Here is where to find reviews, details, schedules, prices and ticket information about Off Broadway shows in New York
New York theater ranges far beyond the 41 large midtown houses that we call Broadway. Many of the city's most innovative and engaging new plays and musicals can be found Off Broadway, in venues that seat between 100 and 499 people. These more intimate spaces present work in a wide range of styles, from new pieces by major artists at the Public Theater or Playwrights Horizons to crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the top Off Broadway shows usually cost less than the best Broadway shows (even if you score cheap tickets to them). Use our comprehensive listings to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows.
RECOMMENDED: Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC
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.
Before Tarell Alvin McCraney won a screenplay Oscar for Moonlight, he exploded onto the theater scene with the Brother/Sister plays, a trio of dramas set in Louisiana but inspired by stories from Yoruba mythology. McCraney and Bijan Sheibani now co-direct a revival of the trilogy's middle chapter, which focuses on two brothers with very different approaches to life—one is serious and hardworking, while the other is adventurous and reckless—and the latter brother's troublemaking former prison cellmate. André Holland, a veteran of many McCraney projects, played this third man at the Public Theatre in 2009; at the Shed, he assumes the role of the sensible older sibling, joined by Alani iLongwe and Malcom Mays.
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.
The queer Salvadoran-American comedian Julio Torres has one of the country's most distinctive sensibilities, as he has proved as the auteur and star of Los Espookys, Fantasmas and Problemista. His 2019 HBO special My Favorite Shapes found him musing about physical forms; in this new multimedia stage show, he hews to hues.
In Michael Shaw Fisher's head-spinning spoof, Emma Hunton (Spring Awakening) stars as an actress who becomes possessed by a demon while starring in a musical adaptation of The Exorcist. After more than a decade in development, this wickedly potty-mouthed rock musical had a hit 2023 engagement in Los Angeles early this year, followed by a Halloween stint at the Box that year. Among the guest stars scheduled to pop in during this latest run are Lance Bass, Jaime Cepero, Nicci Claspell, Garrett Clayton, Frankie Grande, Lena Hall, Nina West, Marissa Jaret Winokur and Evan Rachel Wood.
The internationally acclaimed operatic countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (Akhnaten) plays the titular demented opera diva in a rare revival of a 1983 comic melodrama by Ridiculous Theatrical Company's queer auteur Charles Ludlam. Eric Ting (The Comeuppance) directs this outdoor production, which is the final major offering of Little Island's ambitious 2025 summer season.
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.
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 Public Theater's civically ambitious Public Works series, which collaborates with multiple New York communities to create large-scale theater, lost its leader when director Laurie Woolery fell victim to budget cuts at the Public last year. But the program soldiers on with songwriter-playwright Troy Anthony's new concert adapatation of one of Shakespeare's strangest plays: a kind of Ancient Mediterranean Flash Gordon adventure (often co-attributed to Elizabethan ne'er-do-well George Wilkins) that includes shipwrecks, contests to win a princess’s hand, a pirate abduction, a virgin in a brothel and a guest shot by the goddess Diana. Carl Cofield directs the production, which is performed at the impressive Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights in lieu of the usual Delacorte Theater, which is busy hosting Shakespeare in the Park this year. Casting of the principal roles—usually played by professional actors, leading an army of amateurs—has not yet been announced.
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.
The pop megastar Sia provides songs for the stage adaptation of Damon Cardasis's 2017 movie musical about a sisyish young man torn between his conservative aunt's church and his secret new community amid the LGBTQ+ ballroom scene. Cardasis is joined as book writer by James Ijames (Fat Ham), and Honey Dijon contributes additional music. Whitney White (Liberation) directs the world premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, with Darrell Grand Moultrie as choreographer; recent Voice semifinalist Bryson Battle and recent Tony winners J. Harrison Ghee (Some Like It Hot) and Joaquina Kalukango (Paradise Square) lead a large cast that also includes B Noel Thomas and Kristolyn Lloyd.
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.
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). Another New York stage treasure, Marin Ireland, takes over from Bernstine starting September 2.
Theatre for a New Audience presents Henrik Ibsen's 1884 social drama, which, like Chekhov's The Seagull, investigates the links among family discord, suicidal young people and symbolic waterfowl. Simon Godwin—of Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, which is coproducing the show—directs the first Off Broadway revival of the show to employ David Eldridge's new adaptation of the script. Leading the cast are Robert Stanton, Alex Hurt, Nick Westrate, Melanie Field, Maaike Laanstra-Corn and David Patrick Kelly.
Five classically trained actors gather to perform a Shakespeare play, but this dramatic cocktail is served with a twist: One of them gets boozed up before the show—in the vein of Comedy Central's Drunk History—and hilarity ensues as the four sober cast members try to keep the script on track.
The prolific Bob and Tobly McSmith, who specialize in silly musicals based on nostalgia objects like Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, take a shot at America's favorite six 1990s white people. Assaf Gleizner, who wrote music for the McSmiths' The Office! A Musical Parody, is there for them like he's been there before, and Ryan David Barto directs.
Self-described “bubble scientist” Fan Yang's blissfully disarming act (now performed in New York by his son Deni, daughter Melody and wife Ana) consists mainly of generating a dazzling succession of bubbles in mind-blowing configurations, filling them with smoke or linking them into long chains. Lasers and flashing colored lights add to the trippy visuals.—David Cote
The Canadian performer Katsura Sunshine, billed as the only Western master of the traditional and rigorously trained Japanese comic stortellying art of Rakugo, performs a monthly show at New World Stages. In keeping with the genre's minimalist practice, Sunshine performs in a kimono using only a fan and a hand towel for props.
Milo Manheim, Elizabeth Gillies and Jeremy Kushnier currently star in the latest revival of this dark, tuneful and utterly winsome 1982 horror-camp musical about a flesh-eating plant who makes dreams come true for a lowly flower-shop worker. Composer Alan Menken and librettist Howard Ashman wrap a sordid tale of capitalist temptation and moral decay in layers of sweetness, humor, wit and camp. Michael Mayer directs the feeding frenzy in this deeply satisfying revival.—Adam Feldman
The boys are back in town! Five nice-looking men take it all off and vocalize in this collage of musical vignettes on gay themes, revamped since its 1999 debut with new jokes and more up-to-date references. Although sex is central to most of the numbers, the goofy nudism has no erotic charge (and when the show tries to be serious, it's sometimes hard to watch). After a hiatus of several years, NBS has returned to NYC at a new venue in 2023.
Having already created goofy musical spoofs of shows including Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, Bob and Tobly McSmith—joined again by composer Assaf Gleizner, who wrote the score for Friends! The Musical Parody—take on yet another TV institution. Donald Garverick directs a cast led by Caleigh Lozito, in male drag, as paper tiger Michael Scott.
A wily cop tries to psych out a possibly homicidal shrink in Warren Manzi’s moldy, convoluted mystery. The creaky welter of dime-store Freudianism, noirish attitude and whodunit gimmickry is showing its age. (Catherine Russell has starred since 1987.)—David Cote
Ah, the joy of watching theater fail. The possibility of malfunction is part of what makes live performance exciting, and Mischief Theatre’s farce takes that notion to extremes as amateur British actors perform a hackneyed whodunnit amid escalating calamities. Depending on your tolerance for ceaseless slapstick, the show will either have you rolling in the aisles or rolling your eyes. Directed by Mark Bell, the mayhem goes like cuckoo clockwork on Nigel Hook’s ingeniously tumbledown set.—Adam Feldman
Cooper Jordan's comedic musical twist on the movie Saw combines slasher flick with slash fiction, imagining a queer romance between franchise protagonists Lawrence Gordon and Adam Stanheight (who do, after all, meet in a bathrooom). Stephanie Rosenberg directs the showm which has a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and a score by Patrick Spencer and Anthony De Angelis. Expect multiple characters to spill their guts in song, and be warned: The VIP front row is billed as a splash zone.
Four single and neurotic New Yorkers get up to no good in this long-running section of the Theatre Center's must-stage-TV repertory lineup, which also includes shows inspired by Friends and The Office. Like those, Singfeld! has a libretto by Bob and Tobly McSmith; the music in this case is by fellow musical spoof artist Billy Recce (A Musical About Star Wars). Marc David Wright directs.
As controversy continues to rage about immigration from the U.S.'s southern border, this ambitious two-handed musical 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 successfully in Baltimore, Berkeley and Washington, D.C., and are now bringing it to Audible Theater Minetta Lane Theatre, where it will be recorded for future broadcast. David Mendizábal directs.
For 35 years, the comic actor John Leguizamo has played himself—and many colorful side characters to boot—in dynamic solo shows ranging from Mambo Mouth and Spic-O-Rama to Freak, Sexaholix and Latin History for Morons. This time, however, he is surrounding himself with other actors in an old-school ensemble drama about a family waking up from the American Dream. Leguizamo stars as a Latino laundromat owner in 1990s Queens who must own up to old secrets when his mentally unwell son returns to the fold. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs the NYC premiere at the Public; the mostly three-named cast includes Luna Lauren Velez, Rosa Evangelina Arredondo, Sarah Nina Hayon, Bradley James Tejeda, Rebecca Jimenez and, as the wayward son, the director's own son Trey Santiago-Hudson.
Six sexually nonconforming performers imagine life under queer royal rule in a counterfactual metatheatrical comedy 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.
The very talented David Cromer is directing three NYC productions this fall, including the Broadway revival of Bug. And the first of the three to open is a play that, as fate would have it, stars a cast member of Bug's original 2004 production: Amy Landecker, now best known for playing Sarah Pfefferman on TV's Transparent. Landecker is joined by the always compelling Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie) and newcomer River Lipe-Smith in the world premiere of Preston Max Allen's intergenerational drama about a young woman who must turn to her estranged mother for help, while trying to protect her daughter from their dark family history.
Julia McDermott (Heroes of the Fourth Turning) plays a California TV personality and offscreen hot mess who is forced to smile in the face of ecological disaster in a darkly comical ecological cautionary tale by Brian Watkins (Outer Range). Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, this incendiary solo show earned rave notices at the Edinburgh Fringe and in London, and is being brought to NYC by St. Ann's Warehouse, a reliable source of important imports.
As half of the Coen Brothers, Ethan Coen has been one of the cinematic auteurs behind such classics as Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men—but in his spare time, he likes to write short comedies for the stage. Neil Pepe has already directed two collections of them for his Atlantic Theater Company (2008's Almost an Evening and 2011's Happy Hour) and was set to bring in another in 2020, A Play Is a Poem, before Covid interfered. The company has been mum about the contents of this latest trio of playlets, except to say that their subject is love. Aubrey Plaza headlines a promising cast that also includes Nellie McKay, Noah Robbins, Mary Wiseman, CJ Wilson, Dylan Gelula and Atlantic regulars Chris Bauer and Mary McCann.
Heather Christian's divine musical creation, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, is a sui generis meditation on time and existence: a classical choral masterwork infused with pop, blues and gospel, performed by a dozen superlative vocalists and six marvelous instrumentalists. Librettos are distributed at the door; you can use them as hymnals to follow along, but engaging fully with Oratorio in all its mysterious glory is a transcendent experience. (After a sold-out premiere at Ars Nova in 2022, the production returns for an encore at the Signature.)—Raven Snook
Jordan E. Cooper had a hit right out of the gate at the Public Theatre's 2019 production of his debut play, the uproarious Ain't No Mo', in which he played an airport employee overseeing boarding for the last plane out in a mass African-American exodus. His follow-up play reunites him with director Stevie Walker-Webb to tell a different story of survival through transit: a modern riff on the story of Noah's Ark, in which Cooper plays the black sheep of a southern Black family who rises to an unexpected calling. Keith Randolph Smith and Tamika Lawrence costar as his relatives, and three exceptional singers—Tiffany Mann, Sheléa Melody McDonald and Latrice Pace—give voice to original gospel songs by Donald Lawrence.
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.
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 National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, founded in 1915, pays homage to Hannah Senesh: a young woman who escaped Hungary in 1939 only to be murdered there, five years later, while on a courageous rescue mission to save Jews from the Nazis. Written and directed by David Schechter, this solo piece—which NYTF first mounted in 2019—stars Jennifer Apple and includes poems and diaries by Senesh herself (translated by Marta Cohn and Peter Hay) along with music by Steven Lutvak and additional songs by Schechter and Elizabeth Swados.
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.
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 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.
Our critics list the best Broadway shows. NYC is the place to catch these exciting plays, musicals and revivals.
Adventurous theatergoers looking for great plays and musicals can get details, reviews and tickets for Off Broadway shows in New York
Looking for the best Off-Off Broadway shows? Here are the most promising productions in NYC’s smaller venues right now.
Discover Time Out original video
