Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

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

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),...

Proven stage talents Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett play the roles made famous by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, respectively, in a stage version of Iris Rainer Dart's 1985 novel about unlikely longtime friends, which was adapted into the beloved 1988 film weepie. The musical's book is by Dart and Thom Thomas; the lyrics are also by Dart, and the music is by the seminal 1950s pop songwriter Mike Stoller (who is now is his 90s. After more than a decade in development, Beaches lands on Broadway in a production co-directed by Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill's Lonny Price and Matt Cowart.

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...

Having won a Tony Award for Merrily We Roll Along, Daniel Radcliffe returns to make more magic in the Broadway premiere of Duncan Macmillan's interactive dark comedy about a British man who makes lists of the world's good things, at first to ease his mum's depression and later to temper his own. The show ran Off Broadway in 2014 with Jonny Donahoe, who also contributed to the script; this version is co-directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin (Wolf Hall). It's theatrical candy cane: slim and sweet, tempered by sharpness and striped with bright nostalgia.

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  [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  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...

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. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Liberation with playwright Bess Wohl on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Theater, they say, is the fabulous invalid, regaling visitors with tales of past glory as it sinks into its deathbed; conversation, they say, is another dying art. But don’t tell that to Bess Wohl’s Liberation, which has just moved to Broadway, with its exceptional cast intact, after a much-discussed run at the Roundabout earlier this year. A searching and revealing drama about the achievements and limits of 1970s feminism, Liberation weaves different kinds of conversation into a multilayered narrative—and, in doing so, serendipitously restores the very word conversation to its roots. As an adjective or noun, converse denotes opposition or reversal. As a verb, however, it stems from the Latin term conversare, which means “turning together.” In other words: Conversation may involve disagreement—and in Liberation, it often does—but it is not at its core adversarial. It’s literally about sharing a revolution.  Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang The revolution in question here is second-wave feminism, the so-called “women’s lib” movement of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to continue the advances toward sexual equality that had come earlier in the century. The play’s first level of conversation takes place over a period of years in the early 1970s in a smelly high school gym somewhere in the midwest. Lizzie...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman [Related: An in-depth discussion of Ragtime with director Lear deBessonet on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] A little-known fact about the anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman is that she dabbled in theater criticism. In a series of 1914 lectures, collected in book form as The Social Significance of Modern Drama, she assessed such writers as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw through the lens of their revolutionary potential. Modern drama, she opined, “mirrors every phase of life and embraces every strata of society, showing each and all caught in the throes of the tremendous changes going on, and forced either to become part of the process or be left behind.” That is a good description, as it happens, of the 1998 musical Ragtime, which is being revived on Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater in a first-class production directed by Lear deBessonet and anchored by the superb actor-singer Joshua Henry. The show is a vast panorama of American life in the turbulent early years of the 20th century, as illustrated by the intersecting stories of three fictional families—those of a moneyed white businessman, a Jewish immigrant and a successful Black pianist—as well as a clutch of real-life figures from the period, including Goldman herself. It is hard to know what she would make of this grand musical pageant. Perhaps she would admire the production’s epic sweep, stirring score and excellent cast; perhaps she might shudder at the lavish...

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  [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...

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 musical's second Broadway revival for Roundabout Theatre Company; British heartthrob Luke Evans (Beauty and the Beast) stars as the show's strutting, lingerie-clad "sweet transvestite" antihero: the alien mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, whose version of Frankenstein's monster is a blond muscle boy. Supporting casting has not yet been revealed.

Two of the very brightest lights on the marquee of modern stage stars—Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf—star as Willy and Linda Loman in another revival of Arthur Miller's 1949 working-stiff tragedy, the third to hit Broadway in the past 15 years. Director Joe Mantello has worked with both actors to excellent effect in the past, so hopes run high for this production (if not for lowly Willy). The stacked supporting cast includes Christopher Abbott as Biff, Ben "Clock Twink" Ahlers as Happy, Jonathan Cake as Uncle Ben, and K. Todd Friedman and Jake Silbermann as the enviable neighbors. 

This thrilling reconception of Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot's musical not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it to unexpected heights. Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch embrace the musical’s inherent strangeness by absorbing it into queerness: The show’s secret ball for cats is now a ballroom runway competition of the kind recently visited by TV’s Pose and Legendary. This concept—let’s call it Paris Is Purring—is ideal for the musical’s revue-like structure, and the show’s wispy plot is clearer than it has ever been; the fur truly flies. After an already-legendary run at PAC in 2024, the production moves to Broadway with most of its original cats, including André De Shields, Chasity Moore, Sydney James Harcourt, Dudney Joseph Jr., Robert “Silk” Mason, Emma Sofia and ballroom elder Junior LaBeija.  

In Matthew Libby's Silicon Valley thriller, Karan Brar—all grown up since his stints as an immigrant Indian kid on the Disney Channel's Jessie and Bunk'd—plays a computer genius who gets recruited into a potentially sinister data-mining operation. Brandon Flynn, Sophia Lillis and Justin H. Min round out the cast of the play's NYC premiere, which is directed by Tyne Rafaeli (The Coast Starlight). 

Elevator Repair Service is best known for Gatz, its brilliant micro-epic eight-hour dramatization of the entire text of The Great Gatsby. The experimental company now returns to the Public Theater, under the aegis of the festival Under the Radar, with another literary-minded adaptation—this time, heavily condensed—of James Joyce's densely witty and allusive 1922 modernist novel, Ulysses, an odyssey through a single day in 1904 Dublin and into the minds of several of its denizens. ERS's John Collins directs an cast of seven: Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Stephanie Weeks, Kate Benson, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Dee Beasnael and principal Gatz man Scott Shepherd (who is also this production's dramaturg and co-director).

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...

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. 

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 an extended run. This latest showcase is directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway: To attend this show—which premiered last season at the Atlantic Theatre, and has now moved to Broadway—is to enter a world thick with history that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know it already. While you’re there, though, you don’t need to think too hard. Just give yourself over to the sounds that pour out from the stage.  The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. It became a worldwide sensation upon its release, and was the subject of a 1999 documentary film by Wim Wenders. Marco Ramirez’s stage version has a less factual bent. “Some of what follows is true,” says the bandleader Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), who was instrumental in assembling the album’s participants. “Some of it only feels true.”  Buena Vista Social Club | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with...

Two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) reprises his 2024 London performance as Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who spent more than 20 years on Death Row before getting exonerated by DNA evidence, in a biodrama by Lindsey Ferrentino, based on David Sington's 2015 documentary. (Ferrentino's other recent documentary adaptation, The Queen of Versailles, is no longer with us.) The estimable and prolific David Cromer (Bug) directs the NYC production, which marks Brody's Broadway debut as well as that of his co-star, screen star Tessa Thompson (Hedda). 

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...

Simon Rich's All In: Comedy About Love, a collection of humor pieces performed by a rotating cast of big-name comedic actors, was a hit last season. This sequel—which critics were not invited to review—applies the same model to an anthology of leftover Rich stories, this time organized around themes of ambition, directed again by the very busy Alex Timbers. Live songs by the soul-pop band Lawrence constitute a large portion of the running time. The cast through February 20 comprises Mike Birbiglia, Cecily Strong, Wayne Brady and Beck Bennett. They are succeeded through February 15 by Sarah Silverman, Craig Robinson, Heidi Gardner and Jason Mantzoukas; after that, Ray Romano, Jenny Slate, Nicholas Braun and Ashley Park close out the run.