Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

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. 

Classic dance numbers from Broadway history return to life in a revue conceived by American Dance Machine's Nikki Feirt Atkins, who co-directs the show with Randy Skinner (who also contributes text and additional choreography). The lineup includes showstopppers from West Side Story, A Chorus Line, Pippin, Singin’ in the Rain, White Christmas, Contact, Gypsy, An American in Paris, The Act, Bubbling Brown Sugar and more, by dance makers including Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Susan Stroman, Stanley Donen, Christopher Wheeldon and Gene Kelly.

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. 

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).

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. 

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

As controversy continues to rage about immigration from the U.S.'s southern border, this ambitious musical two-hander 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.

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. 

Wolf whistles are bound to ensue as Austin McCormick and his risqué neobaroque dance-burlesque troupe Company XIV present their latest dazzling spectacle: a lavish erotic reimagining of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. Along with the dancers, you can expect circus performers, singers and titillating costumes. Leave the kids at home.

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. Katie Finneran, Will Pullen, Mallori Johnson and Nael Nacer constitute the cast.

Writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury costars with his mother, physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, in a series of scenarios—from quietly poetic to melodramatic—in which he confronts his fears about her death through a language that both of them understand: experiments. Rheology articulates the existential conflict between parent and child: finite time, infinite love. The play succeeds because of its deep embrace of death’s antithesis, liveness, both in the introductory lecture and the science-inspired explorations that follow.—Billy McEntee

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. 

New York stage treasure Quincy Tyler Bernstine stars as a Midwestern woman navigating the ruins of her life in Bubba Weiler's debut play, which returns now for an encore run at Seaview Studio after a hit engagement at the Irondale Center last year. 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—for this run—the distinctive Matthew Maher.