The best Halloween theater in 2023

Patrick Page's magnificent bass voice has made him the go-to actor for menacing roles in Broadway musicals, including Hadestown, The Lion King, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. In this solo show, he goes from bad to verse in an extended look at the villains of Shakespeare, stepping into the shadows of multiple characters—such as Richard III, Iago and Macbeth—to explore the playwright's evolving understanding of the evil that men do. Classical-theater expert Simon Godwin directs. 

Is NYC a ghost town? In this now-annual show, Tom Meyers and Greg Young, who co-host the longevous podcast The Bowery Boys: New York City History, share spooky tales of the city as it used to be. (You can get a taste of what's in store through this recording of the 2019 edition.)

New Zealand's Catherine Waller plays multiple denizens of a sinister medical-entertainment complex—including a reptilian emcee, a strung-out stripper, a guilt-ridden blind laborer and, most oddly, a child amputee with a penchant for stand-up comedy—in this interactive solo show, which has earned her acclaim in fringe festivals around the world. Quilted together from macabre tropes, it all plays out rather like an interactive haunted house experience, with audience members regularly corraled into conversation with Waller's lineup of lost souls.

Austin McCormick and his neo-Baroque troupe Company XIV (Queen of Hearts) specialize in lavish pageants that combine dance, burlesque and circus arts into a heady speciality cocktail. Their popular current show, Seven Sins, offers a sexy spin on lust, envy, greed and other deadlies; the run concludes with a pair of Halloween-themed evenings, Dance with the Devil, that include costume competitions.

The new Williamsburg performance space Brooklyn Art Haus celebrates the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos with a family-friendly musicale that combines classical music played by pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner with merrily macabre life-sized puppetry by Juanita Cardenas. The program includes works by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, Carlos Chávez, Franz Liszt, Manuel Ponce, Jesús González Rubio, Consuelo Velázquez and Leonard Bernstein. 

Frigid New York gives you the chills in a two-week festival inspired by Mexico's dead-lifting Día de los Muertos, performed at the Kraine Theater and Under St. Marks. The lineup includes more than a dozen shows on themes of mortality and the afterlife, each performed only once or twice; among them are Eve Blackwater's folk-noir survey Brokeneck Girls: The Murder Ballad Musical!, Richard Width's Dracula take Mina, Alise Morales's journey of Harry Potter disillusionment The Girl Who Lived, Miguel Loyola mythic epic Odyssey and the Flowers of the Sun and Rising Sun Performance Company's one-act collection Here, Between and Beyond. Visit the festival's website for a full list of offerings. 

Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen's spoof of Bram Stoker's bloodcurdling novel replaces horror with humor, centering on a pumped-up, preening, pansexual vampire (James Daly) who is suffering through an eternal-life crisis. Five crackerjack actors sink their comic teeth into the puns, punch lines, pop-culture gags, malapropisms, slapstick and quick changes. If you've been craving a break from the frights of real life, this campy, vampy romp is a scream.

Get down with the Count at Never More Immersive's version of Bram Stoker's vampire story, rendered in an atmospheric combination of theater, dance and masquerade. Audience members wander at will through multiple rooms on two floors of the giant midtown dance club Musica, sipping cocktails in a gothic fugue written and directed by Jonathan Albert and Nicole Coady and choreographed by Arianne Meneses. Black-tie attire is required on Friday and Saturday nights; basic black will do at other performances, though Victorian finery is encouraged. (Doors open half an hour before start time.)

Thy favorite scary movie, oh, what is't? Brooklyn’s Random Access Theatre’s boozy-geeky Drunk Texts series muddles classical texts—or modern ones reimagined as classical—into a cocktail of drinking games, improv and audience interaction, in which the audiences chooses which thespians take shots. Now the gang returns for Halloween with Thou Wilt Scream, Robert Price's mock-Shakespearean gloss on horror flicks.

Charlotte Booker talks up a grey streak in this intimate portrait of Bride of Frankenstein star Elsa Lanchester, which recreates the nightclub act that the British character actor and two-time Oscar nominee performed in her later years. Expect a sprinkling of saucy ditties along with behind-the-scenes tales of her life on and off screen.