debut in an open-ended Off Broadway run with a cast of nine. 

Tadeusz Słobodzianek's epic history-based drama is about the familiarity of evil. Ten classmates in a rural Polish town—five Catholic, five Jewish—grow up bantering and bickering in the 1920s and 1930s; the upheaval caused by the invasions of the Soviets and the Germans, however, frays their bonds and sets the stage for a ghastly 1941 pogrom. The adventurous director Igor Golyak employs minimalism for maximum impact, and a virtuosic international ensemble keeps this harrowing material from becoming too much.—Raven Snook 

Company XIV's seductive take on Alice in Wonderland is a singular sexcess: a transporting fusion of haute burlesque, circus, dance and song. Impresario Austin McCormick has assembled an array of alluring and highly skilled artists, who look smashing in Zane Pihlstrom's lace-and-crystal-encrusted costumes. With its soundtrack of pop songs, attractive ensemble cast and immersive aesthetics—plus chocolate and specialty cocktails—Queen of Hearts feels like Moulin Rouge! for actual bohemians. Hell, it even has a cancan.—Raven Snook

City Center has corraled a very impressive cast indeed for its two-week gala concert staging of this widely cherished 1998 musical. Adapted by composer Stephen Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens and book writer Terrence McNally from E.L. Doctorow's great American novel, the musical offers a panoramic look at seismic shifts in American culture at the turn of the 20th century, as exemplified through the interlocking stories of a fictional WASP family, a Black piano player and a Jewish immigrant. Broadway bold names Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, Brandon Uranowitz, Nichelle Lewis, Colin Donnell, Ben Levi Ross and Shaina Taub lead the large ensemble in a production helmed by Encores! artistic director Lear deBessonet.

Since its 2016 release, the hit Italian film Perfect Strangers—in which a group of friends play a highly revealing party game—has been remade a record 24 times in countries around the world (though not yet in English). Now it is the basis of a satirical stage comedy by writer-director Robert O'Hara, the auteur behind the delectable Bootycandy and Barbecue, who has assembled a staggering cast of stars: Neil Patrick Harris, Debra Messing, Jane Krakowski, Constace Wu, Billy Magnussen, Garret Dillahunt, Genevieve Hannelius and Tramell Tillman. Expect tickets to be scarce for this MCC Theater premiere.

The scrappy immersive-theater troupe Broadway Murder Mysteries conjures up a new production in time for Halloween season: a 1920s soirée at which the celebrated medium Margery tries to convince the skeptical stage magician Harry Houdini of her supernatural powers. The show is inspired by the real encounters, facilitated by Houdini's more credulous friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that led to Houdini's 1924's exposé A Magician Among the Spirits. Co-conceived by writer Monica Hammond and director Sarah Sutliff, the show features Krystyn Lambert as Margery and Patrick Terry as Houdini; to fill out the atmosphere, the evening includes close-up magic and period cocktails. 

A gay playwright of partly Cherokee heritage, Lynn Riggs is remembered today mainly for his 1931 drama Green Grows the Lilacs, which Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted into Oklahoma! But he wrote dozens of other plays as well, including this coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl champing at the bit to free herself from her mother's control. Mint Theater Company's Jonathan Bank directs what appears to be the New York City premiere of this all-but-lost work, which was published in 1928.

Vagina dentata! What a wonderful phrase! Vagina dentata ain't no passing craze for the Christian teen played with fearsome abandon by Alyse Alan Louis in this savagely raunchy and gory musical dark comedy, adapted by Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) and Anna K. Jacobs from the 2007 cult horror flick about a girl with nether regions of doom. After a hit debut at Playwrights Horizons, Sarah Benson's savage production now moves to New World Stages, where supporting actors Will Connolly, Jason Gotay and Jared Loftin are newly joined by Andy Karl.—Adam Feldman

A pair of 'rents deal with the special challenges and rewards of raising young children in this original musical by Graham and Kristina Fuller. Jen Wineman (Dog Man The Musical) directs a cast of six: Natalie Bourgeois, Max Crumm, Vidushi Goyal, McKenna OGrudnik, Brian Owen and Dwayne Washington.

The songs of Québécois nightingale Celine Dion are the stately vessel—or are they the iceberg?—in this campy spoof of James Cameron's 1997 romantic disaster film, written by Marla Mindelle (Sister Act) and Constantine Rousouli (Cruel Intentions) with director Tye Blue. The highly game musical-comedy cast currently includes Dee Roscioli, Michael Williams, Cayleigh Capaldi, Joel Waggoner, Lisa Howard, Tommy Bracco, Brandon Contreras and Marcus Antonio.

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 other Carle books; a different combo is performed at each show.

Just months after Patriots comes another drama about recent Russian history: Erika Sheffer's drama about a journalist trying to tell difficult truths about Vladimir Putin's first term in ther early 2000s, despite potential repercussions for her and her sources. Francesca Faridany (Manifest) plays the reporter, and Broadway regular Norbert Leo Butz (Catch Me If You Can) co-stars as her editor and friend. The venerable Daniel Sullivan (Proof) directs the world premiere for Manhattan Theatre Club; the supporting players are Erin Darke, Erik Jensen, Olivia Deren Nikkanen, David Rosenberg and Jonathan Walker.

Emmy Rossum (The Phantom of the Opera) and Zoë Winters (Succession) play twin NASA-trained scientists on diverging paths in Amy Berryman's philosophical drama, set in a future when the world is plagued by disaster and space colonization is an ever more appealing option. Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding) directs Second Stage's New York premiere of the play, which debuted in London in 2021, and Motell Foster completes the cast as Rossum's resolutely down-to-Earth fiancé.

Six idealistic young activists use art and music to help bring down the government of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarek in an original musical, by brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, that chronicles the Arab Spring and the fall that followed. Taibi Magar directs the world premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, whose cast includes Drew Elhamalawy, John El-Jor, Nadina Hassan, Michael Khalid Karadsheh, Rotana Tarabzouni and Tommy's impressive Ali Louis Bourzgui.