Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

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 Raven SnookJacob Ming-Trent has come to preach salvation in his vivacious memoir How Shakespeare Saved My Life. He leads us, his congregation, through a "testimony" based on the life he has led, drawing guidance from a large tome onstage—not the Bible, but the Bard. The morning after his father abandoned his family, 12-year-old Jacob walks into the wrong class and is tasked by the teacher with delivering the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V aloud, an experience that fills him with power and purpose. That world-Shakespearing discovery sets this troubled youth on a new path to become a classical actor, with several dramatic detours along the way: parental estrangement, homelessness, depression, drugs. How Shakespeare Changed My Life | Photograph: Courtesy HanJie Chow Ming-Trent’s project began as a series of personal anecdotes before being synthesized into its more ambitious current form. How Shakespeare Saved My Life explores major issues: the impact of generational trauma, the effects of racism and sizeism in the theatre industry, the liberation that comes with forgiveness. It also interpolates passages from Shakespeare and connects the Elizabethan master to more recent writers such as Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur and James Baldwi; Ming-Trent even spits some original rhymes, inspired by the beats of his life, with a bit of poetic license (which seems only fair, since Shakespeare took plenty of that with his histories).  How Shakespeare Changed My...

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...

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...

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.  

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  Deep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa—the poor, scrappy Greasers and the rich, mean Socs (short for socialites)—has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage, just as it did in the most recent Broadway revival of West Side Story. The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other. This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers. But it may also be significant that the rumble contains no dialogue or songs. Elsewhere, despite some lovely music and several strong performances, The Outsiders tends to attenuate the characters and situations it draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation. Action, in this show, speaks better than words.  The Outsiders | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Like Hinton’s novel, which she wrote when she was a teenager herself, The Outsiders is narrated by the 14-year-old...

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 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,...

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. 

Roundabout Theatre Company takes charge of Molière's classic 17th-century farce about a serial hypochondriac at the mercy of opportunistic quacks. Bill Irwin, arguably America's greatest clown, plays the title role—which, ironically enough, Molière himself played when he was actually fatally ill—in his own adaptation of the text. The celebrated actor Brandon J. Dirden (Waiting for Godot) makes his Broadway directorial debut at the helm of a production that also stars Brooks Ashmanskas, Dylan Baker, Hiram Delgado, Daniel Croix Henderson, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's Rachel Bloom. 

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...

Can you handle the truth? Film and TV auteur Aaron Sorkin launched his writing career with this 1989 courtroom thriller about a murder trial that implicates two Marines in a wider conspiracy plot. Michael Arden, who has quickly become one of Broadway's preeminent directors of musicals, ventures into straight-play terrority to helm the play's revival for Lincoln Center Theater. The cast includes Bradley Whitford—an alum of Sorkin's The West Wing—and the rising English actor Tom Blyth (Billy the Kid). 

Demimonde demigod Joey Arias and puppet master Basil Twist return to HERE to 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 keeping with the show's combination of 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 tapes—he goes on to ingest a special mushroom (“Lucy in the Sky with...

In this outrageous satirical metamusical by songwriter Andrew Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky, a hyperwoke theater company reimagines the story of Anne Frank as an inspirational Afro-Latin hip-hop tuner that centers postcolonial and genderqueer identities. Following a developmental run at Asylum last season that generated enough buzz to electrocute an elephant, the production now moves to the East Village's Orpheum Theatre for a proper run, still directed by Sam LaFrage. The cast includes Asylum cast members Olivia Bernábe, Alex Lewis, Austen Horne, Rocky Paterra, John Anker Bow, Jaz Zepatos and Walker Stovall, as well as newcomer Amelia Louise Barr. 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus studied theater in college before shifting into improv comedy, which led her to Saturday Night Live and eventually to sitcom superstardom (earning 11 Emmys along the way). She returns to her stage roots, and makes her Broadway debut, in John Benjamin Hickey's revival of Jon Robin Baitz's personal-political drama, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Louis-Dreyfus stars opposite the redoubtable Ed Harris as a successful pair of Republicans whose daughter, played by Lily Rabe, threatens to expose a long-buried family tragedy. Joe Keery and Allison Janney—whose mantel is also overcrowded with Emmys—complete the cast.

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...

A Gestapo officer interrogates the future philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt in Jenny Lyn Bader’s historical drama, set in 1933 Berlin. Ari Laura Kreith directs the New York premiere production, whose run was extended several times last year and now continues at 59E59; the cast comprises Ella Kaille, Drew Hirshfield, Brett Temple and Daniel Adam Cantor.

Frank Sinatra is back, baby—sort of. The original creators and performers of Our Sinatra, Eric Comstock, Christopher Gines and Hilary Kole, reunite for a 25th-anniversary revival of the hit Off-Broadway musical celebration. Rather than doing impressions, the trio revisits Sinatra’s greatest songs across the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, from torch songs and standards to swinging classics, with plenty of wit, romance and old-school glamour. The MAC Award-winning show plays the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, 10 W 64th St. Save up to 30% on performances September 11–November 1 (the show is scheduled to end November 29) at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater. Tickets $49–$69 (regular price $69–$99) TO BUY TICKETS:Click here to buy tickets through OvationTix Subject to availability. Discount only applies to select tickets. Other restrictions may apply. Not applicable to previously purchased tickets. Offer may be discontinued at any time.

What's it all about, you ask? As Alfie could tell you, Going Bacharach is all about the time-tested, beloved songs of composer Burt Bacharach, mostly written with lyricist Hal David. The pop craftsmanship of songs like "Anyone Who Had a Heart" or "I Say a Little Prayer" invites and supports multiple interpretations, and their signature shifts of time signature help them suprise listeners even after all this time. Directed by David Zippel, this encore run of the musical revue finds the cast performing such neostandards as  “That’s What Friends Are For," "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose." Musical director and arranger Adrian Galante leads the five-piece band. Save up to 30% on performances September 9–November 1 (the show is scheduled to end November 29) at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater. Tickets $49–$69 (regular price $69–$99) TWO WAYS TO BUY TICKETS:1. Online: Click here to buy tickets through OvationTix2. At the website: Visit GoingBacharach.com and use code GBTONYPerformance schedule: Wednesdays at 2:30pm, 7pm; Thursdays at 7:30pm; Fridays at 7:30pm; Saturdays at 2pm, 8pm; Sundays at 4pm. Subject to availability. Discount only applies to select tickets. Other restrictions may apply. Not applicable to previously purchased tickets. Offer may be discontinued at any time.

Todrick Hall has kept very busy in the past two decades, rising from chorus boy to early YouTube star, RuPaul's Drag Race judge, recording artist and Broadway leading man. His latest project certainly doesn't lack for ambition: It's an original musical that tells the stories of 12 characters, half of them white and the other half Black, whose lives intersect in the 19th-century American South. Hall not only leads the cast of 20 actors and nine swings—a huge ensemble by Off Broadway standards—but is also the show's writer, composer, director, choreographer and lead producer. After two developmental runs in London, he is ready to unveil his creation in NYC. 

Andrew Durand plays the title character, who is born an old man and ages into a child, in Jethro Compton and Darren Clark's musical adaptation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's whimsical 1922 short story. This British version moves the setting from 19th-century America to 20th-century Cornwall, and its acclaimed 2024 West End production won the Olivier Award for Best Musical last year. Co-author Compton also serves as the show's director and scenic designer; the rest of the London creative team is also on board for its U.S. premiere at the Public Theater, which co-stars Kelsee Kimmel as the love of Button's backward life. 

In this spooky-seasonal variation on the long-running Drunk Shakespeare, five actors gather to perform a vampire-in-New-York story loosely adapted by Lori Wolter Hudson from Bram Stoker's batty gothic thriller. The twist? One of them gets plastered before the performance and it's up to the four remaining cast members to keep the show from going down for the Count. (Audience members can buy alcoholic drinks of their own to get into the spirit.)      

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses. The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman   The Great Gatsby often sounds great, too. Its lead actors, Jeremy Jordan as the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as his dream girl, Daisy Buchanan, have deluxe voices, and the score gives them plenty to sing. Jason Howland’s music dips into period pastiche for the group numbers—there are lots of them, set to caffeinated choreography by Dominique Kelley—but favors Miss Saigon levels of sweeping pop emotionality for the main lovers; the old-fashioned craft of Nathan Tysen’s lyrics sits comfortably, sometimes even cleverly, on the melodies.  In other regards, this Gatsby is less great. Book writer Kait Kerrigan has taken some admirably ambitious swings in adapting material that has defeated many would-be adapters before her. She cuts much of Gatsby’s backstory,...

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...