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. Lee, Jeremy Stole and Phumzile Sojola, though never all in the same track.
The fall theater season includes plenty of upcoming Broadway shows in what's left of 2025. But as usual, many of New York's most exciting stage shows will be in the smaller venues known as Off Broadway. And that raises a problem: With dozens of Off Broadway productions crunched into a few short months, how can you choose what to see? That's where we can help. We've perused the long list of upcoming Off Broadway shows and chosen 40 that strike us especially promising, from new plays and musicals to solo shows and fresh takes on classics by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, O'Neill and Molière—as performed by top actors like Tom Hanks, Michelle Williams, Aubrey Plaza and Ariana DeBose. (And we're not even counting the return of Heather Christian's divine Oratorio for Living Things, which no one should miss.) Here, in order of when their runs start, is our 2025 Off Broadway fall preview.
RECOMMENDED: Complete current and upcoming Off Broadway listings