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).

59E59's second annual Amplify Festival, devoted to the work of playwright Chisa Hutchinson (Somebody's Daughter), concludes with the NYC premiere of this fraught drama about a rural Marylander whose desire to join a white supremacist group is at odds with the results of his ancestry test. Jade King Carroll directs the production for Primary Stages, which helped develop the play and featured it in the 2018 edition of its Fresh Ink Reading Series. Daniel Abeles, Molly Carden, Luke Robertson, Tobias Segal, Andrea Syglowski, Amber Reauchean Williams and Victor Williams form the cast.

Michael Sgouros and Brenda Bell's child-oriented musical adaptation of the classic folktale— as rendered in books by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont and Madame De Villeneuve—celebrates a bookish girl's ability to see past the hirsute appearance or her kidnapper. Pierce Cassedy directs this 70-minute production; the first performance of each two-show day is preceded by an hour-long arts workshop at which kids can meet members of the company and create a mask to take home.

Tommy Dorfman (Romeo + Juliet) plays the trans scion of a Hassidic rabbinical dynasty in Emil Weinstein's stage adaptation of Abby Chava Stein's 2019 memoir. Tyne Rafaeli (Selling Kabul) directs the Off Broadway premiere for New York Theatre Workshop, which is presented offsite at Abrons Arts Center.

Nina Hoss, who gave a riveting performance in 2018's Returning to Reims, is now returning to St. Ann's Warehouse to star in writer-director Benedict Andrews's new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's 1903 tragicomedy about a family on the edge of ruin in a country on the brink of revolution. Hoss plays the profligate Ranevskaya, an aristocrat stymied by nostalgia, and Adeel Akhtar is the rich but lower-class merchant with designs on her family estate. The production arrives at St. Ann's on the heels of a highly acclaimed U.K. run at the Donmar Warehouse (no relation).

Little Engine Theater, a new company devoted to mounting international plays in unusual settings, pulls out of the station with its first production: the U.S. premiere of an intimate workplace two-hander by the U.K. playwright Philippa Lawford, staged by Michael Herwitz (Job) in the Lower East Side's Ki Smith Gallery. Stefania LaVie Owen and Ben Rosenfield play a recent university graduate and her boss in the drama department of the hometown school she used to attend. 

Mamma mia! That's a spicy comedy! Matthew Lombardo's one-act two-hander, party inspired by his own experience, traces the volatile relationship between a formidable Italian-American woman and her less self-assured son gay son. Caroline Aaron (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Matt Doyle (Company) share the stage, directed by Noah Himmelstein.

Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play Curse of the Starving Class, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm, was revived at the Signature just six years ago, and the New Group's current revival of it in the same theater complex provides no good reason to see it anew. Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart are deeply miscast as the screwy Tate parents—each trying to sell the place out from under the other—as is the gentle-miened Cooper Hoffman as their violent son. (The scenes between Slater and Hoffman should be ticking time bombs; instead, they just tick.) Stella Marcus fares better as the outlaw Lisa Simpson of the factious clan, and Jeb Kreager adds a jolt of real energy in his brief turn as a local barman. But the star of this version is unquestionably a fluffy live sheep named Lois, who provides moments of authenticity that are otherwise rare in Scott Elliott's torpid, disjointed production. When Lois takes a poop onstage, at least she does it literally.—Adam Feldman

Rising director Jack Serio (Grangeville) has a serious knack for shows in cramped spaces, such as his buzzy staging of Uncle Vanya in a Flatiron loft last season; so does playwright Ken Urban, whose recent drama A Guide for the Homesick was set in a Dutch hotel room. So it makes sense for the two to team up at the ultra-cozy new venue East Village Basement, which accommodates only about 25 spectators on wooden chairs against the walls. The play's subject matter is suitably intimate: Juan Castano and Ryan Spahn play a restless married gay couple whose relationship takes a turn when they reunite with one of the guys' high school ex-girlfriends, played by Julia Chan. With so few seats up for grabs, tickets are sure to go fast.

This ensemble play by Abe Koogler (Fulfillment Center), about nature lovers in the Pacific Northwest investigating the disappearance of an orca pod, was a highlight of the 2023 Summerworks festival. Now Clubbed Thumb brings it back for a longer encore run at the Public, directed once again by Arin Arbus (Waiting for Godot). Returning original cast members—including Crystal Finn, Jan Leslie Harding, Armando Riesco and stage treasure Maryann Plunkett (The Notebook)—are joined by newbies Miriam Silverman, Mia Katigbak, Arnie Burton, Ryan King and Carmen Zilles.

The jokes are well-worn but the costumes are worn well in this campy new musical, which is exactly what you'd expect: high heels, big hair, sassy one-liners and enough RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants to fill their own season. The script—by Tomas Costanza, Ashley Gordon and Justin Andrew Honard (a.k.a. Alaska Thunderf**k)—provides a fishnet-thin plot about two rival drag clubs facing different sets of troubles. But Marco Marco’s sculptural outfits are bejeweled works of art, the wigs are amazing and director-choreographer Spencer Liff works in some terrific hairography. The current cast includes Alaska, Nick Adams and Adam Pascal.—Melissa Rose Bernardo

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 expert Jack O'Brien directs the latest revival of Henrik Ibsen's once-scandalous 1882 play about the roots of deadly social disease, a classic indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Stage A-listers Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup and Hamish Linklater star opposite second-generation acting stars Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty in this Lincoln Center Theater production, which marks the New York debut of a new translation by Ireland's Mark O’Rowe. 

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.

Writer-performer J.S. Streible synthesizes his experience growing up as a biracial man among the white mountain folk of rural Appalachia—some very rich, soime dirt poor—in a solo collection of original songs, poems and short tall tales. Inspired by Southern and West African storytelling traditions, the show desscribes itself as "the world’s first Neo-Appalachian, Afrolachian, Southern Pop Revusical."

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.

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.

Fishamble: The New Play Company visits Origin's 1st Irish festival with two productions at 59E59. One is the boxing-themed solo Fight Night; the other is this 2023 two-hander by Joanne Ryan, directed by Sarah Jane Scaife. Pom Boyd and Karen McCartney play, respectively, a retiree with bipolar disorder and the adult daughter whose studio apartment she temporarily shares.

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. 

Audience members choose their own paths through a specially designed multifloor complex in the Financial District in this all-new immersive theatrical experience from Emursive, the producers of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. Dozens of performers evoke life in the Gilded Age through narratives loosely inspired by real New York City history as well as literary sources like the Faust legend and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Teddy Bergman directs the show, which is written by Jon Ronson and features scenic design Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and costumes by Emilio Sosa.

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The Chicago collective Manual Cinema (Ada/Ava) combines live actors and musicians with puppetry, overhead projectors and filmic techniques to create virtuosically handmade theater experiences. The company visited the New Vic in 2022 with Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster, which was aimed at very young kids. This time, it aims a little older with a reprise of its first show for family audiences: its 2017 adaptation of Edith Nesbit’s 1910 novel about a girl who finds herself trapped inside the miniature metropolis she has been building out of household objects to avoid the annoyances of real life. 

Elizabeth A. Davis (Once) and Dan Amboyer (Younger) play a couple whose marriage is sorely tested when she disappears into the bathroom of their mobile home and refuses to come out—not in a cute Plaza Suite kind of way, but in a major depressive episode kind of way. The Off Broadway premiere of Max Mondi's two-hander is directed by Chad Austin for his Abingdon Theatre Company. (The play made its New York debut in the 2015 edition of the much-missed Fringe Festival.)

Vinny DePonto reunites with the team behind his 2013 show Charlatan, co-writer Josh Koenigsberg and directeor Andrew Neisler, for an ambitious new theatrical magic act that revolves largely around audience participation. DePonto is an engaging crowd worker, and he has devised several clever variations on the standard mentalist repertoire, so the show is a pleasant diversion. But a conceptual throughline about dementia feels underdeveloped, while its corresponding physical set is overdone: a high-concept space that at first evokes a 1970s office and then morphs into walls of metal deposit boxes that represent where memories are stored. What should be impressive reveals sometimes get lost in elaborate set-ups, which is too bad: A mind trick is a terrible thing to waste.—Adam Feldman

Three Black artists from different disciplines, cultures and generations compete for attention and opportunity at an international conference for artists of the African diaspora. WP Theater partners with Colt Coeur to present the world premiere of Francisca Da Silveira's drama; Ato Essandoh, Nedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wureh play the clashing trio. To ensure greater access, tickets are sold at pay-what-you-can prices (from $30–$100) and a row of very good seats is priced at $10 for each performance. 

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.

Stage treasure Jessica Hecht (Eureka Day) stars in a new play, conceived by Hecht and playwright Neena Beber, that updates the gist of Bertolt Brecht's pedantic 1932 drama The Mother, about an impoverished Russian woman's journey toward Marxist revolutionary consciousness. Beber's version relocates the story to Miami in a period that includes the 1980 race riots that followed the murder of motorist Arthur McDuffie by a group of policemen. (Adapted from a novel by Maxim Gorky, Brecht's original is seldom revived, though the Wooster Group took at shot at it in 2021). Maria Mileaf directs the premiere, which features choreography by Shura Baryshnikov and an eclectic score overseen by musical director Mustapha Khan. The supporting cast includes Zane Pais, Portia Johnson and Delilah Napier.

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) and Alisia Reiner, Renee Taylor and Mary Testa (June 4–29). 

The York Theatre Company's New2NY series offers spare stagings of original musicals. This year's spring lineup concludes with a biomusical portrait of the great American inspiration and cautionary tale Howard Hughes, the aerospace innovator, Hollywood producer and Las Vegas developer who ended his life as a long-nailed, germophobic, urine-hoarding recluse and codeine fiend. The music is by Jim Scully; Frank Evans's original book has been revised by Scully and director Jennifer Paulson-Lee, and Evans's lyrics have been augmented by Chad Gorn. Michael Halling plays Hughes, supported by a cast that includes Jill Paice, David Elder and Eric Michael Gillett.

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

Mark Povinelli plays the remarkable Benjamin Lay, a 4-foot-tall Quaker who moved to Pennsylvania from England by way of Barbados and established himself as one of the 18th century's most fervent abolitionists. (His antislavery book All Slave Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1737.) A collaboration between the playwright Naomi Wallace (One Flea Spare) and the historian and activist Marcus Rediker, the play debuted in London in 2023, directed by Ron Daniels; it now hops the Pond to make its U.S. premiere at the Sheen Center, a project of the Archdiocese of New York that focuses on works that engage with questions of religious faith. (A companion exhibition about Lay's life is also at the Sheen Center from March 7 through April 13, and is open between the hours of 10am and 5pm.)

This hard-nosed British revival of Tennessee Williams's steamy 1947 classic, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, commands exorbitant prices thanks to the presence of the gifted Irish actor Paul Mescal. But it is Patsy Ferran's unconventional Blanche DuBois, not Mescal’s fairly straightforward Stanley Kowalski, who dominates the production. This nattering, boozing Blanche has none of the character's usual Southern charm; she’s utterly mad, and utterly maddening, from the moment she arrives to stay with Stanley and her sister Stella (a knowing Anjala Vasan). The production sometimes beats its points home too loudly, but Ferran commits to her original choices completely.—Adam Feldman

Awoye Timpo, who directed Theatre for a New Audience's beautiful 2019 revival of Alice Childress's Wedding Band, returns to TFANA with another overlooked work of Black drama: The first major play by Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. This 1958 one-act tells the story of a young man from the flooded Niger delta who is mistreated by his rapacious twin brother and disappointed by the overfed Yoruba priest of the Serpent of the Swamp. 

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's scabrous musical, a cynical Weimar update of John Gay's 1728 satire The Beggar's Opera, returns in a new production by Germany's Berliner Ensemble, which mounted the original version in 1928. The show still centers on the charismatic killer and lothario Macheath—known as Mackie Messer ("Mack the Knife")—but Barrie Kosky's staging, on a geometrical set by Rebecca Ringst, is far from traditional the production makes numerous trims and changes to the notoriously unwieldy script by Brecht and his finally credited collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Performances are in the original German, with English titles.

Warehouse workers reenact legends of their high-school heydays, which loosely correspond to myths from The Iliad, in an original synthwave musical written and composed by Loading Dock Theater's Leegrid Stevens, with an ear to evoking 1980s nostalgia via vintage instruments and tape loops. The gender-fluid cast of 16, directed by Eric Paul Vitale, includes Daphne Always, Deshja Driggs, Arya Grace Gaston, Max Raymond, Jen Rondeau and Loading Dock co-founder Erin B. Treadway (Spaceman). 

Playwright-performers Emma Horwitz (Mary Gets Hers) and Bailey Williams (Buffalo Bailey’s Ranch for Gay Horses, Troubled Teen Girls and Other)—who are also partners in real life—perform a surreal comic lesbian fantasia that involves file boxes, alien abduction and a mysterious visitor to a pet store. Tara Elliott directs the premiere, which is coproduced by Rattlestick Theater and New Georges.

Tony Sportiello and Al Tapper's Zanna Don't!–ish new musical comedy imagines a world where gayness is the norm and a pair of musical-theater writers entertain the crazy notion of writing a show about heterosexual love. Director-choreographer Taavon Gamble directs the production, whose cast is led by Jeffrey Kringer, Matthew Liu and Brogan Nelson.

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. 

LaChanze, who shone in the overdue 2021 Broadway premiere of Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, makes her directorial debut at CSC with another work by the pioneering playwright: a 1969 drama, set against the backdrop of the 1964 Harlem riot, that she originally wrote for the Boston public-television series On Being Black. Grantham Coleman plays a painter working on a triptych about Black womanhood, and Olivia Washington—the daughter of Denzel and sister of John David—plays a downtrodden woman he thinks would be a good model for the unflattering final panel.