Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Richard O'Brien's delirious and oddly touch-a-touch-a-touch-a-touching spoof of science-fiction and horror B flicks—a mix of satire, rock & roll and anything-goes queer sensibility— didn't last long in its 1975 Broadway debut, but it spawned a film that became the fairy godmother of all midnight movies and attracted a rabid cult following that continues to this day. Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!) directs the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival, which features a high-wattage and appropriately ecelectic cast. British heartthrob Luke Evans stars as the show's strutting, lingerie-clad "sweet transvestite" antihero: the alien mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, whose idea of Frankenstein's monster is a blond muscle boy. His extended entourage includes Juliette Lewis, Amber Gray, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Josh Rivera and Harvey Guillén; Stephanie Hsu and Andrew Durand are the squares who get stranded in their midst, and the priceless Rachel Dratch serves as narrator.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Sophocles’s Oedipus is a story of blind ambition: the cautionary tale of a proud ancient Greek ruler whose determination to avoid a terrible fate leads him into it headlong. There are no kings in the English playwright-director Robert Icke’s modernized 2018 adaptation of the play, written ”(long) after Sophocles,” as the script jokingly notes. Icke’s Oedipus (Mark Strong) is a star politician instead, with resemblances to several other 2010s leaders. Like Barack Obama, he is an inspirational family man derided by some as a foreigner; like Donald Trump, he’s a populist outsider who promises strong leadership; and like France’s Emmanuel Macron, he shares a scandalous past with his significantly older wife. On the verge of winning power, Oedipus presents himself as the bald, muscular, tough-talking hero-daddy his rudderless country needs: the reformist politician as badass motherfucker. Which in a tragic sense—spoiler alert—he already is.  Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Oedipus is not really about the fall of a great man; rather, it’s about a great man coming to realize that he has already fallen. It is election night, the TV screen blinks with news, and Oedipus is surrounded by his family: his studious daughter Antigone (the lovely and sympathetic Olivia Reis); his twin sons, the sweet Polyneices (James Wilbraham) and the rakish Eteocles (Jordan Scowen); his sturdy old mum, Merope (Anne Reid, tasty as a crust of bread),...

The 2026 season of City Center’s invaluable Encores! concert series begins with a dash of séance fiction: Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's 1964 musical adaptation of Noël Coward's 1941 supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit, in which a man's second marriage is disrupted by the ghost of his first wife. The typically A-list cast includes musical-theater power couple Steven Pasquale and Phillipa Soo as the man and wife, Katrina Lenk as the meddling specter and Andrea Martin as the dotty medium who sets the whole business in motion (as well as Campbell Scott, Jennifer Sánchez and the priceless Rachel Dratch). The concert script has been adapted by Billy Rosenfield; Jessica Stone directs, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell wields the baton.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on,” said William S. Burroughs in a 1970 interview. Viewed from the outside, it might seem that Peter (Pass Over’s Namir Smallwood), an itinerant Army veteran, is out of his mind when he talks about the infinitesimal aphids hiding in his body and transmitting surveillance data to the government. But he knows what he knows. He can see the tiny insects. He can feel the hum of the machines at night. He has been through the sinister experiments; he has learned of the Oosterbeek consortium. And while most people don’t believe him, at least one does: Agnes (the riveting Carrie Coon), a fortysomething divorcée who lives in a seedy motel on the edge of Oklahoma City. Others may dismiss Peter’s knowledge as a disease, but not Agnes. Agnes gets it.  Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Tracy Letts’s engrossing and unsettling 1996 psycho-thriller Bug—which ran Off Broadway in 2004 and has now returned at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre—puts social contagion under the microscope with a mounting sense of dread. The lonely and isolated Agnes is especially vulnerable to Peter’s totalizing suspicion. She has good reason to be afraid: Her violent ex-husband, Jerry (Steve Key), has just been sprung from prison, and has made it clear that intends to get her back. She spends her free time emptying bottles of wine and snorting or freebasing coke with...

The unassuming-looking but keenly incisive playwright Wallace Shawn's on-again, off-again 50-year collaboration with the director André Gregory has yielded, among other things, the fascinatingly unconventional films My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street and the dystopian 2000 masterpiece The Designated Mourner. They reunite for Shawn's newest work: a sharp-elbowed look at a successful writer and the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle on his wife, their son and the writer's longtime mistress—played, respectively, by the very auspicious quartet of Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Hope Davis. (On select Sunday and Monday nights throughout the run, Shawn performs his dark 1991 monologue The Fever.)

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Masquerade wth director Diane Paulus on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly altered to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial 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.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The story of Chess dates back to the 1980s, and so do the efforts to fix it. This overheated Cold War musical, by lyricist Tim Rice and ABBA songsmiths Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, began as a 1984 concept album (which yielded the unlikely radio hit “One Night in Bangkok”). But its original London production was a mess, and its 1988 Broadway incarnation, which framed the songs in a completely new book, closed in under two months. The script has been reworked countless times since then, as different writers keep moving its pieces around, trying to solve the large set of Chess problems. None have cracked it yet, and the show’s latest revisal, with yet another completely new book, inspires little hope that anyone will.  Chess | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “No one’s way of life is threatened by a flop,” sings the chorus in what is now the show’s opening number, and while that sentiment has a ring of wishful thinking here, it does speak to a certain strain of showtune culture. Many musicals that are not initially successful attract passionate fandoms—perhaps all the more passionate for their underdog spirit—and subsequent versions of such shows are sometimes markedly better (like the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along or the charming current production of The Baker’s Wife). That is not the case with Chess. The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh,...

Manhattan Theatre Club proffers the local premiere of writer-director Ngozi Anyanwu's two-person drama, which was commissioned by New Jersey's Two River Theater and premiered there last year. Okieriete Onaodowan (Hamilton) plays a mixed martial arts champion who agrees to train his estranged younger half-sister, played by Aigner Mizzelle (Chicken & Biscuits), as both of them spar with demons from their childhoods.

Like Robert Icke's Oedipus and Simon Stone's Medea, writer-director Alexander Zeldin's contemporary British psychodrama is adapted from an ancient Greek tragedy—in this case, Sophocles's prototypical protest play, Antigone. Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon) has the central role and Tobias Menzies (The Crown) is the unyielding uncle who refuses to budge on his funeral plans for a relative. The Shed, which frequently serves as a warehouse for luxury-brand English imports, presents a limited run of Zeldin's production, which premiered at London's National Theatre in 2024; Lorna Brown and Ruby Stokes join the cast alongside original stars D'Arcy, Menzies, Jerry Killick and Lee Braithwaite. (A different adaptation of Antigone, by Anna Ziegler, is also opening this season.)

Playwright-director Erica Schmidt's dark comedy seems intended to update—and critique—the kind of 1930s drawing-room romp, like Noël Coward's Present Laughter or Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, in which an egocentric male artist plays ringmaster to a theatrical circus but is eventually forgiven his trespasses. Its antihero is Ben Braxton (Hamish Linklater), a self-dramatizing cinematic auteur married to a extraordinarily patient novelist, Mira (Miriam Silverman); they have a teenage daughter (Anna Mirodin), who pouts and plants trees in an effort to counteract his carbon footprint. Their arrangement is threatened by a midlife crisis that leads him to throw himself at a forward young actress named Julie (Madeline Brewer), as his leading man (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and indulgent British producer (Dylan Baker) look on with bemusement. But the play's messages about marriage, art and other big questions are buried in a production that is nearly unbearable to watch. Although Schmidt the writer specifies, in all caps, that Ben "MUST BE CHARMING," Schmidt the director ignores that imperative; as embodied by Linklater, who usually is charming, Ben is an insufferable manchild from beginning to end, and nothing more than that. Spending even a second with him, much less The Disappear's two hours and 15 minutes, is not recommended.—Adam Feldman

As questions of public protest dominate the zeitgeist, the Off Broadway season offers not one but two adaptations of Sophocles's tragic tale of of political resistance in ancient Thebes. One is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other, by the rather similarly named Anna Ziegler, places the action in a less literally modern setting. Tyne Rafaeli (of this spring's Data) directs the world premiere at the Public, which stars Susannah Perkins as Antigone, Tony Shalhoub as Creon and Celia Keenan-Bolger as the Chorus.

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...

Just Sean! Three years after his Tony-winning turn in Good Night, Oscar, Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) returns to the New York stage alone in a solo thriller by David Cale, who specializes in writing one-man shows for himself (We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time) and others (Harry Clarke). Hayes plays a writer on a rural retreat, whose increasing suspicion that he is in danger may—or may not—be a function of cabin fever. The ever-reliable Leigh Silverman (Suffs) directs the world premiere.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Marjorie Prime with playwright Jordan Harrison and director Anne Kaufman on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime is set in the 2060s, and it imagines a world in which artificial intelligence has been modeled into realistic holographic forms: companion robots who look and sound like figures from their owners’ pasts, and thus serve as triggers for—and repositories of—those owners’ fading memories. The octogenarian and increasingly addled Marjorie (June Squibb), for example, can spend time with a reincarnation of her late husband, Walter (Christopher Lowell), as she remembers him in his prime: young, handsome, romantic. This android learns quickly; the question is what to teach him. The more this purified Walter knows about their shared history, the more fully he can inhabit his role as her emotional caregiver. The less he knows, on the other hand, the better he can stick to the stories she wants to hear.  Marjorie Prime | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus “Time will tell if A.I. ever becomes a reality,” wrote Time Out’s David Cote in his review of the play’s 2015 premiere at Playwrights Horizons, “but the human parts of Harrison’s smart, lovely play are built to last.” He was certainly right about the latter: Harrison’s drama is currently on Broadway, in a Second Stage production directed once again by the needle-sharp Anne Kauffman, and if anything it feels even...

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Screen stars Owen Teague and Abbey Lee play recovering alcoholics who stumble into a blurry, co-dependent and co-enabling love affair in this one-act two-hander, which marks the U.S. debut of the rising English playwright Joe White. Rory McGregor directs them through the protracted Days of Wine and Roses daze of their romantic drama. 

Lauren Yee has previously explored historical clashes between Communist deologies and Western culture in The Great Leap (set in Beijing in 1971 and 1989) and Cambodian Rock Band (set in Phnom Penh in 1975 and 2008). Her new dark comedy continues that trend: Set in 1992 in St. Petersburg— née St. Petersburg, renée Petrograd, re-renée Leningrad—the play looks at the upended lives of two surveillance agents (and a pop star with a past) as they wrap their minds around free-market thinking. Teddy Bergman (KPOP) directs the production for Signature Theatre, where Yee is a resident playwright. The super cast of four comprises Adam Chanler-Berat, Steven Boyer, Rebecca Naomi Jones and (in drag as Mother Russia herself) David Turner.

Anna Zavelson, who made a tremendous first impression as Clara in the 2023 Encores! production of The Light in the Piazza, plays an ambitious young corporate financier who unsettles a trio of older businesswomen in a new dark comedy by Alex Lin. Chay Yew (Cambodian Rock Band) directs the world premiere for the Roundabout; in addition to Zavelson, the cast includes Jennifer Ikeda, Jully Lee, Jodi Long and Ben Langhorst. 

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.  

Along with the full-length musicals that they have written together, including Baby and Big, the highly longevous collaboration between composer David Shire and lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. has yielded two much-loved Off Broadway anthologies of stand-alone songs whose emphasis on craftsmanship and character suits them well to cabaret performance: 1977's Starting Here, Starting Now and 1989's Closer Than Ever. In this new revue, which they claim will be their last, they collect more recent material that addresses getting older. Maltby also directs a six-person ensemble of seasoned pros that comprises Big boy Daniel Jenkins, original Closer Than Ever cast member Lynne Wintersteller, Sally Wilfert, Allyson Kaye Daniel and—trivia alert!—the two gifted actor-singers who successively played Enoch Snow in the 1994 revival of Carousel, Eddie Korbich and Darius De Haas.

Before he went Munchkin in the Wicked movies, Ethan Slater demonstrated his major gift for physical theater in Broadway's underrated SpongeBob SquarePants. That should come in handy—handy in white gloves—as he plays the great French mime Marcel Marceau in a biodrama that Slater co-wrote with director Marshall Pailet. The play looks at the young Marceau's work with an underground network that rescued fellow Jews from Nazi-occupied France. The fine cast also includes Max Gordon Moore, Maddie Corman, Tedra Millan, Alex Wyse and Aaron Serotsky. 

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. 

Woody Harrelson headlined the 2023 London revival of David Ireland's 2018 dark comedy about an oafish American actor who has traveled to the U.K. for a stage role but proves utterly ignorant about its subject, Northern Ireland. Fresh from a strint as the title character in Tartuffe, Matthew Broderick stars in the play's NYC premiere at the Irish Rep, which directed by the company Ciarán O’Reilly. Max Baker co-stars as Broderick's flustered English director, and Geraldine Hughes is his increasingly frustrated playwright. 

In Jake Brasch's memory-themed play, Noah Galvin (The Real O'Neals) plays young man struggling to stay sober who finds that his booze-addled brain helps him relate to the dementia of his elderly grandparents. Well-loved stage vets Mary Beth Piel, Chip Zien, Caroline Aaron and Peter Maloney portray the seniors, joined by Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldívar. Shelley Butler directs the NYC premiere for the Atlantic.