Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Maya Rudolph plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through June 20, joined by Phillip James Brannon, Cheyenne Jackson and original cast members Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht.] 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, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy...

Theater review by Sandy MacDonald Rating: Not recommended The brutish ocean-liner stoker called Yank, who propels Eugene O’Neill’s expressionistic 1922 play The Hairy Ape, is basically a two-note role: He’s aggressively boastful, then aggrieved. Jon Beavers hits both extremes with admirable vigor. Impressively built, albeit not hirsute, he morphs easily from braggadocious grunt to humiliated would-be social activist. Yank may rant at great length about what a powerhouse he is—“I’m parta de engines!”—but at length he’s forced to see his status as that of a born patsy: the unschooled, unskilled flotsam of a tiered society that views him only as cheap labor. The Hairy Ape | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg All it takes to trigger Yank’s rage is a passing glimpse of an elegant phantasm descended from the privileged promenade deck. Rebel debutante Mildred (Elizabeth Teeter) arranges a slumming expedition to the boiler room, scandalizing her snappish chaperone (Joanna Glushak). The dialogue is actually quite shocking—this proto-flapper has a mixed agenda and attitude to spare—so we’re not adequately set up for Mildred's reaction upon penetrating the lower depths, where the crew shovels coal in choreographed lockstep like pistons in a machine. “Oh, the filthy beast!” she whimpers before swooning. The Hairy Ape | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg Vowing revenge on the ruling class in general and this entitled princess in particular, Yank joins a socialist shipmate (Ariyan...

Theater review by Billy McEnteeRating: Not recommendedTicketing: Buy tickets here Looking at the living room onstage in The Unbelievers, you may sense that it feels off. The fireplace, wooden table and upright piano of Paul Steinberg’s set evoke a home, but there are no photographs or knickknacks, no centerpiece on the table: Something or someone seems missing. And that turns out to be true in Nick Payne’s drama, which arrives at Manhattan Theatre Club after a successful run in London. A young boy has disappeared, leaving his family desperate for answers—especially his mother, Miriam, who is played by an unflagging Lauren Ambrose. Her laserlike focus on finding the truth cuts through an otherwise stilted and overwrought play.  The Unbelievers | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Ambrose is no stranger to stories about mourning; she spent six years on HBO’s funeral-home drama Six Feet Under, which unearthed the beautiful everyday in facing the reality of death. But Miriam’s grief is open-ended, and after seven years of fruitless hoping, everyday life becomes intolerable—especially when everyone around her seems to be moving on. Miriam’s husband (Tom Riley) takes a new partner; her eldest child (Nina Ross) begins a music career, and her youngest (Elizabeth Yeoman) gets pregnant with her new boyfriend (Jack DiFalco). Miriam says she feels like “a pool,” and Ambrose asks us to meet her in the deep end. The Unbelievers | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy To the anguished...

Magic shows have been popping up like mushrooms in New York City. They tend to fall into two categories: close-up magic shows for very small audiences and, more rarely, full Broadway productions like The Illusionists or Darren Brown’s Secret. The British conjurer Jamie Allan stakes out an appealing middle ground between those scales in Amaze, his long-running show at New World Stages (directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond). The venue is big enough to accommodate a few large-scale effects, including levitation and a motorcycle, but sufficiently intimate for Allan’s personal narrative, which centers on his discovery of magic as a child.  Allan has built much of his reputation on incorporating new technology into his acts, as he sometimes does here—a particularly lovely sequence employs animation on multiple iPads—but it’s the show’s many retro 1980s references and props that provide much of its nostalgic charm: a Rubik’s Cube, a Fisher Price magic set, The Neverending Story. As one might expect from a two-act magic show that is more than two hours long, some of the routines are more impressive than others, but the skill level is consistently high and you get a lot of dazzlement for your dollar. And although the story Allan tells is tinged with loss, it is lifted by the obvious joy he takes in expertly plying his craft.

Theater review by Raven Snook  [Note: This is a review of the 2024 production of The Ask at the Wild Project. The show returns in 2026 for a run at Theater 555, directed again by Jessi D. Hill but now starring Marilu Henner and Shannon Purser (who played the unlucky Barb on Stranger Things).] Words are wounding in Matthew Freeman's taut two-hander The Ask, an entertaining and empathetic examination of generational and philosophical differences that divide the political left. Savvy sexagenarian Greta (a flawless Betsy Aidem) welcomes Tanner (Colleen Litchfield)—a young, nonbinary representative from the American Civil Liberties Union—to her well-appointed Upper West Side study. A longtime liberal and high-level donor, Greta is polite but peeved: Her old ACLU contact has departed without warning, and she is wary of what she sees as the organization’s mission creep beyond civil liberties. Tanner knows they're there to listen, even when the conversation stings. But they also try to gently explain the group’s expanded priorities as they steel themself to make a big-money request. Inspired by his own long tenure as an ACLU fundraiser, Freeman gives this extended power play an uncomfortable verisimilitude. Aidem and Litchfield, who costarred in Leopoldstadt on Broadway, mine the unease for laughs but also understanding. As you listen to their arguments and their anguish—when Tanner uses inclusive gender language, Greta feels erased—you lament how quickly common ground can be...

Mixed-up men find glorious release in the backroom of a rural bar in Max Wolf Friedlich's strange and suggestive upstate New York fairy tale, directed by Michael Herwitz. Bubba Weiler—who has recently won acclaim as the playwright of Well, I'll Let You Go and The Saviors—returns to acting as the bartender of a hole in the wall with a possibly holy secret; Tina Benko and Jack Mulhern play local patrons, and Grantham Coleman is a city slicker with big plans for the place.

What does A stand for? That question hangs over the protagonist—referred to only as A in the script—of Marin Ireland's deeply personal play Pre-Existing Condition. Her ex-boyfriend hit her so hard that she ended up on the floor, and although she didn't seek medical attention, the incident left her with emotional and psychological scars and split her life into before and after. Everyone wants to know what A wants now: Money? Justice? Revenge on her abuser? The problem is, she’s not sure she knows. If A’s intense, halting, often uncomfortable exchanges with the people in her life—a dismissive lawyer, her no-nonsense therapist, her support-group facilitators, her dates, her friends, her self-involved mother—sound unsettlingly authentic, that's because Ireland, a highly acclaimed stage actor, is writing from firsthand experience. But Pre-Existing Condition isn’t just a memoir à clef. Delicately directed by Maria Dizzia, the play offers a deep dive into the messy aftermath of domestic violence. Unlike many stories about abuse, it’s not about escaping or standing up; it's about navigating an inadequate system while trying to process what happened. (The difficulty of doing so is reflected by the fact that Ireland has been working on this play for 14 years.) Pre-Existing Condition | Photograph: Courtesy Jessica Kourkounis In a poignant illustration of how abuse can happen to anyone—A’s group leader says that one in three women is battered in her lifetime—six different actors are...

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...

Lynn Rosen's new play is not intended to be scary, but it is set near Halloween with a serial strangler on the loose, so we think it should count. The formidable Danielle Skraastad (Hurricane Diane) plays a New England waitress who bonds with a loyal customer in this intimate one-act comedy, which also features John Alejandro Jeffords and Annie Henk. The director is Julie Kramer, and since the actor-illusionist Steve Cuiffo is credited as Magic Consultant, you can anticipate more than a few tricks to go with the treats.

Actor Steven Pasquale makes his directorial debut at the helm of Classic Stage Company's revival of Clifford Odets's 1935 agitprop classic, in which angry cabdrivers fight for the right to organize. The cast of ten comprises Greg Hildreth, Raffi Barsoumian, Tala Ashe, Austin Durant, Adam Kantor, Henry Stram, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zach McNally and—contributing original music as well under their band name, Yeller Tooth—the married actor-musicians Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins.

Writer-performer Milo Kramer's one-act, one-person show uses their experience as a private tutor for NYC tweens who hope to qualify for elite schools as the inspiration for fictionalized musical portraits of ten children in various states of angst—and of the teacher who watches them cope with the pressures of parents and peers. The show generated considerable enthusiasm in 2023, when it briefly ran in rep with two other solo works at Playwrights Horizons; it now returns at the Cherry Lane, where it alternates performances with the extremely different Two Girls.

Two girls. One cup. What could go wrong? Eliya Smith's potentially shocking two-hander, developed with the Goat Exchange and inspired by the viral scat-porn clip that scandalized and titillated the world in 2007, does not try to dramatize the experience of Karla and Latifa, the stars of the Brazilian fetish film Hungry Bitches. Instead, it is drawn verbatim from conversations with men who have watched their scene—which inspired countless reaction videos online—and explores what they remember about it and how much about their own sexuality they are willing to share. Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass play all the roles in what sounds like both an exercise in docutheater and a subversion of it; Claudel also co-directs it with Mitchell Polonsky.

Demimonde demigod Joey Arias and puppet master Basil Twist return to HERE—and to outer space, a jungle garden, the underworld and a 1930s nightclub"—in a reprise their trippy 2008 pageant, originally reviewed below. The production is as fabulously overstuffed as ever, and if Arias is a little creakier in body and in voice, that feels perfectly in tune with the show's combination of the nostalgic and the outré.—Adam Feldman  Theater review by Elisabeth Vincentelli In 1950s science-fiction paperbacks, a resourceful hero could save the galaxy by improvising a super-potent weapon with a tin can, an elastic band and an old battery. In their new collaboration Arias with a Twist, performer Joey Arias and puppeteer Basil Twist essentially pull off the same trick: They’ve hatched a completely delirious revue halfway between Busby Berkeley and Pee-wee’s Playhouse out of felt and strings, a handful of songs, and a lot of loose screws. Arias with a Twist | Photograph: Courtesy Richard Termine The narrative, if you can call it that, is as pulpy as one of the aforementioned books, starting with Arias’s grand entrance: Tightly encased in a Thierry Mugler fetish corset and strapped onto a lazy Susan–cum–gynecological table, the chanteuse belts out Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” while being probed by aliens. The show only gets more inventively nutty from there. After waking up in the jungle and crooning “Jungle of Eden,” penned by Propellerheads’ Alex Gifford —the songs are all backed by...

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...

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,...

Miriam Silverman, who won a 2023 Tony for stealing The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, stars as a mad botanist bent on breaking the laws of nature—and of social convention—in a rare revival of Susan Glaspell's genre-blending 1921 play, an early example of expressionism in American drama that finds three of the men in the scientist's life converging on her greenhouse during a blizzard. Jessie Austrian directs a cast that includes her fellow Fiasco Theater mainstays Noah Brody, Paul L. Coffey, Devin E. Haqq, Paco Tolson and Emily Young as well as newcomer Amara Leonard.

The seasoned trans actress Rachel Crowl (Prince Faggot) contains multitudes in the U.S. premiere of El cos més bonic que s'haurà trobat mai en aquest lloc, a solo work by Josep Maria Miró that won Spain's 2022 National Prize for Dramatic Literature. Crowl plays many different inhabitants of a small town reeling from the murder of a popular local man. Mei Ann Teo (Jesa) directs the production for PlayCo, which has been working on it for years with Miró and Sharon Feldman, who has translated it from the original Catalan.  

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, the comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II, has arrived to storm the shores of Broadway with plenty of backup. Critics in the U.K. have loved it; it has been billed as “the best-reviewed show in West End history”—Time Out London’s own Andrzej Lukowski called it “a glorious spoof”—and it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The show is the debut offering of a young comedy-theater troupe called SpitLip, which has been performing variations of it since 2019, and local critics were clearly rooting for it. (“It’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company,” wrote Lukowski. “This is very much their triumph.”) Perhaps, in riding this wave of praise to Broadway, the production has lost some of what made the operation itself an unlikely success in 1943: the element of surprise.  Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Like Six, the show is an irreverent look at English history, devised by university chums, that worked its way up from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End; like Dead Outlaw, which will also open on Broadway this season, it features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of...

This thriller by Danny Robins, the creator of the hit BBC podcast The Battersea Poltergeist, has been a sensation in the West End, where it has had seven engagements since its 2021 debut. It makes its Off Broadway debut just in time for the Halloween season in a production co-directed by Matthew Dunster (who helmed the London version) and NYC's own Gabriel Vega Weissman. Jasmine Cephas Jones stars as a woman who is convinced that her new house is haunted; Finn Jones plays her skeptical husband, and Anna Camp and Martin Marquez are the friends who come over to dinner and whom Jenny convinces to stay up until the wee hours to get to the bottom of what's going on. (Pitch Perfect alum Camp is reprising the role she played in the show's 2022 U.S. premiere in Los Angeles.)

For the lost and sexually frustrated, the manosphere can be seductive. Else Went's thrillingly disorienting new play forces us to grapple with why so many men end up there, and to humanize some of the detached souls whose hatred of women is surpassed only by palpable self-loathing; this nearly three-hour deep dive into incel subculture surfaces into something unexpectedly touching. Director Emma Rosa Went elicits fearless performances from a cast of five led by a chilling charismatic Zachary W. Desmond as a would-be leader of men and the wondrous Christopher Dylan White as an effeminate teenage agoraphobe who works as a camgirl. Read the full review here.

Two snooty and suspiciously close Ivy Leaguers hold a dinner party around a chest that contains the body of a classmate they have murdered in Patrick Hamilton's 1929 thriller, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film and was itself loosely inspired by the infamous case of Leopold and Loeb. This new incarnation, adapted by Gordon Greenberg and directed by Scott Elliott for his New Group, stars Corey Fogelmanis and Cameron Monaghan as the nasty boys, Jason Butler Harner as their Nietzsche-loving professor and James Waterston as the dead man's father. 

Looking to class up your Halloween season? Head to the Met for a rare hearing of Luigi Cherubini's 1797 opera, based on one of Greek mythology's greatest horror stories. The fiery Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva stars as the vengeful sorceress Medea, the mother of all infanticides, and tenor Michael Spyres is her treacherous husband, Giasone. (Chiara Isotton sings the title role on November 21.) This 2022 production, helmed by director and set designer David McVicar, marked Medea's extremely belated Met debut; this is its first return. As before, the production uses Carlo Zangarini's 1909 Italian translation of François-Benoît Hoffman's original French libretto.

Brooklyn magician Greg Dubin plies his tricks for just 20 people at a time in an cozy evening of close-up magic delivered in a room that is hidden, speakeasy-style, behind a faux vintage-timepiece store. The space was once part of P.J. Hanley’s—billed as Brooklyn's oldest bar before it closed in 2013—so Dubin has christened it the Hanley Close-Up Magic Theater; a full bar and specialty cocktails are available courtesy of the complex's more prominent current occupant, Luana’s Tavern. 

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging—that bring this old story to quivering life. In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) falls for Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a busboy with an otherworldly high-tenor voice who is working, like Roger in Rent, toward writing one perfect song. But dreams don’t pay the bills, so the desperate Eurydice—taunted by the Fates in three-part jazz harmony—opts to sell her soul to the underworld overlord Hades (Patrick Page, intoning jaded come-ons in his unique sub-sepulchral growl, like a malevolent Leonard Cohen). Soon she is forced, by contract, into the ranks of the leather-clad grunts of Hades’s filthy factory city; if not actually dead, she is “dead to the world anyway.” This Hades is a drawling capitalist patriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them...