Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Five classically trained actors gather to perform a Shakespeare play, but this dramatic cocktail is served with a twist: One of them gets boozed up before the show—in the vein of Comedy Central's Drunk History—and hilarity ensues as the four sober cast members try to keep the script on track. 

The prolific Bob and Tobly McSmith, who specialize in silly musicals based on nostalgia objects like Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, take a shot at America's favorite six 1990s white people. Assaf Gleizner, who wrote music for the McSmiths' The Office! A Musical Parody, is there for them like he's been there before, and Ryan David Barto directs.

Self-described “bubble scientist” Fan Yang's blissfully disarming act (now performed in New York by his son Deni, daughter Melody and wife Ana) consists mainly of generating a dazzling succession of bubbles in mind-blowing configurations, filling them with smoke or linking them into long chains. Lasers and flashing colored lights add to the trippy visuals.—David Cote

The Canadian performer Katsura Sunshine, billed as the only Western master of the traditional and rigorously trained Japanese comic stortellying art of Rakugo, performs a monthly show at New World Stages. In keeping with the genre's minimalist practice, Sunshine performs in a kimono using only a fan and a hand towel for props. 

Milo Manheim, Elizabeth Gillies and Jeremy Kushnier currently star in the latest revival of this dark, tuneful and utterly winsome 1982 horror-camp musical about a flesh-eating plant who makes dreams come true for a lowly flower-shop worker. Composer Alan Menken and librettist Howard Ashman wrap a sordid tale of capitalist temptation and moral decay in layers of sweetness, humor, wit and camp. Michael Mayer directs the feeding frenzy in this deeply satisfying revival.—Adam Feldman

The boys are back in town! Five nice-looking men take it all off and vocalize in this collage of musical vignettes on gay themes, revamped since its 1999 debut with new jokes and more up-to-date references. Although sex is central to most of the numbers, the goofy nudism has no erotic charge (and when the show tries to be serious, it's sometimes hard to watch). After a hiatus of several years, NBS has returned to NYC at a new venue in 2023.

Having already created goofy musical spoofs of shows including Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, Bob and Tobly McSmith—joined again by composer Assaf Gleizner, who wrote the score for Friends! The Musical Parody—take on yet another TV institution. Donald Garverick directs a cast led by Caleigh Lozito, in male drag, as paper tiger Michael Scott.

A wily cop tries to psych out a possibly homicidal shrink in Warren Manzi’s moldy, convoluted mystery. The creaky welter of dime-store Freudianism, noirish attitude and whodunit gimmickry is showing its age. (Catherine Russell has starred since 1987.)—David Cote

Ah, the joy of watching theater fail. The possibility of malfunction is part of what makes live performance exciting, and Mischief Theatre’s farce takes that notion to extremes as amateur British actors perform a hackneyed whodunnit amid escalating calamities. Depending on your tolerance for ceaseless slapstick, the show will either have you rolling in the aisles or rolling your eyes. Directed by Mark Bell, the mayhem goes like cuckoo clockwork on Nigel Hook’s ingeniously tumbledown set.—Adam Feldman 

Cooper Jordan's comedic musical twist on the movie Saw combines slasher flick with slash fiction, imagining a queer romance between franchise protagonists Lawrence Gordon and Adam Stanheight (who do, after all, meet in a bathrooom). Stephanie Rosenberg directs the showm which has a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and a score by Patrick Spencer and Anthony De Angelis. Expect multiple characters to spill their guts in song, and be warned: The VIP front row is billed as a splash zone. 

Four single and neurotic New Yorkers get up to no good in this long-running section of the Theatre Center's must-stage-TV repertory lineup, which also includes shows inspired by Friends and The Office. Like those, Singfeld! has a libretto by Bob and Tobly McSmith; the music in this case is by fellow musical spoof artist Billy Recce (A Musical About Star Wars). Marc David Wright directs.

As controversy continues to rage about immigration from the U.S.'s southern border, this ambitious two-handed musical revisits a time when the pipeline ran in the other direction, and thousands of Black Americans fled slavery for the safety of Mexico. Writer-actors Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson have performed the show successfully in Baltimore, Berkeley and Washington, D.C., and are now bringing it to Audible Theater Minetta Lane Theatre, where it will be recorded for future broadcast. David Mendizábal directs.

The sharp-minded Eisa Davis, whose plays include the memoir Angela’s Mixtape and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Bulrusher worked with Lin-Manuel Miranda on last year's musical concept album Warriors. At HERE she strikes off on her own as the writer, director and star of a piece that interrogates the positioning and perception of Black bodies while rejecting the idea that any person can be reduced to an immalleable essence. The show incorporates striking physical imagery as well as original electrosoul music. 

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. 

Six sexually nonconforming performers imagine life under queer royal rule in a counterfactual metatheatrical comedy by Canada's Jordan Tannahill, directed by the very busy Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Public Obscenities). The ensemble cast comprises K. Todd Freeman, John McCrea, Rachel Crowl, Mihir Kumar, N’yomi Allure Stewart and recent New York Drama Critics' Circle Award lifetime-achievement honoree David Greenspan. After a sold-out summer run for Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons, the production returns for a fall extension at Studio Seaview.

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. 

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.

Julia McDermott (Heroes of the Fourth Turning) plays a California TV personality and offscreen hot mess who is forced to smile in the face of ecological disaster in a darkly comical ecological cautionary tale by Brian Watkins (Outer Range). Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, this incendiary solo show earned rave notices at the Edinburgh Fringe and in London, and is being brought to NYC by St. Ann's Warehouse, a reliable source of important imports.

The formidable Elizabeth Marvel plays a lawyer representing a prisoner on Death Row in a new drama by Tim Blake Nelson (The Grey Zone), set in a near future when irredeemable convicts can supposedly be executed without suffering any pain. Supporting Marvel in this La MaMa production, directed by Mark Wing-Davey, are Elizabeth Yeoman as her enigmatic client and Scott Shepherd, Henry Stram and Jennifer Mogbock as cogs in the ruthless justice machine. 

Before the major developments of her last five years—her TikTok stardom, her transition, her trans advocacy, her Bud Light ad campaign and the hateful backlash and boycott it engendered—Dylan Mulvaney was in the chorus of Broadway's Book of Mormon. So it's no surprise that this autobiographical solo show about her roller-coaster ride of self-discovery incorporates elements of musical-theater fabulousness, including several original songs. Tim Jackson, who directed the show's hit production at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, returns to oversee its Off Broadway debut, along with the impending Broadway premiere of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).

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, 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. 

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.

Composer Michael Sgouros and librettist Brenda Bell adapt Washington Irving's classic tale of horror and decapitated equestrianism into a spooky 90-minute musical aimed at family audiences. Directed by Bell, the show has had several previous New York runs, most recently in 2021.

Heather Christian's divine musical creation, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, is a sui generis meditation on time and existence: a classical choral masterwork infused with pop, blues and gospel, performed by a dozen superlative vocalists and six marvelous instrumentalists. Librettos are distributed at the door; you can use them as hymnals to follow along, but engaging fully with Oratorio in all its mysterious glory is a transcendent experience. After a sold-out premiere at Ars Nova in 2022, the production returns for an encore at the Signature.—Raven Snook

Jen Tullock, who plays the unsevered sister on Severance, goes multicharacter onstage in an expressionistic solo show that she co-wrote with Frank Winters. The protagonist is a popular essayist whose critical accounts of the abuse she suffered as a gay child in the Deep South are disputed by an important figure from her past. Director Jared Mezzocchi employs multiple cameras and live looping systems to convey the complexity of the shifting perspectices and narratives. 

Jordan E. Cooper had a hit right out of the gate at the Public Theatre's 2019 production of his debut play, the uproarious Ain't No Mo', in which he played an airport employee overseeing boarding for the last plane out in a mass African-American exodus. His follow-up play reunites him with director Stevie Walker-Webb to tell a different story of survival through transit: a modern riff on the story of Noah's Ark, in which Cooper plays the black sheep of a southern Black family who rises to an unexpected calling. Keith Randolph Smith and Tamika Lawrence costar as his relatives, and three exceptional singers—Tiffany Mann, Sheléa Melody McDonald and Latrice Pace—give voice to original gospel songs by Donald Lawrence. 

Writer-performer Drew Droege, known and loved for his online impersonations of Chloë Sevigny, has previously skewered modern gay culture in Happy Birthday Doug and the hilarious Bright Colors and Bold Patterns. In his newest comedy, he throws a little Rope down that same well, imagining a Hell's Kitchen brunch hosted a gay couple who have just killed their boyfriend and stashed his body in the furniture. Mike Donahue directs the world premiere with a highly auspicious cast of gay entertainers: Droege, Aaron Jackson, James Cusati-Moyer, Pete Zias and Fire Island hunk Zane Phillips.

Earlier this year, F. Murray Abraham starred in Samuel Beckett's bleakly witty 1958 one-act Krapp's Last Tape at the Irish Rep, playing a bitter man reflecting on his wasted life as he listens to recordings he made 30 years earlier. Now the Irish film and stage star Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) gives another Krapp in a two-week run at the Skirball Center. This iteration, directed by Vicky Featherstone, ran in London earlier this year after prior engagements in Ireland and Australia; the tapes that Krapp listens to onstage were recorded by Rea himself 12 years ago, in anticipation that he would one day play this role.  

An American lobbyist for the oil industry connives to protect his clients from the threat of an international climate-change agreement in Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's historical drama, set in Japan in 1997. Directed by the team of Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin—who also helmed the Joes' The Jungle (as well as Stranger Things: The First Shadow)—the play was a hit in Stratford-on-Avon in 2024 and in the West End earlier this year. New York stage pillar Stephen Kunken reprises his lead performance in Lincoln Center Theater's importation of that production for its U.S. premiere.

Matt Rodin stars as a queer country singer-songwriter named Ace who connects with his gruff grandfather—previously believed to be dead—in this original musical with words by Douglas Lyons (Chicken and Biscuits) and music by Ethan D. Pakchar. The storytelling moves between Ace's adult life and the sexually confusing adolescence that he draws on for many of his songs. Josh Rhodes (Spamalot) directs and choreographs the production, which returns for a second run after its successful production this summer.

Need a little break from the daily drama of current White House? Venture back to a simpler time through this R&B–flavored musical satire of the rise and reign of Barack Obama, as imagined by writer-composer-director Eli Bauman (who was once an Obama campaign staffer). The show has already been a hit with audiences and critics in Los Angeles and Chicago, and now arrives in New York for a limited run. The cast is headlined by T.J. Wilkins and Shanice as the President and First Lady and Chad Doreck as Joltin' Joe Biden.

Robin Schiff adapts her own screenplay for the 1997 comedy Romy and Michele's High School Reunion—in which a pair of friends pretend to be successful inventors to impress their former classmates—into an original musical with songs by Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay. Kristin Hanggi (Rock of Ages) is set to direct; casting has not yet been announced. 

This all-female drama by Martyna Majok (Cost of Living) had a brief run at LCT3 in 2018, but its central themes have become even more urgent since then: Set in a Queens basement, it's about a Polish woman deciding whether to provide shelter for a Ukrainian immigrant. Manhattan Theatre Club brings the play back to the boards in a new version directed by Trip Cullman (Significant Other). New cast members Marin Ireland, Anna Chlumsky, Julia Lester and Brooke Bloom—ringers all—are joined by Sharlene Cruz and three veterans of the LCT3 cast: Nadine Malouf, Andrea Syglowski and Nicole Villamil. 

Are the prejudices of yesteryear still worth rehearsing today? The esteemed Jewish-Canadian character actor Saul Rubinek stars in Mark Leiren-Young's philosophical metatheatrical solo show, in which an actor cast as the avaricious and bloodthirsty Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice reflects on his situation after a perfomance of the play is canceled midway through. Leiren-Young's script has been tailored to reflect Rubinek's own experience. Martin Kinch directs this NYC premiere, which follows a successful run in Toronto last year. 

The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, founded in 1915, pays homage to Hannah Senesh: a young woman who escaped Hungary in 1939 only to be murdered there, five years later, while on a courageous rescue mission to save Jews from the Nazis. Written and directed by David Schechter, this solo piece—which NYTF first mounted in 2019—stars Jennifer Apple and includes poems and diaries by Senesh herself (translated by Marta Cohn and Peter Hay) along with music by Steven Lutvak and additional songs by Schechter and Elizabeth Swados.

Ireland's marvelous Druid Theatre Company, a frequent visitor to New York, unpacks a new staging of Samuel Beckett's 1957 masterwork, a darkly funny metatheatrical exploration of existential dread. The director is Druid founder Garry Hynes, whose work on 1998's The Beauty Queen of Leenane made her the first woman ever to win a Tony for directing. Rory Nolan and Aaron Monaghan, respectively, play the blind and domineering Hamm and his long-suffering servant Clov; Bosco Hogan and Marie Mullen (who also won a Tony for Beauty Queen) get canned as elderly garbage dwellers.

Director David Staller has long borne a torch for George Bernard Shaw, as demonstated in his monthly Project Shaw readings. Now he and his company, Gingold Theatrical Group, present a full staging of the Bearded One’s 1913 parable about English accents, class and power, in which a snooty professor tries to pass off a Cockney lass as an aristocrat. (You may know the story as the basis of My Fair Lady.) Casting has not yet been announced. 

Rajiv Joseph, whose Guards at the Taj was a memorable exercise in historical gallows humor, takes an irreverent look at the short life of Gavrilo Princip, the teenage Serbian revolutionary whose 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited the Balkan powder keg and triggered the first World War. >Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) directs the New York premiere for the Roundabout, with a cast that includes Jake Berne, Adrien Rolet, Jason Sanchez, the invaluable Kristine Nielsen and Broadway's favorite baddie, Patrick Page (Hadestown). 

The estimable Scott Bakula and Ariana DeBose star in a revival of Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein's romantic parable about a French baker who falls into a deep depression when his wife runs off with a younger man. Although the show never made it to Broadway in 1976, it has since become a cult favorite on the strength of such songs as “Meadowlark” and “Proud Lady"; since the original cast album was heavily truncated, this production offers a rare chance to hear the whole score in context. Gordon Greenberg directs for Classic Stage Company.

The Civilians, one of Off Broadway's most consistently searching and original troupes, joins forces with the Vineyard to present a new play written by Anne Washburn and directed by Steve Cosson. This duo's previous collaborations include 2013's mind-blowing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play; this one, set in a self-isolated Northern California community, is tantalizingly described as a story about "a death, a pageant, a rescue, a resurrection, pigs, and the act of saying grace." Casting has not yet been announced.

In his frequent visits to Joe's Pub, writer-composer-performer Ethan Lipton has sometimes shared clever, unassuming musicals that compressed big subjects like space travel and AI into storytelling cabarets. He goes wider in scale—and moves to one of the Public's larger stages—with this musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's rule-shattering, Pulitzer-winning 1942 allegory The Skin of Our Teeth, which takes a New Jersey family from the Ice Age to the end of the world. (Kander and Ebb tried for years to adapt the same play, without much success.) Lipton's usual director, Leigh Silverman (Suffs), navigates the transhistorical madness with help and ace cast led by Shuler Hensley, Ruthie Ann Miles, Micaela Diamond, Damon Daunno, Amina Faye, Ally Bonino and Andy Grotelueschen.

The accomplished and busy Michael Urie (Shrinking) essays the title role of Shakespeare's lyrical portrait of the last Plantagenet king, a unfortunate weakling who gets sent to the Tower after making an unpopular land deal—thus setting off a splitting of heirs that eventually leads to the War of the Roses, as chronicled in Shakespeare's other history plays). Craig Baldwin directs his own adaptation of the play for Red Bull, the city's gutsiest classical-theater company.

Laurence O'Keefe, Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming's 2001 cult musical Bat Boy, a horror comedy in the sliced vein of Little Shop of Horrors, gets another chance to fly. Director Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!) has assembled a tremendous cast for the show's two-week gala run at New York City Center: Taylor Trensch as the title character, a misunderstood monster torn from the headlines of the lurid supermarket tabloid Weekly World News; Christopher Sieber and original cast member Kerry Butler as the West Virginia couple that takes him in; Andrew Durand, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Rema Webb and Mary Faber as local townsfolk; and Alex Newell as the satyrical Greek god Pan.  

The prolific David Cromer directs Talene Monahon's double-barreled satire, which looks at an Armenian-American family in two time periods: struggling to make it in the 1920s and then living in Kardashians-style hyperpublic luxury a century later. The cast of Second Stage's world premiere includes comic legend Andrea Martin, Susan Pourfar,Raffi Barsoumian, Nael Nacer, Tamara Sevunts and the frequent Cromer crony Will Brill (Stereophonic).

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.

In recent years, the Skirball Center has become New York's top landing zone for Europe's most outré avant garde theater and dance. This production, the U.S. debut of the Oslo company Susie Wang, continues that tradition with Trine Falch's creepy and surreal horror-comedy thriller, set in American hotel lobby and rendered in a style that might be described as extreme Southern Gothic. Among the attractions are blood, dismemberment, cannibalism and a briefcase stuffed with a mother's remains. Susie Wang is only here for a week, so you have just five chances to see this—if you dare.

Danny Mefford directs a revival of William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin's beloved 2005 musical about six weird kids on a quest to be letter-perfect. Recent Broadway breakout stars Jasmine Amy Rogers (Boop!) and Justin Cooley (Kimberly Akimbo) are two of the grown-ups playing adolescents, joined by Autumn Best, Philippe Arroyo, Leana Rae Concepcion and Glee's Kevin McHale. 

The five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams returns to the stage in a revival of Eugene O’Neill's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1921 tale of a former prostitute and her troubled romance with a sailor. Hamilton's Thomas Kail directs the production, which also stars Tom Sturridge and that great Broadway everyman Brian d’Arcy James. 

New York Theatre Workshop bakes up a new version of Molière's baguette-crisp comedy about religious hypocrisy and gullibility among the upper crust, freshly adapted by Lucas Hnath (A Dolls House, Part 2) and directed by erstwhile Soho Rep leader Sarah Benson. The cast is a murderers' row: Matthew Broderick plays the conning lead character and David Cross is his principal dupe; joining the fun are Amber Gray, Francie Jue, Emily Davis, Ryan Haddad, Lisa Kron, Ike Ufomadu and RuPaul’s Drag Race's acidulous Bianca del Rio. 

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