Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Theater review by Adam Feldman  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 revised 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, including the roof. To help sustain the atmosphere and the sense of event, audience members must wear black, white or silver...

The British conjurer Jamie Allan (iMagician), a Houdini aficionado who has made his reputation by infusing newfangled technology and emotionally charged storyelling into old-school tricks, appears at New World Stages for a limited run. This latest showcase is directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond.    

The boundary-busting comedian Natalie Palamides loves a high concept: She dressed as an egg for her first solo show, Laid, and donned hirsute dudebro drag for her astonishing follow-up, the toxic-masculinity lampoon Nate (which was filmed for a 2020 Netflix special). In Weer, which was a hit in Edinburgh last year, she takes he-said-she-said comedy to new extremes: Dividing herself down the middle through makeup and costume, she simultaneously plays both parts of the kind of young couple you might find in a 1990s romcom. The cherry on top: This production marks the official reopening of the Cherry Lane Theatre, a century-old Off Broadway landmark that has been closed for renovation since it was purchased by the film studio A24 in 2023. 

As half of the Coen Brothers, Ethan Coen has been one of the cinematic auteurs behind such classics as Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men—but in his spare time, he likes to write short comedies for the stage. Neil Pepe has already directed two collections of them for his Atlantic Theater Company (2008's Almost an Evening and 2011's Happy Hour) and was set to bring in another in 2020, A Play Is a Poem, before Covid interfered. The company has been mum about the contents of this latest trio of playlets, except to say that their subject is love. Aubrey Plaza headlines a promising cast that also includes Nellie McKay, Noah Robbins, Mary Wiseman, CJ Wilson, Dylan Gelula and Atlantic regulars Chris Bauer and Mary McCann.

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More gave up the ghost last fall after 14 years, but fans of that immersive theatrical experience have a new show to tide them over: a smaller-scale work by Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett that invites audience members to move barefoot through a labyrinthine installation inspired by Barry Pain’s 1901 gothic short story “The Moon-Slave," as adapted by the acclaimed British writer Daisy Johnson. Participants wear headphones and are guided through the 50-minute experience at the Shed via narration in the voice of Helena Bonham Carter. 

Eric Tucker and his neoclassical company Bedlam have a knack for modern-minded stagings of period pieces, and their past seasons have offered takes on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Here they turn to Pride and Prejudice, in a cheeky new adaptation by Emily Breeze that shifts the focus away from romance to center the relationships among the 1813 novel's five Bennet sisters. The cast includes Elyse Steingold, Shayvawn Webster, Masha Breeze, Violeta Picayo and Caroline Grogan as the girls, Zuzanna Szadkowski as their mum and Edoardo Benzoni as all of the story's men.

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,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In the 1989 movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter played a pair of dim teenage rockers who traveled through centuries and around the world and even—in the film’s 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey—beyond this mortal coil. So there’s a satisfying snap to the joke of casting them, in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as the long-suffering tramps Estragon and Vladimir, two of the most immobile characters in world drama. Eternally, it seems, they await a mystery man who never appears, and yet they never learn; they are locked in a cycle of forgetting and resetting. “Well, shall we go?” says Reeves’s Estragon. “Yes, let’s go,” replies Winter’s Vladimir. But Beckett’s famous stage direction keeps them in their place: “They do not move.”  This casting is more than just a stunt, though; the nostalgic affection that the audience holds for Reeves and Winter has certain salutary effects. “Together again at last! We have to celebrate this,” says Vladimir at the top of the play; the audience is there for the reunion party, and it arrives with the gift of a prior sense of these two men as friends. When they mention having known each other “a million years ago, in the nineties,” the line hits differently than it did when the play made its Broadway debut in 1956; when they embrace, it has an extra level of sweetness. They have history with each other, and with us.  Waiting for Godot |...

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo Three generations of women navigate intense, complex mother-daughter bonds in Caroline, an alternately quiet and explosive drama by Preston Max Allen. At the center is doting, determined single mom Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz, marvelous), who’s taking her 9-year-old daughter, Caroline (River Lipe-Smith), out of a clearly dangerous domestic situation; Caroline’s broken arm is our clue. Their destination: Maddie’s parents’ home in Illinois. “You have parents?” Caroline asks. “I thought they were dead.” Grandma Rhea (Transparent’s Amy Landecker) welcomes the pair, but with extreme caution. Her last glimpse of Maddie was about 10 years and $70,000 ago—long before Maddie got sober, or became a mom herself. Caroline | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Maddie swallows her pride because she needs her parents’ assistance: Caroline is trans, and day-to-day life has been getting complicated—and dangerous—back home in West Virginia; she needs to find a school, doctors, therapy. “I just need help. I need help, with this. I need you to help me,” Maddie pleads. Rhea’s reaction is surprisingly nonchalant: “Sylvia Defret’s grandson is transgender. He’s in college now, he’s doing very well. We don’t have any sort of problem with this.” One wonderful thing about Allen’s play is that Caroline’s transness isn’t a source of rancor or debate—only of practical questions, mostly from Caroline, who’s in a question-everything phase: “Where am I gonna go to...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Playing a British hooligan who doesn’t know his own strength in the new drama Punch, Will Harrison is a knockout. James Graham’s play is inspired by the real story of Jacob Dunne, as laid out in his 2022 memoir, Right from Wrong: How he fell into drug use and gang culture as a youth; how, while spoiling for a fight with some mates after a cricket match, he took a single jab at a stranger named James that wound up killing the man; and how he found redemption and got his life on a new, better track. It’s a demanding journey, and Harrison meets it every step of the way. Punch | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The actor comes out swinging in a super-energetic opening monologue that situates the teenage Jacob in 2011, rough and unready for the pain he is about to inflict. “A fight’s coming tonight,” he promises on what will prove to be the fatal night. “Gonna be throwing some hands, tonight… And I can’t wait.” Harrison spends much of the first act narrating Jacob’s experience directly to the audience in sequences that double as confessions to his group-therapy circle; this device could easily prove static, but he sustains a sense of urgency throughout. And he’s thoroughly convincing as a Nottingham tough: His accent work is excellent, and his milky features can harden into menace when he’s fronting or soften into blankness when he’s troubled or confused.   Punch | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “I’m just kind of hyper, you know,”...

And Then We Were No More, a new play set in a future that feels a bit too near, includes a scene in which a Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel) attempts to persuade a large jury to spare her client’s life. The Official (Scott Shepherd) in charge protests: The only purpose of this proceeding is to determine the method by which the condemned woman, known as the Inmate (Elizabeth Yeoman), will eventually be put to death. The Lawyer perseveres, questioning the court’s logic and the state’s motives, but when she requests permission to refer to the Inmate by her actual name, she is sharply rebuked for trying to sway the jury with irrelevant emotions like empathy and compassion. As stand-ins for the jury, the audience is likewise barred from knowing not only the convict’s name, but also those of the Lawyer, the Official or anyone else. And Then We Were No More | Photograph: Courtesy Bronwen Sharp Playwright Tim Blake Nelson—who is also a novelist, a filmmaker and one of the Coen brothers’ favorite actors—has synthesized more than a century’s worth of ideas from dystopian fiction into a chilly, talky two hours of nameless people in a soulless system. Directed by Mark Wing-Davey, it wears its influences on its sleeve: Kafka, Orwell, Philip K. Dick (Nelson appeared in the film Minority Report, which was based on one of Dick’s stories) and Caryl Churchill, whose work Wing-Davey has directed on several occasions. Marvel’s Lawyer has grudgingly come to terms with her irrelevance in this world,...

Theater review by Marcus Scott History is never inert, as the Belfast playwright Leo McGann reminds us in The Honey Trap: It metastasizes across decades, reshaping itself through recollection, omission and remorse. In McGann’s unnerving and meticulously crafted political thriller, what begins as a deceptively simple interview between a graduate student and a veteran soldier unfolds into a labyrinthine meditation on the perilous seductions of remembrance.  Emily (Molly Ranson), an Irish-American PhD candidate compiling oral histories of the Troubles, meets Dave (Michael Hayden), a British military veteran formerly stationed in Northern Ireland. With academic equanimity, dictaphone in hand, Emily is intent on recording his story in pursuit of truth and reconciliation—which, she argues, Northern Ireland has never fully embraced, leaving old wounds to fester. Dave, gruff and cagey, counters that only his account is the truth, because the IRA is incapable of it.  The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg Flashback to Belfast, 1979: Young Dave (Daniel Marconi), brimming with mercurial mischief, stumbles through boisterous drinking games with his affable comrade Bobby (Harrison Tipping). Two local women—Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski)—enter the bar, the young men dial up the flirtation and a night of bawdy comedy spirals into catastrophe: Bobby is lured away and murdered, leaving Dave seared with lifelong guilt. More than three decades later,...

Jen Tullock, who plays the unsevered sister on Severance, goes multicharacter onstage in an expressionistic solo show that she co-wrote with Frank Winters. The protagonist is a popular essayist whose critical accounts of the abuse she suffered as a gay child in the Deep South are disputed by an important figure from her past. Director Jared Mezzocchi employs multiple cameras and live looping systems to convey the complexity of the shifting perspectices and narratives. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  But is it art? That is the question, familiar to students of 20th-century aesthetics, that hangs at the center of the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s 1994 comedy of manners and men. Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) has paid a fortune for a large painting, by a celebrated artist named Antrios, that is almost totally white. His old friend Marc (Bobby Cannavale) is outraged by this purchase, which he considers a grave insult to common sense and, by extension, to his own good influence. Their perpetually flustered common pal Yvan (James Corden), caught in the middle, tries in vain to accommodate them both while retaining their love, as though mommy and daddy were getting a divorce.  Even in 1998, when Art debuted on Broadway, this framework was more than a little passé, rehearsing arguments about modern art that probably peaked around 1965. In the play’s current Broadway mounting, directed by Scott Ellis, those discussions seem even quainter—and all but irrelevant to the seismic gaps that have opened up in recent years. This iteration is ostensibly set in the U.S., so the francs of the original have been exchanged for dollars, but the names and the overall sensibility remain quite French (with a twist of British via Christopher Hampton’s translation). If you squint very hard, you may make out faint suggestions of contemporary American resonance—in Marc’s blustering contempt for elite tastes, for example, or Serge’s dismissal of him as a “nostalgia...

Frigid New York gives you the chills in a festival inspired by Mexico's dead-lifting Día de los Muertos. The lineup features spooky variety shows, short horror plays, Edgar Allan Poe works, a traditional ofrenda, psychic mediums, a tiny interactive matchbox theatre, a murder ballad musical, necromancer burlesque, and other tales of the macabre. Among them are The Witching Hour by Andrew Agress, One Man Poe performed by Stephen Smith and Death Owns an Ice Cream Parlor, written by Maeve Aurora Chapman & Liam Corley.  Visit the festival's website for a schedule and a full list of offerings for shows running October 16 through November 2. 

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...

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...

Jordan E. Cooper had a hit right out of the gate at the Public Theatre's 2019 production of his debut play, the uproarious Ain't No Mo', in which he played an airport employee overseeing boarding for the last plane out in a mass African-American exodus. His follow-up play reunites him with director Stevie Walker-Webb to tell a different story of survival through transit: a modern riff on the story of Noah's Ark, in which Cooper plays the black sheep of a southern Black family who rises to an unexpected calling. Keith Randolph Smith and Tamika Lawrence costar as his relatives, and three exceptional singers—Tiffany Mann, Sheléa Melody McDonald and Latrice Pace—give voice to original gospel songs by Donald Lawrence. 

Three couples from different generations navigate ther changing seas of modern love and marriage in an original comedy by Anne Marilyn Lucas. The play debuted at Theater for the New City last year under the title Party?; this new incarnation, directed by Matt Gehring, stars Audrey Heffernan Meyer,  Alan Ceppos, Pamela Shaw, Molly Chiffer, Brian Mason and Atlantic Theater Company pillar Jordan Lage. 

In Michael Shaw Fisher's head-spinning spoof, Emma Hunton (Spring Awakening) stars as an actress who becomes possessed by a demon while starring in a musical adaptation of The Exorcist. After more than a decade in development, this wickedly potty-mouthed rock musical is live in NYC for the entire month of October at The Asylum. Among the guest stars scheduled to pop in during this latest run are Jaime Cepero, Nicci Claspell, Garrett Clayton, Frankie Grande, Lena Hall, Nina West, Marissa Jaret Winokur and Evan Rachel Wood.

An American lobbyist for the oil industry connives to protect his clients from the threat of an international climate-change agreement in Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's historical drama, set in Japan in 1997. Directed by the team of Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin—who also helmed the Joes' The Jungle (as well as Stranger Things: The First Shadow)—the play was a hit in Stratford-on-Avon in 2024 and in the West End earlier this year. New York stage pillar Stephen Kunken reprises his lead performance in Lincoln Center Theater's importation of that production for its U.S. premiere.

Earlier this year, F. Murray Abraham starred in Samuel Beckett's bleakly witty 1958 one-act Krapp's Last Tape at the Irish Rep, playing a bitter man reflecting on his wasted life as he listens to recordings he made 30 years earlier. Now the Irish film and stage star Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) gives another Krapp in a two-week run at the Skirball Center. This iteration, directed by Vicky Featherstone, ran in London earlier this year after prior engagements in Ireland and Australia; the tapes that Krapp listens to onstage were recorded by Rea himself 12 years ago, in anticipation that he would one day play this role.  

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.   Unlike most other jukebox-musical sources, Darin doesn’t come with a long catalogue of signature hits. If you know his work, it’s probably from four songs he released in 1958 and 1959: the novelty soap bubble “Splish Splash,” the doo-wop bop “Dream Lover” and two European cabaret songs translated into English, “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife.”  What he does have is a tragically foreshortened life. “Bobby wanted nothing more than to entertain, wherever he could, however he could, in whatever time he had, which it turns out was very little,” Groff tells us at the top of the show. “He died at 37.” Darin’s bum heart—so weak that doctors thought he wouldn’t survive his teens—is the musical’s countdown clock; it beats like a ticking time bomb.  Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s agile...

[Note: The review is for the 2022 production of Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. The production returns for an encore run at the Signature Theatre in 2025.] Heather Christian's divine Oratorio for Living Things welcomes you to worship. To call this genre-nonconforming show a musical would be reductive: It's a sui generis meditation on time and existence, a classical choral masterwork infused with pop, blues and gospel. A dozen superlative vocalists and six marvelous instrumentalists make sense and aural spectacle out of Christian's compositions. Because the lyrics are dense and can be difficult to parse (some parts are in Latin, sometimes it builds into cacophony), librettos are distributed at the door. You can use them as hymnals to follow along, but engaging fully with Oratorio in all its mysterious glory is a transcendent experience.  Those familiar with Christian's background—she's described her upbringing as "avant-garde Catholicism"—and with her previous shows (I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, Animal Wisdom) know that ritual and religion are threaded throughout her work. Fittingly, director Lee Sunday Evans's simple yet effective staging sometimes evokes a church choir, with the cast swaying and clapping in unison. Aided by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew evocative lighting, scenic designer Kristen Robinson has completely transformed Ars Nova's Greenwich House, placing the audience in tiered seating in the round; the performers pass inches from your face and sing...

In his frequent visits to Joe's Pub, writer-composer-performer Ethan Lipton has sometimes shared clever, unassuming musicals that compressed big subjects like space travel and AI into storytelling cabarets. He goes wider in scale—and moves to one of the Public's larger stages—with this musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's rule-shattering, Pulitzer-winning 1942 allegory The Skin of Our Teeth, which takes a New Jersey family from the Ice Age to the end of the world. (Kander and Ebb tried for years to adapt the same play, without much success.) Lipton's usual director, Leigh Silverman (Suffs), navigates the transhistorical madness with help and ace cast led by Shuler Hensley, Ruthie Ann Miles, Micaela Diamond, Damon Daunno, Amina Faye, Ally Bonino and Andy Grotelueschen.