Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Michael Vegas and Payton Millet's pop-operatic fantasia on queer themes weaves elements of Mozart's The Magic Flute into the story of Alan Turing, the British computer-science pioneer and gay martyr. Andrew Coopman directs and choreographs; the cast includes Spencer Petro as a defiant Turing and Sara Lucille Law as the wicked coloratura diva of his dreams.

The British conjurer Jamie Allan (iMagician), a Houdini aficionado who has made his reputation by infusing newfangled technology and emotionally charged storyelling into old-school tricks, appears at New World Stages for a limited run. This latest showcase is directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond.

Angel Kaba directs and choreographs this survey of hip-hop dance, from the mean streets of the Bronx to the world's most prestigious platforms. A cast of ten guides the audience through dance styles including breaking, house, lite feet, popping, locking, krump and body percussion. After a popular engagement last winter, the production returns to Theater 555 for an encore. 

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. 

Comedy writer Bill Posley (Shrinking) looks back on his accidental history of service in the U.S. military in an autobiographical one-man show about the veteran experience. The production reunites him with director Bente Engelstoft, who also helmed his 2018 foray into solo performance, The Day I Became Black. 

Rock me, Amadeus! The suave Ryan Silverman—familiar to Broadway audiences for his stint of Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera and his many, many tours of duty as Billy Flynn in Chicago —plays Mozart's infamous seducer, murderer and all-around bad boy in a reinvention of the classic opera, featuring a new English translation and rock orchestrations by director Adam B. Levowitz. The principal cast also includes Rachel Zatcoff as Donna Elvira, Anchal Dhir as Donna Anna, Felipe Bombonato as Don Ottavio, Richard Coleman as Leporello and Edwin Jhamaal Davis as the Commander.

Jonathan Randell Silver plays Gene Wilder and Jordan Kai Burnett plays Gilda Radner in Cary Gitter's biographical two-hander about the love affair between two of America's most beloved comic actors. Joe Brancato directs the Off Broadway premiere for his Hudson Valley–based company, Penguin Rep Theatre. 

The extremely funny Kevin Zak—who has contributed jokes to Death Becomes Her, had a Kenneth Starr–ing role in Clinton: The Musical and created an Instagram industry of memes about Nicole Kidman and Amy Klobuchar—is the writer and director of this campily irreverent send-up of The Parent Trap. Russell Daniels and Aneesa Folds star as identical twins bent on reuniting their estranged parents, played by Lakisha May and Matthew Wilkas, and thwarting the plots of a gold digger played by Phillip Taratula. Tha cast is fleshed out by Jimmy Ray Bennett, Grace Reiter and Mitch Wood.  

Looking for a little escapism? The Italian escape artist Lord Nil keeps you on the edge of your seat as he narrowly survives—or will he?!—such perils as boiling grease, an axe and a circular saw. Each escape is connected thematically to one of the old seven deadlies, and his battery of pulchritudinous male and female assistants seems likely to induce at least one of them. 

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 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. 

Right across the street from Wicked, scrappy improv comedians offer alternative alternative histories of Oz: completely improvised musical back stories for a different Wizard of Oz character every week. Director Greg Moss also leads a four-piece band; the six-person cast of this Baum attack includes several members of the musical-improv troupe Hell Yeah!

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. Nancy McKeon (The Facts of Life) and Gail Winar (Trans Scripts) share the stage from August 15 through August 31; after that come Michelle Clunie and Megan Follows (Sept 2–14), original Angels in America costars Kathleen Chalfant and Ellen McLaughlin (Sept 17–28), Kate Burton and Pauletta Pearson Washington (Oct 15–26) and Sharon Lawrence and Maureen McCormick (Nov 12–23). 

The seasoned actor-playwright-polemicist Brian Dykstra ($elling Out) debuted his latest show at 59E59 last year as part of the complex's East to Edinburgh festival before taking it overseas for a well-received run at the Fringe. Now he and director Margarett Perry bring it back home for an extended run. Dykstra plays a billionnaire arts patron who wants to hire playwrights to "translate" Shakespeare into modern speech; Kate Levy is the head of a theater company he supports, and Kate Siahaan-Rigg is a struggling writer tempted by his offer. As a meta bonus, the play—which is inspired by real events—is written entirely in iambic pentameter. 

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

Half a century after the fall of Saigon, Kenneth Ferrone directs the NYC premiere of this hit 2014 Austalian jukebox musical about the Vietnam War and the protest movement that emerged in response to it. The show's story, by journalist Bryce Hallett, incorporates more than 20 classic-rock staples made famous by such artists as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, Simon and Garfunkel, the Animals, the Impressions and Santana. The cast of six comprises Drew Becker, Cassadee Pope, Justin Matthew Sargent, Daniel Yearwood, Courtnee Carter and Deon’te Goodman.

Avast! The Waterfront Barge Museum is the scene of a site-specific production of a musical that imagines the love affair between the 18th-century pirate Black Sam Bellamy and Goody Hallett, a headstong Massachussetts lass who would come to be known as the Witch of Wellfleet. The show is by songwriter Jason Landon Marcus and the very aptly named book writer Chas LiBretto, who previously collaborated on 2012's rowdy Cyclops: A Rock Opera (ripped from Euripides's satyr play). Emily Abrams directs a cast that includes Maggie Lickani, Danny Hayward, Korie Lee Blossey and Lauren Molina.

Olivia Dennehy-Basile recasts the Bible story of Cain and Abel as a feminist tale of teenage sisters in an empty house in 1979 Long Island. Jennifer McCabe directs the premiere for Bitter Maiden Productions, which is mounting it under the aegis of WP Theater's Space Program. Shaelin McKenna and Bryn Frazee lead the cast of six. 

Playwright Rishi Varma urges us to clean up our acts in a darkly comical and glancingly absurdist "eco-gothic drama" that looks at the ruinous effects of industrial pollution as reflected in 40 years of one family's history. Megumi Nakamura directs the show's Off Broadway premiere, which features Kendyl Davis in the central role. 

After taking last summer off for renovations to the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the Public Theater's cherished annual series Shakespeare in the Park returns with one of the Bard's most popular plays: an ever-popular comedy of cross-purposes, cross-dressing and cross-gartered socks. Resident director Saheem Ali (Buena Vista Social Club) directs a starry cast: Lupita Nyong’o and her brother Junior Nyong'o as Viola and Sebastian, nearly-identical siblings separated by a shipwreck; Sandra Oh as the mourning noblewoman who takes a shine to Viola when she is dressed as a boy; and Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Khris Davis, Bill Camp, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Moses Sumney as various figures in the lovely Olivia's orbit. Tickets are, as always, free; see our complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park tickets for details.

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More gave up the ghost last fall after 14 years, but fans of that immersive theatrical experience have a new show to tide them over: a smaller-scale work by Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett that invites audience members to move barefoot through a labyrinthine installation inspired by Barry Pain’s 1901 gothic short story “The Moon-Slave," as adapted by the acclaimed British writer Daisy Johnson. Participants wear headphones and are guided through the 50-minute experience at the Shed via narration in the voice of Helena Bonham Carter. 

The title of Conor McPherson’s 1997 masterwork The Weir refers to a small dam, an interruption in the natural flow of a river. And certainly the Irish Repertory Theatre’s offering boasts a palpable liquidity, an accelerating rush of people swept off their feet by loneliness who are nonetheless caught and stilled in a village bar. In Ciarán O’Reilly’s production, we can almost feel the heat emanating from designer Charlie Corcoran’s photo-perfect pub. But the work moves beyond mere coziness; an excellent cast and McPherson’s profoundly felt humanism make the piece warming on some deep, maybe even soul-deep, level.—Helen Shaw

New York stage treasure Quincy Tyler Bernstine stars as a Midwestern woman navigating the ruins of her life in Bubba Weiler's debut play. 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—making a long overdue return to the stage after more than a decade—Michael Chernus (Severance).