New and upcoming Broadway shows headed to NYC in 2025

Bobby Canavale, James Cordon and Neil Patrick Harris play three old friends whose mutual regard is tested when one of them buys a hyperminimalist white painting. Scott Ellis (Pirates!) directs the first Broadway revival of this boulevard comedy of ideas by France's Yasmina Reza (God of Carnage), which won the Tony for Best Play in 1998; the taut English translation is by Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). 

Manhattan Theatre Club, which staged James Graham's media-history drama Ink in 2019, imports another Graham play based on real events: his adaptation of Jacob Dunne's 2022 memoir Right from Wrong, the crime-and-redemption memoir of a man convicted of manslaughter after killing someone with a single blow. The production, directed by Adam Penford, is running simultaneously in the West End this fall in what we might call a one-two Punch. This version stars Will Harrison as Jacob and Victoria Clark and Sam Robards as the parents of his victim.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who played lovable doofuses in the 1989 time-travel comedy Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and its sequels, reunite to play the inertial tramps Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. The current British "it" director Jamie Lloyd (Sunset Blvd.) directs the 21st century's third Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett's 1953 masterwork, which depicts a pair of men in a barren landscape, killing time as they await the long-delayed arrival of a mystery man. Brandon J. Dirden and Michael Patrick Thornton complete the principal cast as an unusual pair of travellers who cross our antiheroes' path. 

Lear deBessonet directed the two-week concert run of this widely cherished 1998 musical at City Center last year. As the new artistic director of Lincoln Center Theatre, she now  reassembles that production's very impressive main cast to have a go at Broadway. Adapted by composer Stephen Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens and book writer Terrence McNally from E.L. Doctorow's great American novel, the show offers a panoramic look at seismic shifts in American culture at the turn of the 20th century, as exemplified through the interlocking stories of a fictional WASP family, a Black piano player and a Jewish immigrant. Broadway bold names Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, Brandon Uranowitz, Nichelle Lewis, Colin Donnell, Ben Levi Ross and Shaina Taub lead the large ensemble.

After giving up the ghost on Broadway twice before, this 2019 musical returns anew in a limited-run visit from the show's national tour. Adapted from Tim Burton's well-loved 1988 film comedy and directed by Alex Timbers, Beetlejuice stars Justin Collette as the ooky title character, a demon hired by a kindly dead couple to rid their former home of its distasteful live inhabitants and their miserable goth daughter. The book is by Scott Brown and Anthony King, and the original score is by Eddie Perfect. Notable creative design elements—including David Korins’s haunted-house set, which seems to buckle in the middle and stretch at the edges, and William Ivey Long’s costumes, a batty vision of colors and patterns at war—help make the show spectacularly weird.—Adam Feldman

The dream duo of stage queen Laurie Metcalf and director Joe Mantello gave us Three Tall Women and Hillary and Bill, but their most recent collaboration—a 2000 revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—was derailed by the Covid epidemic. And that epidemic happens to be the subject of their new Broadway project: an intimate drama by Samuel D. Hunter, whose plays are exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes (physical and financial limitations, queer identity, crises of family and faith) with seemingly endless variety and sympathy. As in the show's world premiere at Chicago's Steppenwolf last year, Metcalf and co-star Micah Stock play estranged relatives who must reunited to handle estate questions as Covid-19 begins to spread. John Drea and Meighan Gerachis complete the small cast. 

The versatile playwright Bess Wohl (Small Mouth Sounds) looks at Ohio women's dreams of liberation in the 1970s in a world premiere directed by Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding). The production opened Off Broadway at the Roundabout earlier this year, and its original cast of eight—Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood, Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion and Charlie Thurston—won the New York Drama Critics' Circle's inaugural award for Best Ensemble Performance; all of them return for the Broadway transfer.

The last time the omnitalented Kristin Chenoweth collaborated with Broadway tunesmith Stephen Schwartz, the result was a little show called Wicked. Two decades later, they're hoping to make magic again with a musical adapted by Lindsey Ferrentino from Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about a megarich family’s attempt to build America's biggest house, even as the 2008 recession puts their project on shaky ground. La Cheno plays the gaudy Jackie Siegel, and—as in Boston last year show—F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) costars as her husband, David, otherwise known as "the Timeshare King." Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending), who has been on a quite a run lately, directs the show's Broadway debut. 

Mark Strong plays Oedipus, fate's most helpless tool, and Lesley Manville plays Jocasta, Greek drama's most tragic MILF, in the latest account of Sophocles's complex tragedy. This version, adapted and directed by the U.K.'s Robert Icke (1984), is set at the headquarters of a modern politician on election night. The production was highly acclaimed in its West End debut last year, and now moves to Broadway for a three-month engagement. 

Three of musical theater's brightest stars—Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher—hit the boards (and the board) in this 1980s musical about romantic heat in the Cold War, as manifested at international chess tournaments. Previous productions of the show, including its short-lived Broadway debut in 1988, have struggled to tell coherent stories, but the score by Tim Rice and ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus has proved lastingly popular (and yielded, in "One Night in Bangkok," the last song written for the stage to become a hit on the U.S. pop charts). Danny Strong's new book hopes to succeed where previous ones have failed; Michael Mayer directs and Lorin Latarro choreographs. 

Roughly every year of late, some magician or mentalist comes to Broadway with fresh ways to astonish and delight. This season's trickster is the celebrated large-scale illusionist Rob Lake, who is joined for this run by variety-show impresario Kermit the Frog and select members of his most sensational, inspirational, celebrational and dare we say Muppetational troupe. Bethany Pettigrew serves as creative consultant, and the very clever Kevin Zak (Ginger Twinsies) contributes to the script.

The latest small British musical to hop the Pond is Jim Barne and Kit Buchan's two-person romcom about an Englishman in New York for his estranged father's wedding and the sister of the bride assigned to pick him up at the airport. Directed by Tim Jackson, the show received warm reviews in London last year. In the NYC edition, original star Sam Tutty—who won on Olivier for Dear Evan Hansen—makes his Broadway debut opposite King Kong survivor Christiani Pitts.

Jordan Harrison's sci-fi drama, in which androids take the place of the dead to ease our losses and store our memories, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2015 and was adapted into a feature film in 2017. Its gentle meditations on humanity and history may resonate even more deeply, howeverm now that AI has come to saturate our lives. Anne Kauffman, who directed the show's premiere at Playwights Horizons, returns to helm its Broadway debut for Second Stage, joined by most of her original designers but a very promising new cast of four: Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein, Christopher Lowell and—astonishingly—the 95-year-old June Squibb. 

In the years since her Broadway debut as the neurotic Honey in the sterling 2012 revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carrie Coon has earned widespread love for her work on TV's The Leftovers, Fargo, The Gilded Age and The White Lotus. Now she gets to the chance to fully bug out onstage again in the riveting 1996 psycho-thriller that helped launch the playwriting career of her husband, Tracy Letts. The ever-busy David Cromer directs this production, which co-stars Namir Smallwood (Pass Over) and was first presented at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2021. Randall Arney, Jennifer Engstrom and Steve Key play supporting roles.