Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

The Phantom of the Opera ended its 35-year Broadway run in 2023, but you can't keep a masked man down for long. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical—adapted by the composer and Richard Stilgoe from Gaston Leroux's 1910 horror novel, and featuring lyrics mostly by Charles Hart—is already somehow here again, and in a surprising new form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by a serial killer who lives in the basement. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter at staggered 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other roles are played by one to four actors each; to help sustain the atmosphere, audience members must wear black, white or silver cocktail or formal attire—and, hopefully, comfortable shoes. (Masks are provided for those who do not bring their own.) Don't expect the same old Phantom: This version has been heavily streamlined and rearranged to fit its new form, and material about the Phantom's history has been added. Director Diane Paulus (Pippin), who kick-started the immersive-theater trend with 1999's The Donkey Show, oversees an extremely complicated system of simultaneous performances. The cast includes Hugh Panaro, Jeff Kready, Telly Leung, Nik Walker, Kyle Scatliffe, Clay Singer, Kaley Ann Voorhees, Anna Zavelson, Betsy Morgan, Raymond J....

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.    

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. 

Luke Newton (Bridgerton) plays the highly theatrical British fashion designer Alexander McQueen and Broadway vet Emily Skinner plays his mother—whose death preceded his suicide by a week—in a new bioplay by Darrah Cloud. Director Sam Helfrich's staging employs a thousand square feet of LED screens, along with more than a dozen performers, to create an immersive experience at a new performance space in Hudson Yards. Fashion queens may also appreciate a display of archival McQueen designs. 

The internationally acclaimed operatic countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (Akhnaten) plays the titular demented opera diva in a rare revival of a 1983 comic melodrama by Ridiculous Theatrical Company's queer auteur Charles Ludlam. Eric Ting (The Comeuppance) directs this outdoor production, which is the final major offering of Little Island's ambitious 2025 summer season. 

Theatre for a New Audience presents Henrik Ibsen's 1884 social drama, which, like Chekhov's The Seagull, investigates the links among family discord, suicidal young people and symbolic waterfowl. Simon Godwin—of Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, which is coproducing the show—directs the first Off Broadway revival of the show to employ David Eldridge's new adaptation of the script. Leading the cast are Robert Stanton, Alex Hurt, Nick Westrate, Melanie Field, Maaike Laanstra-Corn and David Patrick Kelly. 

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. 

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,...

Bobby Canavale, James Cordon and Neil Patrick Harris play three old friends whose mutual regard is tested when one of them buys a hyperminimalist white painting. Scott Ellis (Pirates!) directs the first Broadway revival of this boulevard comedy of ideas by France's Yasmina Reza (God of Carnage), which won the Tony for Best Play in 1998; the taut English translation is by Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment. Comfort has always been central to this show’s appeal. Mamma Mia! is constructed around nearly two dozen 1970s Europop bops by the Swedish megagroup ABBA, including “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper” and “Take a Chance on Me”: all the ABBA songs you love plus a few others you probably don’t have strong feelings about one way or the other. (Of the 19 tracks on the greatest-hits album ABBA Gold, the only one missing here is “Fernando,” which was sliced from an early draft.) These songs—written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, sometimes with help from Stig Anderson—are easy to swallow and hard to resist, with infectious melodies and lyrics that are, shall we say, direct: Their titles include "Honey, Honey," "Money, Money, Money," "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" and "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do."  Mamma Mia! | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus But while Mamma Mia! originally inspired warm fuzzies for its score, it now...

For 35 years, the comic actor John Leguizamo has played himself—and many colorful side characters to boot—in dynamic solo shows ranging from Mambo Mouth and Spic-O-Rama to Freak, Sexaholix and Latin History for Morons. This time, however, he is surrounding himself with other actors in an old-school ensemble drama about a family waking up from the American Dream. Leguizamo stars as a Latino laundromat owner in 1990s Queens who must own up to old secrets when his mentally unwell son returns to the fold. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs the NYC premiere at the Public; the mostly three-named cast includes Luna Lauren Velez, Rosa Evangelina Arredondo, Sarah Nina Hayon, Bradley James Tejeda, Rebecca Jimenez and, as the wayward son, the director's own son Trey Santiago-Hudson. 

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.

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.

The queer Salvadoran-American comedian Julio Torres has one of the country's most distinctive sensibilities, as he has proved as the auteur and star of Los Espookys, Fantasmas and Problemista. His 2019 HBO special My Favorite Shapes found him musing about physical forms; in this new multimedia stage show, he hews to hues. 

Hollywood sweetheart Tom Hanks plays a time-traveling scientist—whose search for true love keeps bringing him back to the same day at the 1939 World's Fair in Queens—in a new play that Hanks has adapted with James Glossman from his own short stories. Kenny Leon (Our Town) directs the Off Broadway premiere at the Shed; the cast of 11 includes Kelli O'Hara, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michelle Wilson and the ever-excellent Jay O. Sanders.

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...

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...

The pop megastar Sia provides songs for the stage adaptation of Damon Cardasis's 2017 movie musical about a sisyish young man torn between his conservative aunt's church and his secret new community amid the LGBTQ+ ballroom scene. Cardasis is joined as book writer by James Ijames (Fat Ham), and Honey Dijon contributes additional music. Whitney White (Liberation) directs the world premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, with Darrell Grand Moultrie as choreographer; recent Voice semifinalist Bryson Battle and recent Tony winners J. Harrison Ghee (Some Like It Hot) and Joaquina Kalukango (Paradise Square) lead a large cast that also includes B Noel Thomas and Kristolyn Lloyd.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Marisha Wallace play Sally Bowles for the remainder of Cabaret's Broadway run, with Marty Lauter and David Merino alternating as the Emcee.] Great expectations can be a problem when you’re seeing a Broadway show: You don’t always get what you hope for. It’s all too easy to expect great things when the show is a masterpiece like Cabaret: an exhilarating and ultimately chilling depiction of Berlin in the early 1930s that has been made into a classic movie and was revived exquisitely less than a decade ago. The risk of disappointment is even larger when the cast includes many actors you admire—led by Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee of the show’s decadent Kit Kat Club—and when the production arrives, as this one has, on a wave of raves from London. To guard against this problem, I made an active effort to lower my expectations before seeing the latest version of Cabaret. But my lowered expectations failed. They weren’t low enough. Cabaret | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner So it is in the spirit of helpfulness that I offer the following thoughts on expectation management to anyone planning to see the much-hyped and very pricey new Cabaret, which is currently selling out with the highest average ticket price on Broadway. There are things to enjoy in this production, to be sure, but they’re not necessarily the usual things. Don’t expect an emotionally compelling account of Joe Masteroff’s script (based on stories by Christopher Isherwood and...

Onetime Love Boat bartender Ted Lange mixes a historical cocktail from the life stories of three Southern women during the Civil War: Union spies Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Bowser and Confederate first lady Varina Davis. Van Lew is played by writer-director Lange's Love Boat costar Jill Whelan, and their Pacific Princess shipmate Fred Grandy is also in the cast.  

The very talented David Cromer is directing three NYC productions this fall, including the Broadway revival of Bug. And the first of the three to open is a play that, as fate would have it, stars a cast member of Bug's original 2004 production: Amy Landecker, now best known for playing Sarah Pfefferman on TV's Transparent. Landecker is joined by the always compelling Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie) and newcomer River Lipe-Smith in the world premiere of Preston Max Allen's intergenerational drama about a young woman who must turn to her estranged mother for help, while trying to protect her daughter from their dark family history. 

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...

Since the death of Don Rickles in 2017, Jeff Ross has been insult comedy’s top banana. His most famous running gig, throwing barbed one-liners as the host of celebrity roasts at the Friar’s Club and eventually on Comedy Central, has earned him the sobriquet “Roastmaster General.” He has even come to resemble Rickles a bit in recent years; his frame is thick, and a wide mouth dominates his thumblike head. (As a result of alopecia, he is bald as a ping-pong ball except for a scraggly mustache.) But a typical Rickles set found him humorously savaging his audience with brief interludes of sentimentality and an envoi to assure the crowd that it was all in loving fun and he was actually a mensch—whereas Ross, in his Broadway solo show Take a Banana for the Ride, turns that structure inside out. If you’ve come to be insulted, you’ll have to wait: The first 80 minutes are the sweetie part, and only at the end does he walk down the aisles to skewer volunteers on the fly.  Ross avoids the ethnic stereotyping typical of Rickles—and his contemporary Jackie Mason, whose shows were a staple of Broadway from the 1980s through the 2000s—except when it comes to himself. Take a Banana for the Ride is explicitly grounded in Ross’s Jewishness, which he credits in part with his penchant for jokes. (“My real last name is Lipshultz,” he says. “‘That’s an old Hebrew word that means, ‘Hey, you oughta change that.’”) He was a black-belt karate kid, but he quickly learned that humor could also be...

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 Raven Snook Lick it up, baby: The high-school-is-hell musical Heathers is back to take another shot at being popular. In case you are unfamiliar with either the 1989 movie or its 2014 musical adaptation, the story centers on not-so-mean girl Veronica Sawyer (played here by & Juliet's Lorna Courtney), who's doing her best to survive the indignities of 1980s adolescence in Ohio. In a bid for social stature, she falls into the orbit of three beautiful bullies, all of whom are named Heather. But when Veronica meets J.D. (Casey Likes)—a mysterious rebel in a trench coat and mullet—she starts dreaming of freeing Westerburg High School from the Heathers’ well-manicured talons. What she doesn’t know, at least at first, is that J.D. is not just a bad boy, but a truly bad seed. Like the film, which developed a fervid Gen X cult following, Heathers The Musical needed time to catch on. Although its initial Off Broadway run at New World Stages lasted only a few months, it has since become a hit in the U.K., where it has had multiple West End productions; and thanks to a decade of cast recordings and TikToks, it has spawned legions of Gen Z fans, dubbed Corn Nuts after one character's dying words. The musical has even managed to win over some cynical fans of the darker-hued film, including me, who didn’t like it at first pass; I've come to appreciate its lighter, pop earworm–driven take. (Veronica and J.D.'s teenage angst still has a body count, but when the victims...