New York City Center

The 2026 season of City Center’s invaluable Encores! concert series begins with a dash of séance fiction: Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's 1964 musical adaptation of Noël Coward's 1941 supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit, in which a man's second marriage is disrupted by the ghost of his first wife. The typically A-list cast includes musical-theater power couple Steven Pasquale and Phillipa Soo as the man and wife, Katrina Lenk as the meddling specter and Andrea Martin as the dotty medium who sets the whole business in motion (as well as Campbell Scott, Jennifer Sánchez and the priceless Rachel Dratch). The concert script has been adapted by Billy Rosenfield; Jessica Stone directs, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell wields the baton.

Grey Henson twinkled up a storm as the lovable manchild Buddy in the recent Broadway revival of Elf, and now he's playing another oversize outsider—a sasquatch with a heart as big as his instep—in this new musical comedy by book writers Amber Ruffin and Kevin Sciretta, lyricist Ruffin and composer David Schmoll. Director-choreographer Danny Mefford (Kimberly Akimbo) assembles an ace cast to play small towners who don't know what to make of the big guy: Crystal Lucas-Perry (Ain’t No Mo’), Jason Tam, Jade Jones, Katerina McCrimmon (Funny Girl's Fanny on the national tour) and SNL alum Alex Moffat, who excels at playing jerks.  

The Encores! concert series's 2026 season continues with a very welcome staging of one of best-scored musicals of the 2000s: Michael John LaChiusa's adaptation (co-written with George C. Wolfe) of Joseph Moncure March's poem about a Jazz Age fête that goes terribly out of tune—not to be confused with Andrew Lippa's Off Broadway version of the same poem, which debuted the same year and which Encores! presented in 2015. Boop!'s Jasmine Amy Rogers continues her meteoric rise as Queenie, the party's hostess, and Tina's Adrienne Warren is the frenemy who throws the night into mayhem by bringing a too-attractive date; most of the rest of the cast has not yet been revealed. The Chicago-based director Lili-Anne Brown oversees the mounting mayhem, and Daryl Waters (Pirates!) is the guest conductor.