Free outdoor theater this summer in New York

This summer offers not one, not two, but three different free alfresco NYC productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It, in which love-struck nobles romp around the Forest of Arden. This more, more, more situation raises that timeless disco question: How do you like it? The Drilling Company's version is the 31st season of the Lower East Side institution Shakespeare in the Parking Lot; directed and designed by the troupe's own Hamilton Clancy, it envisions Arden as a modern bohemian neighborhood. (Seats are provided for the first audience members to claim them, but spectators can also bring their own.) 

Hudson Classical Theater Company wraps up its summer season with a show from outside the classical-theater box: a stage version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1903 short story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," in which the master detective Sherlock Holmes is contacted by an aristocrat who is newly married to an American woman with a shady past. HCTC's Susane Lee adapts the text and Nicholas Martin-Smith directs.

Following Romeo & Juliet, the second offering of Shakespeare in the Park's 2026 summer season offers somewhat happier hopes for lovers. A sweeping story of jealousy, love, repentance, angry bears and magic statuary, it begins in deep suffering but ends, like winter itself, with the prospect of healing and rebirth. Raúl Esparza plays the paranoid Leontes and Lily Rabe is his unjustly accused wife, Hermione, supported by Chuck Cooper, Teagle F. Bougere, Steven Skybell and Isabela Ferrer. Helming the production is that old master Daniel Sullivan—who, at 86, has directed eleven previous Shakespeare in the Park, along with such Broadway favorites as The Heidi Chronicles, Good People and Proof. Tickets are free, of course; see our complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park tickets for details.

Hip to Hip Theatre Company swivels from park to park in Queens, with outings to Jersey City and Southampton, to perform its 20th annual diptych of Shakespeare plays in rep. This summer's offerings are the Scottish tragedy Macbeth, in which a nobleman and his wife descend into a nightmare of disquiet after planning their monarch's murder, and popular comedy As You Like It, in which which an inventive young woman disguises herself as a boy to win her man. Consult Hip to Hip's website to see which production plays when and where.

After years as the first outdoor classical-theater production of the summer, Molière in the Park switches positions and becomes the season's final offering. This year's selection—performed as always in Brooklyn's Prospect Parrk—is the great French playwright's philosophically complex 1665 tragicomedy about a serial lothario, which was censored in its day and is rarely performed in ours. Keshav Moodliar takes on the title role, with Alana Raquel Bowers as his servant Sganarelle; Kaliswa Brewster, Kalyne Coleman and Daniel Pearce play all of other characters. Lucie Tiberghien directs a translation by Stephen Wadsworth; Johnathan Moore provides an original cello score. The show is free but reservations are strongly suggested.