Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Five college girls face a big test of their friendship when they stay up together to polish off their final coursework in Natalie Margolin's new play, directed by Jaki Bradley. Expect, if not outright slumber-party games, at least some Adderall-driven version of Truth or Dare. Tony nominees Julia Lester (Into the Woods) and Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) share the stage with Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu and Alyah Chanelle Scott in the world premiere.

Patrick Bringley performs a stage adaptation of his bestselling 2020 memoir, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, in which he recounts the personal discoveries he made while working as security guard at the Met after quitting his job at the New Yorker in the wake of his brother's death. England's Dominic Dromgoole, who ran the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London for a decade, directs the Off Broadway premiere.

Jonathan Silverstein directs the world premiere of Adam Kwon's chamber musical, the first tuner to be commisioned by Silverstein's Keen Company. Fresh from his fast-singing turn as the panicky gay groom in the national tour of Company, Matt Rodin stars as a small-town high school teacher in the 1990s whose efforts to help an ambitious theater kid run afoul of the local church. The rest of the cast comprises Jon-Michael Reese, Eliza Pagelle and the versatile Broadway leading lady Elizabeth Stanley (Jagged Little Pill).

New York's Irish Rep and Dublin's Fishamble: The New Play Company join hands across the water to present a solo work written and performed by Kwaku Fortune. The show explores the experience of darkness both on the outside (as a mixed-race person in Ireland) and the inside (dealing with feeling whose expression is discouraged). Nicola Murphy Dubey directs the world premiere.  

Designers Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek transform the Vineyard Theatre's proscenium playing space into an elevated, in-the-round layout for the world premiere of writer-director Nazareth Hassan's play, which includes live skateboarding and original music by Free Fool. Essence Lotus and Oghenero Gbajge play two friends bonding at a skateboard park as they try to find the right name for their rap group. Felicia Curry completes the cast of three in this coproduction of the Vineyard and National Black Theatre (in association with the New Group).

Broadway favorite Norm Lewis (Porgy and Bess) stars as a 1950s barber who gets caught up in the small-time crookery of his dubious sons in Lonnie Elder III's drama, a critical and popular success in 1969. The seasoned Clinton Turner Davis directs this rare New York revival, the play's first in 40 years; James Foster Jr., Jeremiah Packer, Calvin M. Thompson and Bryce Michael Wood complete the main cast.

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s path-breaking 1970 musical, about love and marriage and whether the twain can meet, is the show that made Sondheim's reputation as the voice of new American musical theater. It is mounted frequently in New York, most recently in an excellent 2021 Broadway revival; this more modest production, by Brooklyn's Theater 2020, is directed by David Fuller and stars Gavin Kenny as the commitment-averse main character, Bobby, a thirtysomething bachelor surrounded by couples.  

There lived a certain man, in Russia long ago, who was big and strong (in his eyes, a flaming glow); most people looked at him with terror and with fear, but to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear. We speak, of course, of the libertine faith healer Grigori "Rah Rah" Rasputin, the so-called mad monk who insinuated himself into the Romanov court in the waning years of imperial Russia until a conspiracy of aristocrats finally managed to have him killed. The female-led troupe Artemis Is Burning invites audiences—who are encouraged to wear black—to relive those heady days of decadence and treachery in an immersive performance in the atmospheric environs of Governors Island. Set Ashley Brett Chipman conceived the show and also directs it with former Sleep No More resident director Hope Youngblood, with assistance from Julia Sharpe; those three women also cowrote the script with David Campbell. James Finnemore is the choreographer. (The ticket price includes ferry trips to the island and back.) 

Role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are inherently theatrical: The players are all playing roles, after all. But the idea of building an actual stage show around the game—an entirely improvised one, guided by audience suggestions and decisions—seems, well, a little dicey. But an element of the unexpected is one of the things that makes this goofy fantasy show such fun. Whether or not you know much about D&D going in, it’s an adventuring party you won't want to miss.—Shaye Weaver

The final installment of this year's Encores! season at City Center was meant to be Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party, but scheduling issues kicked it forward to next year. In its place, the musical-theater staged-concert revival series offers another look at the 1953 musical comedy Wonderful Town, which it first presented 25 years ago in a production that wound up transferring to Broadway three years later. The show features music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; the story, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov from short stories by Ruth McKenney, follows two sisters—played here by Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson—who move from Ohio to Greenwich Village to pursue their dreams and maybe find love along the way. Zhailon Levingston (Cats: The Jellical Ball) is the director and Mary-Mitchell Campbell is the music director.

The supreme Elizabeth Marvel returns plays a fashion photographer on a disastrous shoot for the cover of Vogue in a new dark comedy by Caitlin Saylor Stephens, set on a European estate after the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di. Morgan Green directs the play's world premiere at Lincoln Center Theater's intimate Claire Tow space, with an all-female cast that also includes Stella Everett, Maia Novi, Britne Oldford, Sarah Marie Rodriguez and Madeline Wise.

Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine) is among the finest, strangest and most wonderful playwrights in the English language, so it's always a treat to get something new from her. This time it's a quartet of mostly short experimental works that debuted to acclaim at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2019 and 2021: Glass, about a girl made of, you guessed it, glass; Kill, a monologue for the bloodstained Gods of Olympus; What If If Only, in which a grieving man receives a strange visitation; and the longest piece, Imp, in which an elderly woman threatens to unleash a magical spirit in a bottle. Churchill's frequent collaborator James Macdonald (Escaped Alone) directs.

Eliya Smith's new play, which spies on teenagers at a summer camp in Virginia, was scheduled for January before it got delayed by labor pains at the Atlantic.  Now it resurfaces with most of its original actors—Arjun Athalye, Maaike Laanstra-Corn, Jack DiFalco, Alden Harris-McCoy, Renée-Nicole Powell, Lark White and Danny Wolohan—now joined by Grace Brennan and Dominic Gross. Les Waters (Dana H.) directs the world premiere.

Ryan J. Haddad burst onto the NYC performance scene in 2015 with Hi, Are You Single?, his one-man show about being a horny gay man with cerebral palsy. Ten years later, the funny and talented writer-performer offers a sequel of sorts to that show, perhaps addressing how he has changed in the intervening decade, during which he has raised his profile significantly as an actor (including with a recurring role on The Politician) and won an Obie for Best New American Play for his 2023 show Dark Disabled Stories. Danny Sharron directs this Playwrights Horizons offering. 

Stage master David Greenspan (I'm Looking for Helen Twelvetrees) applies his golden archness to by Mona Pirnot's comedy about life as a downtown playwright. Greenspan plays a quartet of millennial women, under the guidance of director Ken Rus Schmoll (A Map of Virtue). Delayed by a strike at the Atlantic earlier this year, the show is now back on track for an April run.

Where better to send up the conventions of Irish drama than at the Irish Rep? Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson and the estimable Kate Burton lead the cast of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth's world-premiere comedy, about a Dublin theater troupe that gets its Irish up when the writer of its Broadway-bound production strays too far from the tried-and-true path of commercial plays from the Emerald Isle. Nicola Murphy Dubey directs the show, which has been in development at the Irish Rep for several years, and Kevin Oliver Lynch, Brenda Meaney and Angela Reed round out the ensemble. 

The J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company, which stages short runs of underexposed musicals from Broadway's past, continues its fifth season with this bouzouki-heavy 1968 musical adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel (and Michael Cacoyannis's film) about a bookish young man who befriends an earthy Greek peasant. Book writer Joseph Stein was coming off Fiddler on the Roof when he created this show with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, who were coming off Cabaret; though not by any metric as successful as those shows, Zorba had a respectable nine-month run, was revived in 1983 and contributed one song—the declaratory "Life Is"—to the standard repertoire of older nightclub singers. J2 cofounder Robert W. Schneider directs a cast led by Jeremy Radin, Quinn Corcoran, Catherine LeFrere, Katie Claire McGrath and Elora Von Rosch.

Writers Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and director Rory Pelsue are the Fake Friends gang behind 2020's uproarious Circle Jerk, a Charles Ludlam–style satirical farce about technology and white supremacy that was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Expect wild things from their follow-up at the New Group: an original musical that envisions a trio of Gen Zers on a quest to track down a missing pop star from the 2000s. The cast of the world premiere includes Sara Gettelfinger, Natalie Walker, Patrick Nathan Falk, Keri René Fuller, Luke Islam and the distinctive Milly Shapiro, who shared an honorary 2013 Tony Award for Matilda and famously lost her head in Hereditary.

The Time Square Edition's Paradise Club gives itself over to lunacy in this immersive neocirque extravaganza. Conceived by Lara Jacobs Rigolo, the show combines dance, acrobatics, aerialism, music and visual spectacle to salute 13 ancient goddesses of the moon. Tickets purchased individually at the Medusa level have a $40 drink minimum; the fancier Salome level, available for parties of five to seven, includes a thematically related multicourse preshow dinner curated by John Fraser, formerly of the Michelin-starred restaurant Dovetail.

Rotating casts of dynamos star in a new comedy by View master Joy Behar that looks at love, marriage and the end of both. The cast through April 20 includes Veanne Cox, Jackie Hoffman, Carolyn McCormick and Andrea Navedo; they'll be followed by Marilu Henner, Marsha Mason, Benji K Thomas and Julia Sweeney (Apr 23–May 18). Behar herself will guest star at Wednesday matinees starting April 30 (when she'll be joined by Whoopi Goldberg).

Julia Barry Bell explores the sixth sense (and, perhaps, The Sixth Sense) in a paranormal family drama about a mother who comes to believe that 10-year-old son can see dead people—inspired, the playwright says, by real events. The cast includes Jenny Strassburg and Brandon Jones as the parents, Appropriate's Lincoln Cohen as the kid and stage vet Brenda Braxton as the psychic who guides them into ESP enlightenment. 

Company XIV's seductive take on Alice in Wonderland is a singular sexcess: a transporting fusion of haute burlesque, circus, dance and song. Impresario Austin McCormick has assembled an array of alluring and highly skilled artists, who look smashing in Zane Pihlstrom's lace-and-crystal-encrusted costumes. With its soundtrack of pop songs, attractive ensemble cast and immersive aesthetics—plus chocolate and specialty cocktails—Queen of Hearts feels like Moulin Rouge! for actual bohemians. Hell, it even has a cancan.—Raven Snook

Are you, like Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses, aroused by the idea of "what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hat rack"? If the answer is yes—yes you said yes you will Yes!—then you may wish to hear the arguments presented by both sides in the 1933 court case defending Joyce's book, which is sometimes sexually explicit but always explicitly literary, against American charges of obscenity. Six Irish actors, playing some two dozen characters, go a-courting in Colin Murphy legal drama, directed by Conall Morrison in its U.S. premiere at the Irish Arts Center.

The extraordinary Andrew Scott stars in Simon Stephens's modernized solo adaptation of Uncle Vanya. There's a lot of misery to track in Anton Chekhov's 1897 masterwork, but  Scott, director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize keep everything elegantly sorted; they're unafraid of long silences and negative space. And Scott shuffles the roles with gorgeous finesse; the dexterity of his hand is equaled by the gentleness of his touch. A show like Vanya telescopes the empathy at the core of theater’s appeal: how audience members can see themselves in many different people, and how actors can find many people in themselves.—Adam Feldman

Joshua Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic) reteams with his Significant Other director, Trip Cullman, for a new dark comedy in which original Into the Woods star Joanna Gleason plays a dying woman who asks her young playwright grandson—played by Andrew Barth Feldman, an estwhile Evan Hansen—to write a vicious dramatic exposé of their family. The estimable Jeanine Serralles (Catch as Catch Can) is also in the cast of the play's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club.