Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

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 

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.

Lauren Yee has previously explored historical clashes between Communist deologies and Western culture in The Great Leap (set in Beijing in 1971 and 1989) and Cambodian Rock Band (set in Phnom Penh in 1975 and 2008). Her new dark comedy continues that trend: Set in 1992 in St. Petersburg— née St. Petersburg, renée Petrograd, re-renée Leningrad—the play looks at the upended lives of two surveillance agents (and a pop star with a past) as they wrap their minds around free-market thinking. Teddy Bergman (KPOP) directs the production for Signature Theatre, where Yee is a resident playwright. The super cast of four comprises Adam Chanler-Berat, Steven Boyer, Rebecca Naomi Jones and (in drag as Mother Russia herself) David Turner.

Playwrights Horizons launches its Unplugged wing—devoted to minimalist stagings that focus on performance and text—with the world premiere of Jacob Perkins's ensemble drama about a women's recovery group that meets weekly for a period that seems to stretch into forever. Les Waters (Dana H.) directs a wow of an ensemble cast led by NYC stage legends Kathleen Chalfant and Elizabeth Marvel and filled out very nicely indeed by April Matthis, Keilly McQuail, Mallory Portnoy ​​and Maria Elena Ramirez.

The 2026 season of City Center’s invaluable Encores! concert series begins with a dash of séance fiction: Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's 1964 musical adaptation of Noël Coward's 1941 supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit, in which a man's second marriage is disrupted by the ghost of his first wife. The typically A-list cast includes musical-theater power couple Steven Pasquale and Phillipa Soo as the man and wife, Katrina Lenk as the meddling specter and Andrea Martin as the dotty medium who sets the whole business in motion (as well as Campbell Scott, Jennifer Sánchez and the priceless Rachel Dratch). The concert script has been adapted by Billy Rosenfield; Jessica Stone directs, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell wields the baton.

The unassuming-looking but keenly incisive playwright Wallace Shawn's on-again, off-again 50-year collaboration with the director André Gregory has yielded, among other things, the fascinatingly unconventional films My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street and the dystopian 2000 masterpiece The Designated Mourner. They reunite for Shawn's newest work: a sharp-elbowed look at a successful writer and the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle on his wife, their son and the writer's longtime mistress—played, respectively, by the very auspicious quartet of Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Hope Davis. (On select Sunday and Monday nights throughout the run, Shawn performs his dark 1991 monologue The Fever.)

Anna Zavelson, who made a tremendous first impression as Clara in the 2023 Encores! production of The Light in the Piazza, plays an ambitious young corporate financier who unsettles a trio of older businesswomen in a new dark comedy by Alex Lin. Chay Yew (Cambodian Rock Band) directs the world premiere for the Roundabout; in addition to Zavelson, the cast includes Jennifer Ikeda, Jully Lee, Jodi Long and Ben Langhorst. 

Before he went Munchkin in the Wicked movies, Ethan Slater demonstrated his major gift for physical theater in Broadway's underrated SpongeBob SquarePants. That should come in handy—handy in white gloves—as he plays the great French mime Marcel Marceau in a biodrama that Slater co-wrote with director Marshall Pailet. The play looks at the young Marceau's work with an underground network that rescued fellow Jews from Nazi-occupied France. The fine cast also includes Max Gordon Moore, Maddie Corman, Tedra Millan, Alex Wyse and Aaron Serotsky. 

In Jake Brasch's memory-themed play, Noah Galvin (The Real O'Neals) plays young man struggling to stay sober who finds that his booze-addled brain helps him relate to the dementia of his elderly grandparents. Well-loved stage vets Mary Beth Piel, Chip Zien, Caroline Aaron and Peter Maloney portray the seniors, joined by Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldívar. Shelley Butler directs the NYC premiere for the Atlantic.

Off Broadway all-stars Will Brill (Stereophonic) and Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool) portray two major figures from the AIDS crisis— the writer and activist Larry Kramer and the HIV researcher and NIH director Dr. Anthony Fauci—in a theater piece by the always unusual Daniel Fish (Oklahoma!), who delights in making strange things even stranger. The show is based on contentious call-in-show clash between Kramer's rock and Fauci's hard place that was televised on C-SPAN in 1993, as these two frequent sparring partners debated the new Clinton Administration's evolving policies on AIDS research and prevention.  

Writer-director Aya Ogawa taps into the mother lode in a carnivalesque exploration of maternity that combines satirical vignettes, music and dance, bouffon-style physical theater and general chaos. Mamma mia! The production features original songs by Leyna Marika Papach and choreography by Catherine Galasso; the all-mom cast of five consists of Cindy Cheung, Maureen Sebastian, Marina Celander, Robyn Kerr and Liz Wisan.

Search Party's Alia Shawkat plays a lost young woman named Mae whose aging father (Succession's Peter Friedman) is being treated for cancer in Clare Barron's extraordinary play, directed in this rivicaal—as in its 2014 Off Broadway premiere—by the highly adept Anne Kauffman (Marjorie Prime). It’s about the denial of death, but it unfurls mostly in the mode of weird character comedy, with detours into gnarly and frustrated horniness; whether Mae tries to escape into banality or fantasy, time’s one-way arrow keeps piercing through. Caleb Joshua Eberhart, Nadine Malouf, Nina White, Spenser Granese and Misha Brooks complete the promising cast.

Writer-composers Daniel and Patrick Lazour and director Taibi Magar, who gave us the aimbitious Arab Spring musical We Live in Cairo in 2024, reunite for a folk-inflected musical inspired by Susan Sontag's contention, in her influencial 1978 treatise Illness as Metaphor, that "illness is the night side of life." The winsome Brooke Ishibashi stars as a Massachusetts woman who discovers an unwelcome mass in her breast, which kicks off a long journey through cancer treatment. Jonathan Raviv and the implacable Mary Testa, who co-starred with Ishibashi in the show's out-of-town premiere last year, return for its Lincoln Center incarnation, which also features Robin De Jesus and Kris Saint-Louis.

As a character actor, Wallace Shawn has an adorably unthreatening persona. But as a playwright, he bites savagely at the hands that have fed him all his life: the high-minded class of culturati that includes exactly the kind of person who is likely to attend a trenchant Off Broadway play about the disease of capitalism—and pay richly for the privilege. (He’s like a guest at a dinner party who distracts you with talk of literature and dance, then stabs you in the ribs with his salad fork.) On Sunday and Monday nights during the run of his latest play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, he performs his purgatory 1991 monologue The Fever, last seen in NYC in 2021, the tale of an American traveler in a war-torn country who comes to understand the hidden costs of first-world comfort. 

John Kelly, whose career as a performance artist stretches back more than 40 years, plays the outsider artist and graphomaniac Henry Darger—a Chicago menial worker whose enormous trove of strange and sometimes disturbing paintings, illustrations and literary efforts came to light mostly after his 1973 death—in the word premiere of a work conceived and directed by the dance-theater eminence Martha Clarke (The Garden of Earthly Delights). The show's script has been adapted from Darger's copious writings by the veteran playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart).

Experimental theater doesn't get much goofier, peppier and more joyful than this hour-long stunt by the Australian quintet Pony Cam, which is returning for an encore after running at St. Ann's Warehouse for a month in 2024—and running is very much the right word. Four performers on treadmills sweat and strain as they rush to complete a wildly ambitious set of tasks that range from the ordinary (getting dressed, cooking a meal) to the less so (writing a grant proposal, reenacting a core memory). Audience participation is offered enthusiastically by members of a crowd that can't help getting swept up in the moment and the motion. 

Ro Reddick's offbeat comedy with music, set in the days before a 1987 conference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was a standout in last year's edition of the new-play festival Summerworks. Those who missed it then—which is most people, since it ran for only two weeks!—can catch it now in a longer engagement at MCC, co-produced by Clubbed Thumb and Page 73. Alana Raquel Bowers once again plays the central character, a young Black girl in upstate New York, flanked by fellow original cast members Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche, Will Cobbs, Andy Lucien, Lizan Mitchell, Nina Ross and Ellen Winter, along with newbie Crystal Finn. The astute Knud Adams (English) directs.

Abigail and Shaun Bengson sang about their whirlwind marriage in their autobiographical 2017 concert musical Hundred Days. The Bengsons return to New York Theater Workshop nearly a decade later with another collection about connection, focusing this time on recovering from the pain of a lost pregnancy while isolating with their young son in rural Vermont during the pandemic. The show is directed by the inventive Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown).

As questions of public protest dominate the zeitgeist, the Off Broadway season offers not one but two adaptations of Sophocles's tragic tale of of political resistance in ancient Thebes. One is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other, by the rather similarly named Anna Ziegler, places the action in a less literally modern setting. Tyne Rafaeli (of this spring's Data) directs the world premiere at the Public, which stars Susannah Perkins as Antigone, Tony Shalhoub as Creon and Celia Keenan-Bolger as the Chorus.

Along with the full-length musicals that they have written together, including Baby and Big, the highly longevous collaboration between composer David Shire and lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. has yielded two much-loved Off Broadway anthologies of stand-alone songs whose emphasis on craftsmanship and character suits them well to cabaret performance: 1977's Starting Here, Starting Now and 1989's Closer Than Ever. In this new revue, which they claim will be their last, they collect more recent material that addresses getting older. Maltby also directs a six-person ensemble of seasoned pros that comprises Big boy Daniel Jenkins, original Closer Than Ever cast member Lynne Wintersteller, Sally Wilfert, Allyson Kaye Daniel and—trivia alert!—the two gifted actor-singers who successively played Enoch Snow in the 1994 revival of Carousel, Eddie Korbich and Darius De Haas.

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 across the country and, last fall, at Audible Theater's Minetta Lane Theatre; now they bring it back for a longer Off Broadway run. David Mendizábal directs.

Woody Harrelson headlined the 2023 London revival of David Ireland's 2018 dark comedy about an oafish American actor who has traveled to the U.K. for a stage role but proves utterly ignorant about its subject, Northern Ireland. Fresh from a strint as the title character in Tartuffe, Matthew Broderick stars in the play's NYC premiere at the Irish Rep, which directed by the company Ciarán O’Reilly. Max Baker co-stars as Broderick's flustered English director, and Geraldine Hughes is his increasingly frustrated playwright. 

Old secrets and resentments get dug up as four squabbling Korean-American sisters—played by Tina Chilip, Christine Heesun Hwang, Laura Sohn and Shannon Tyo—meet up in Orange County to perform a ritual in honor of their late father. Mei Ann Teo directs the world premiere of Jeena Yi's debut play for Ma-Yi Theater Company, which is currently in residence at the Public.  

Two erstwhile juvenile leads from Disney musicals on Broadway, Adam Jacobs (the original Aladdin!) and Sierra Boggess (the original Little Mermaid!), play the trouble-tossed romantic couple at the heart of this new musical adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père's epic 1846 novel about a swashbuckler who reinvents himself to avenge a terrible betrayal. Musical-theater stalwarts Norm Lewis and Karen Ziemba grace the supporting cast in the show's world premiere, directed by Peter Flynn for that reliable new-musical incubator the York Theatre. The book and lyrics are by Peter Kellogg (Desperate Measures) and the music is by Stephen Weiner.

During the Obama Adminstration, Julissa Reynoso served as a key advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Caribbean and Central Americas issues; she went on to serve as Ambassador to Uruguay and, under Biden, to Spain. Her experience forms the basis of this autobiographical drama, co-written with Michael J. Chepiga, which makes a case for the value of diplomacy, foreign aid and public service. The highly experienced Doug Hughes (Translations) directs the Public Theater's world premiere production. Zabryna Guevara, as Reynoso, leads a cast of eight that also includes Dan Domingues and Marinda Anderson as oither real-life State Department figures and Barbara Walsh as the wife of an American man imprisoned in Cuba. 

The Elizabethan equivalent of a slasher film, Titus Andronicus is the Bard's goriest horror show, in which cycles of violence and revenge leave no body part unhacked: The title character serves his enemy a pie that is stuffed with the flesh of her sons, and that's just the tip of the viceberg. Broadway's favorite baddie, the deeply sonorous Patrick Page (Hadestown), stars in a production directed by Jesse Berger for his often bloody-minded classical company, Red Bull Theater.

The Encores! concert series's 2026 season continues with a very welcome staging of one of best-scored musicals of the 2000s: Michael John LaChiusa's adaptation (co-written with George C. Wolfe) of Joseph Moncure March's poem about a Jazz Age fête that goes terribly out of tune—not to be confused with Andrew Lippa's Off Broadway version of the same poem, which debuted the same year and which Encores! presented in 2015. Boop!'s Jasmine Amy Rogers continues her meteoric rise as Queenie, the party's hostess, and Tina's Adrienne Warren is the frenemy who throws the night into mayhem by bringing a too-attractive date; most of the rest of the cast has not yet been revealed. The Chicago-based director Lili-Anne Brown oversees the mounting mayhem, and Daryl Waters (Pirates!) is the guest conductor.

Russian expat Alexander Molochnikov, who moved to New York in 2022 after speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, directs Eli Rarey's dark comedy—inspired by real events—about a Russian director who moves to New York in 2022 after speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, only to find that America is not quite as welcoming as he'd hoped. Molochnikov is also billed as the creator of the piece, which was part of the Under the Radar festival last year and returns now for as a Public offering.

Last year, ever-inventive theater company Bedlam mounted an immersive staging of this original country jukebox musical built around songs by J.T. Harding, who has written hits for artists including Keith Urban, Kenny Chesney and Uncle Kracker. Directed by Bedlam honcho Eric Tucker, the show was enough of a success that it is reopening this spring in a new midtown location (on the site of the short-lived Playboy Club). Peter Zinn's script centers on a pair of songwriters—played in the last production by Stephen Michael Spencer and Casey Shuler—whose hardscrabble aspirations are obstructed in different ways by the drug epidemic and other challenges.

The New Group's Scott Elliott directs a revival of Elmer Rice’s 1923 gimlet-eyed expressionist classic about the soul rot of conventionality, newly revised by the willfully perverse playwright-provocateur Thomas Bradshaw (Burning). Its antihero, Mr. Zero, is a craven, bigoted, sexually repressed number cruncher who is incapable of creative thought—a willing cog in the same social machinery that is grinding him to paste. The announced cast so far includes Jennifer Tilly, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Only Murders in the Building's Michael Cyril Creighton and And Just Like That… survivor Sarita Choudhury. 

The Bushwick Starr collaborated with HERE and Ma-Yi Theater Company last year to present the world premiere of an unusual work by writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his lovely drama Public Obscenities. Playwrights Horizons is bringing it back this spring for another spin. The show explores his connections to his physicist mother, Bulbul Chakraborty—including through their shared loved of music—as well as the gaps between their scientific and artistic approaches to the world. Chowdury's mother helped create the piece, and performs it alongside him.   

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. 

Second Stage provides a second look at a 2007 one-act by Adam Bock (A Life) that—like his excellent 2006 play The Thugs—begins as a well-detailed workplace comedy but acquires ominous shadings as it creeps to its denouement. The razor-sharp Sarah Benson (Fairview) directs the show, which centers on the quotidian fussing of a gabby gal who works the front desk at an office of a somewhat mysterious operation. Casting for the production has not yet been announced.

Hiran Abeysekera, who starred in Life of Piin the West End and on Broadway, gets mad and then goes mad as the melancholy Dane of in Shakespeare's contemplative revenge tragedy, where a ghost and a prince meet and everyone ends in mincemeat. This 2025 production of London's National Theatre, directed with contemporary cheekiness by Robert Hastie (Operation Mincemeat), now hops the Pond for a multiweek run at BAM. 

Who says you need huge movie stars to do Othello? Eric Tucker's company Bedlam gets back to its minimalist roots with a four-actor version of Shakespeare's fast-paced tragedy of jealousy and misplaced trust, in which a villain preys on the insecurities of a dark-skinned war hero married to a Venetian woman. The cast of the production has not yet been announced. 

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