Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

The two queen Annes of adventurous Off Broadway theater, Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play) and director Anne Kauffman (You Got Older), collaborated memorably on the Civilians' The Ladies way back in 2003. They reunite at MCC Theater for this unsettling look at the conflicts that unfurl when a gay couple in suburban Texas displays a Pride flag, sending one TikTok-addled neighbor into paroxyms of QAnon alarm. Crystal Finn, who buigged out so well in Cold War Choir Practice, goes off the deep end once again, with Jeremy Shamos and Jeff Biehl as her gay foils; Andrew Garman and Izabel Mar complete the primo cast. 

Demimonde demigod Joey Arias and puppet master Basil Twist return to HERE—and to outer space, a jungle garden, the underworld and a 1930s nightclub"—in a  reprise their trippy 2008 pageant, which Time Out called "an eye-popping, delightfully transgressive lysergic fantasia." The production is as fabulously overstuffed as ever, and if Arias is a little creakier in body and in voice, that feels perfectly in tune with the show's combination of the nostalgic and the outré.—Adam Feldman 

Words are wounding in Matthew Freeman's taut two-hander, an entertaining and empathetic examination of generational and philosophical differences that divide the political left—as represented by a savvy liberal sexagenarian and a young, nonbinary rep for the ACLU. Inspired by his own long tenure as a fundraiser, Freeman gives this extended power play an uncomfortable verisimilitude. After a successful downtown run in 2024, the show returns at a different location, still directed by Jessi D. Hill but now starring Marilu Henner and Shannon Purser (who played the unlucky Barb on Stranger Things).—Raven Snook

Bobby Conte (Company) rides out a twists and turns of Victorian friendship, love, work and loss as the titular David Copperfield in this ambitious musical adapation of Charles Dickens's weighty, much-loved crypto-autobiographical 1850 bildungsroman. The book, music and lyrics are all by Jeffrey Scharf, while Gabriel Barre (The Wild Party) handles the direction and choreography. Seventeen other actors help fill out the roster of Dickens's famously vivid side characters, from the headstrong aunt Betsey Trotwood and the eternally optimistic Mr. Micawber to the unctuous yet treacherous Uriah Heep.

Stage pro Linda Purl plays more than a dozen characters in a solo show that draws dfrom playwright Sharon Scott Williams's personal experience with a mother who struggled with pananoid schizophrenia. The memoirist's husband, Anson Williams, best known for playing Potsie of Happy Days, directs the Off Broadway premiere of this unhappy tale; Will Huse provides bluesy live musical support. 

Mfoniso Udofia steps away from the Ufot Family Cycle, her nine-part survey of the Nigerian immigrant experience in America, to blend the mythic and the modern in this portrait of a successful woman whose difficulty conceiving a child is at odds with the plans she has made for herself. Abigail Onwunali, who made a stunning late entrance in last season's revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, plays the central figure, joined by Savannah Commodore as her younger self and Donnetta Lavinia Grays as a magic horsie. Tamilla Woodard directs the world poremiere for Lincoln Center Theater. 

Andrew Durand plays the title character, who is born an old man and ages into a child, in Jethro Compton and Darren Clark's musical adaptation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's whimsical 1922 short story. This British version moves the setting from 19th-century America to 20th-century Cornwall, and its acclaimed 2024 West End production won the Olivier Award for Best Musical last year. Co-author Compton also serves as the show's director and scenic designer; the rest of the London creative team is also on board for its U.S. premiere at the Public Theater, which co-stars Kelsee Kimmel as the love of Button's backward life. 

WP Theater teams up with Signature Theatre Company to present Melis Aker's coming-of-age drama about a London teenager whose attempts to track down her missing brother lead her and her best friend into potentially dangerous Internet waters. Tatiana Pandiani directs the world premiere, and Yasmin Ranz-Lind leads the cast of five.

You have only four chances to see this haunting new work by the virtuosic Chicago collective Manual Cinema (Ada/Ava), which combines shadow puppetry and cinematic techniques to create unforgettable theater experiences. This time, the company imagines a companion piece to Shakespeare's Macbeth in which an orphaned girl bent on revenge receives help from a trio of witches. The show is wordless and accompanied by live music, like a silent film, but you won't miss the verbiage; if Manual Cinema's past works are prologue, you'll be engrossed by the imagery and the visible process through which it is generated. 

Audible Theater's productions are recorded for later audio release, but rarely if ever has that aspect it been so central as in this two-man horror play written and directed by Six co-director Jamie Armitage, featuring sound design by Ben and Max Ringham (who scored double Tony nominations in 2023 for A Doll's House and Prima Facie). Audience members are outfitted with headphones as they take in this tale of a ghost story that seems to spill out into the recording studio where a hired performer is reading it. Lucas Iverson (The Pitt) and Owen Campbell play the actor and engineer, respectively. 

What's it all about, you ask? As Alfie could tell you, Going Bacharach is all about the time-tested, beloved songs of composer Burt Bacharach, mostly written with lyricist Hal David. The pop craftsmanship of songs like "Anyone Who Had a Heart" or "I Say a Little Prayer" invites and supports multiple interpretations, and their signature shifts of time signature help them suprise listeners even after all this time. Directed by David Zippel, this encore run of the musical revue finds the cast performing such neostandards as  “That’s What Friends Are For," "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose." Musical director and arranger Adrian Galante leads the five-piece band.

A man with thwarted artistic ambitions of his own plays mentor to his nephew, a young man who dreams of Broadway stardom, in this multigenerational gay comedy by the gifted Ryan J. Haddad (Dark Disabled Stories). Jonathan Raviv plays guncle to Haddad himself as the theater kid; the cast of seven also includes Michael Cristofer, Beth Malone, Nael Nacer, Artemis Pebdani and the ubiquitous TV actor-comedian Tim Bagley (Somebody Somewhere). Danny Sharron directs the world premiere for the Public Theater, where he and Haddad began developing the play nearly a decade ago as part of the company's Emerging Writer's Group. 

You gotta have heart, as the baseball team sings in Damn Yankees, and this new musical is all about it: Adapted from Maylis de Kerangal's 2014 novel Réparer les vivants, the show centers on the family and medical team of a dead young surfer and their efforts to transplant one of his vital organs to a middle-aged stranger in dire need. The score is by Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath, with additional lyrics by book writer Kait Kerrigan. Christopher Ashley (Come From Away) directs a cast that includes Joaquina Kalukango, Jason Tam, Heidi Blickenstaff and Drew Gehling. 

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 appeals to newcomers as well as to the show's loyal fans. 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. 

Th Rwandan writer-performer Dorcy Rugamba honors the memory of his parents, who were murdered during his country's 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, in a searching work of musical storytelling created with the Senegalese singer-instrumentalist Majnun. The event is presented under the aegis of BAM's 2026 Next Wave festival. 

A 16-person choir of classically trained singers performs a first-person monologue in this unconventional musical by Mona Pirnot (I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan), in which a woman in her 30s grapples with the question of whether or not to have children. The music is by Jack D. Coen, who also colloborated with Pirnot on the lyrics. Sarah Benson (Fairview)—who demonstrated great deftness with avant-garde material during her 15-year leadership of Soho Rep—directs the world premiere for Atlantic Theater Company.

Lauren Yee, who scored with the dark comedy Mother Russia earlier this year, continues her Signature Theatre residency with this metatheatrical and quasi-autobiographical work about a playwright whose father disappears into the history and mystery of San Francisco's Chinatown. Kelly Marie Tran (The Last Jedi) stars as the authorial surrogate and the priceless Francis Jue reprises the role of her dad that he originated in the play's 2017 Chicago premiere, which was also directed by Joshua Kahan Brody. Jon Norman Schneider, Maureen Sebastian and David Shih roujnd out the cast.

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.  

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

New York audiences have watched Sophia Anne Caruso grow up onstage, from the Girls of Lazarus and Blackbird to the creepy teens in Beetlejuice and The Grey House. Now she steps into her leading-lady era in a musical adapted from Moyoco Anno's biographical manga about the racy early years of the French writer Colette (Gigi) during the Belle Époque. The score is by Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening)—who died unexpectedly last month—and the book is by Leah Nanako Winkler. Broadway director-choreographer Rob Ashford (Promises, Promises) steers the premiere production, whose quite large cast also includes Cory Jeacoma, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Andy Bakun and Jenny Powers.

Todrick Hall has kept very busy in the past two decades, rising from chorus boy to early YouTube star, RuPaul's Drag Race judge, recording artist and Broadway leading man. His latest project certainly doesn't lack for ambition: It's an original musical that tells the stories of 12 characters, half of them white and the other half Black, whose lives intersect in the 19th-century American South. Hall not only leads the cast of 20 actors and nine swings—a huge ensemble by Off Broadway standards—but is also the show's writer, composer, director, choreographer and lead producer. After two developmental runs in London, he is ready to unveil his creation in NYC. 

A Gestapo officer interrogates the future philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt in Jenny Lyn Bader’s historical drama, set in 1933 Berlin. Ari Laura Kreith directs the New York premiere production, whose run was extended several times last year and now continues at 59E59; the cast comprises Ella Kaille, Drew Hirshfield, Brett Temple and Daniel Adam Cantor.

The titular heroine of Petite Rouge dances with wolves aplenty in Company XIV’s latest fairy tale–themed neoburlesque spectacle, but don’t worry for her safety: She’s as voracious a predator as any of them. Director-choreographer Austin McCormick and his Brooklyn company give a decadent spin to the adventures of Little Red Riding Hood through a decadent, femme-forward mélange of slinky dance, explosive live singing and suggestive circus acts. This little lady knows her way around a basket.—Adam Feldman

Two snooty and suspiciously close Ivy Leaguers hold a dinner party around a chest that contains the body of a classmate they have murdered in Patrick Hamilton's 1929 thriller, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film and was itself loosely inspired by the infamous case of Leopold and Loeb. This new incarnation, adapted by Gordon Greenberg and directed by Scott Elliott for his New Group, stars Corey Fogelmanis and Cameron Monaghan as the nasty boys, Jason Butler Harner as their Nietzsche-loving former housemaster and James Waterston as the dead man's father. 

Writer-perrformer Milo Kramer's one-act, one-person show uses their experience as a private tutor for NYC tweens who hope to qualify for elite schools as the inspiration for fictionalized musical portraits of ten children in various states of angst—and of the teacher who watches them cope with the pressures of parents and peers. The show generated considerable enthusiasm in 2023, when it briefly ran in rep with two other solo works at Playwrights Horizons; it now returns at the Cherry Lane, where it alternates performances with the extremely different Two Girls.

If you missed Andrew Scott's tour de force solo turn in Vanya last year, you now have another chance to get him alone—if you can afford the tickets, which start at $299 a pop. In the one-act monologue Sea Wall, written for Scott in 2008 by Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), the actor plays a catalog photographer who opens up to the audience about the great sadness he carries with him in the aftermath of a trip to southern France. (Scott reprised the role in London in 2018 and streamed it during the pandemic; Tom Sturridge essayed it beautifully on Broadway in 2019.) The play a marvel of compression and detail; it earns your trust and then gently breaks your heart. Scott's two-week run will be recorded for a future film documenting the production, its creation and its reception.

In this outrageous satirical metamusical by songwriter Andrew Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky, a hyperwoke theater company reimagines the story of Anne Frank as an inspirational Afro-Latin hip-hop tuner that centers postcolonial and genderqueer identities. Following a developmental run at Asylum last season that generated enough buzz to electrocute an elephant, the production now moves to the East Village's Orpheum Theatre for a proper run, still directed by Sam LaFrage. The cast includes Asylum cast members Olivia Bernábe, Alex Lewis, Austen Horne, Rocky Paterra, John Anker Bow, Jaz Zepatos and Walker Stovall, as well as newcomer Amelia Louise Barr. 

Nick Blaemire's indie-pop chamber musical, performed in an intimate living-room setting, concerns an East Village shut-in who is convinced that she has only a few months left to live and the lovestruck delivery guy who challenges her to rejoin the world outside. Will Blum directs for Out of the Box Theatrics; the cast of four comprises Ava Delaney, Mike Millan, Broadway regular Mylinda Hull and TikTok singer-songwriter Oliver Richman.

Two girls. One cup. What could go wrong? Eliya Smith's potentially shocking two-hander, developed with the Goat Exchange and inspired by the viral scat-porn clip that scandalized and titillated the world in 2007, does not try to dramatize the experience of Karla and Latifa, the stars of the Brazilian fetish film Hungry Bitches. Instead, it is drawn verbatim from conversations with men who have watched their scene—which inspired countless reaction videos online—and explores what they remember about it and how much about their own sexuality they are willing to share. Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass play all the roles in what sounds like both an exercise in docutheater and a subversion of it; Claudel also co-directs it with Mitchell Polonsky.

The always compelling Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) returns to the stage in a new play by Nick Payne (Constellations) that premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre last year. Ambrose plays the increasingly unhinged mother of a teenage boy who has disappeared; the supporting cast includes Tom Riley and Hadi Tabbal as her two ex-husbands and Nina Ross and Elizabeth Yeoman as her daughters. Knud Adams (English) directs the American premiere for Manhattan Theatre Club.

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 of these seven other Carle books: 10 Little Rubber Ducks, The Very Lonely Firefly, The Very Busy Spider, Mister Seahorse, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, Dream Snow and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See. (A different combination of stories is performed at each show.)

Actor Steven Pasquale makes his directorial debut at the helm of Classic Stage Company's revival of Clifford Odets's 1935 agitprop classic, in which angry cabdrivers fight for the right to organize. The cast of ten comprises Greg Hildreth, Raffi Barsoumian, Tala Ashe, Austin Durant, Adam Kantor, Henry Stram, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zach McNally and—contributing original music as well under their band name, Yeller Tooth—the married actor-musicians Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins.