New and upcoming Broadway shows headed to NYC in 2026

In Jocelyn Bioh’s ferocious comedy, set in 1986, the queen bee at an exclusive Ghanaian boarding school competes with a sunny American student for the attention of a pageant recruiter. The play’s Off Broadway premiere in 2017 was one of the buzziest shows of the season, and returned for an encore run the next year. Now Manhattan Theatre Club brings it Broadway in a new production helmed by Whitney White (Liberation), who also directed Bioh's Jaja’s African Hair Braiding for MTC in 2023. Casting for the new iteration has not yet been announced.

Roundabout Theatre Company takes charge of Molière's classic 17th-century farce about a serial hypochondriac at the mercy of opportunistic quacks. Bill Irwin, arguably America's greatest clown,n plays the title role—which, ironically enough, Molière himself played when he was actually fatally ill—in his own adaptation of the text. The celebrated actor Brandon J. Dirden (Waiting for Godot) makes his Broadway directorial debut at the helm of a production that also stars Brooks Ashmanskas, Dylan Baker, Hiram Delgado, Daniel Croix Henderson, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's Rachel Bloom. 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus studied theater in college before shifting into improv comedy, which led her to Saturday Night Live and eventually to sitcom superstardom (earning 11 Emmys along the way). She returns to her stage roots, and makes her Broadway debut, in John Benjamin Hickey's revival of Jon Robin Baitz's personal-political drama, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Louis-Dreyfus stars opposite the redoubtable Ed Harris as a successful pair of Republicans whose daughter, played by Lily Rabe, threatens to expose a long-buried family tragedy. Joe Keery and Alison Janney—whose mantel is calso overcrowded with Emmys—complete the cast.

Veteran funnyman Billy Crystal, whose career in TV and film stretches back five decades, had a smash hit with his 2004 Broadway solo show 700 Sundays and returned to the Great White Way in the underrated 2022 musical Mr. Saturday Night. In his latest stage venture, he tackles a serious subject—the 2025 Palisades fire that destroyed his home—and looks back on the parts of his life that have proved the most important and enduring. But don't expect this to be an evening of dark Crystal; laughs are sure to play a big part in his survival story. The ever reliable Scott Ellis directs this limited engagement. 

Can you handle the truth? Film and TV auteur Aaron Sorkin launched his writing career with this 1989 courtroom thriller about a murder trial that implicates two Marines in a wider conspiracy plot. Michael Arden, who has quickly become one of Broadway's preeminent directors of musicals, ventures into straight-play terrority to helm the play's revival for Lincoln Center Theater. The cast includes Bradley Whitford—an alum of Sorkin's The West Wing—and the rising English actor Tom Blyth (Billy the Kid). 

In this original musical—which was called Gun & Powder in its 2024 production at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse—Solea Pfeiffer and Liisi LaFontaine play Mary and Martha Clarke, Black twin sisters who passed as white in late 19th-century Texas. The book and lyrics are by Angelica Chéri, a descendant of the women in question; the music is by Ross Baum. Stevie Walker-Webb (Ain't No Mo') directs; additional casting has not been anounced. 

Four years after its Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons, Bruce Norris's shattering drama—which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play—arrives on Broadway with a new director, Joe Mantello, but retaining the earlier version's two superb central actors, Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman. Norris gives voice to the unspeakable: It is set at a shabby group residence for men who have finished their prison sentences for sexually abusing minors. The play lays bare the blind spots and self-deceptions of the ex-cons even it also pokes at the penal system and, most provocatively, at the rage that can bubble just beneath a set of liberal pieties. Brace yourself. 

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's metatheatrical fable—in which a group of players stages the tale of young lovers devided by a wall, with echoes of the Rude Mechanicals’ take on Pyramus and Thisby in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—opened Off Broadway in 1960 and went on to run for some 42 years. Second Stage brings it to Broadway for the first time in a version that recasts the plot as a modern gay love story. The imaginative Christopher Gattelli (Schmigadoon!) directs and choreographs the revisal, whose cast includes TV hunk Zane Phillips as the narrator, Maxim Chlumecky and Nathan Levy as the youngsters, and a bevy of Broadway pros—Kevin del Aguila, David Patrick Kelly, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Ruthie Ann Miles and Ahmad Simmons—rounding out the cast.

The accomplished stage and screen actors Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell—also known to audiences worldwide as Loki and Agent Carter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—star in Shakespeare's tart-tongued romcom about a pair of too-witty enemies who clearly have the hots for each other. This production, directed by the current British "it" director Jamie Lloyd (Sunset Boulevard), was reviewed ecstatically in London last year, and the Broadway transfer fatures nearly all of the same cast and creative team. Soutra Gilmour designs the sets and constumes; the supporting cast includes Forbes Masson, Gerald Kyd, James Phoon, Mara Huf and Mason Alexander Park. 

Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project have excelled in docutheater work that incorporates historical documents and sources, such as The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. In this play—which ran at New York Theatre Workshop in 2024 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist that year—the subject is a trove of photographs that was donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 and which revealed (as in The Zone of Interest) an oasis of Nazi leisure just beyond the horrors of Auschwitz. The script is by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich; Kaufman directs a cast of eight actors who play multiple roles.

Galileo, Galileo! Rock me, Galileo! It's been 13 years since the internse and cavern-voiced Raúl Esparza starred in a Broadway show, which is roughly 12 years too long. In his overdue return, Esparza plays the cosmos-shaking Italian astonomer, physicist and heretic Galileo Galilei, whose discoveries played a major role in ushering in the scientific age. The production reunites Chess director Michael Mayer and book writer Danny Strong, paired this time with soingwriters Zoe Sarnak and Michael Weiner. Joy Woods and Jeremy Kushnier lead the supporting cast.

If you liked playwright Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin's 2023's Prima Facie—a drama involving the treatment of sexual assault in the British legal system, showcasing a bravura performance by a female star—then there's a quite good chance you might also enjoy playwright Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin's Inter Alia, a drama involving the treatment of sexual assault in the British justice system, showcasing a bravura performance by a female star. The newer work stars Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl), in her Broadway debut, as a feminist judge trying to balance the scales of justice and also her own life and work; her West End costars Jamie Glover and Cormac McAlinden join her for the NYC transfer.

Broadway has frequently hosted magic shows in the past 20 years, whether performed by big stars (e.g., Penn and Teller, Derren Brown, El Mago Pop) or by slates of tricksters with different sets of specialty skills (e.g. The Illusionists). This latest effort, inspired by the heist-film franchise Now You See Me, falls into the latter camp. A quartet of performers incarnate the Four Horsemen personae invented by Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt: the international team comprises illusionists James More and Darcy Oake, mentalist Matthew Pomeroy and escape artist Gabriella Lester. 

The much-beloved, much-mourned country star Dolly Parton's inspirational life story comes to the stage in a musical that charts the rise of the so-called "Backwoods Barbie" from extreme childhood poverty in East Tennessee to rhinestone-studded fame and fortune. Like Summer and The Cher Show before it, Dolly divides its central role into three parts, played by actresses of different ages—casting has not been finalized—but unlike other jukebox musicals, this one is autobiographical: Before her death in August, Parton co-wrote the musical's book with TV writer-producer Maria J. Schlatter. Bartlett Sher directs and Mandy Moore choreographs.