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Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford and the company of the 2023 Broadway production of SWEENEY TODD
Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan ZimmermanSweeney Todd

The best Halloween theater in 2023

Travel to dark places for Halloween in 2023 with these spooky shows.

Adam Feldman
Written by
Adam Feldman
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Halloween is always the most theatrical of American holidays. Every year, people of all ages put on costumes and makeup and bring the world of make-believe to the streets, and the theater world is happy to join the fun with a range of Halloween shows to celebrate the season. We’ve scared up this list of horror-themed theater events—including plays, musicals, concerts, festivals and even a couple of Broadway shows—to help you get in the spooky spirit. Here they are, in alphabetical order.

RECOMMENDED: The Scariest Haunted Houses in NYC

  • Theater
  • Shakespeare

Patrick Page's magnificent bass voice has made him the go-to actor for menacing roles in Broadway musicals, including HadestownThe 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. 

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  • Theater
  • Drama

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.

  • Dance
  • Contemporary and experimental

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.

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  • Theater
  • Puppet shows

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. 

  • Theater

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 LivedMiguel 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. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Comedy
  • Recommended

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.

  • Theater
  • Interactive

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.)

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  • Theater
  • Comedy

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.

  • Theater
  • Musicals

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.

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