Things to do in New York this Saturday

City Center's invaluable Encores! series concludes it 2025–26 season with a look back at the Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's groundbreaking 1983 musical, adapted from Jean Poiret's French stage play. In this all-Black version, directed by Robert O'Hara (Bootycandy), Billy Porter and Wayne Brady star as a middle-aged gay couple in St. Tropez—proprietors of a popular drag nightclub—who must go back into the closet to meet the arch-conservative parents of their son's fiancée. James Jackson Jr. plays their flamboyant maid and Tonya Pinkins is their friend, a swanky restaurateuse; Alaman Diadhiou and Rachel Webb are the younger couple, and Peter Francis James and Sharon Washington are the mean in-laws-to-be. Joseph Joubert is the visiting musical director.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Maya Rudolph plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through June 20, joined by Phillip James Brannon, Cheyenne Jackson and original cast members Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy...

In this ambitious and timely exploration of American, which spans 18 years in three acts, Jonathan Spector (Eureka Day) depicts the evolving opinions, relationships and fracture points within a group of six friends who have visited Israel together in 2006. Teddy Bergman directs the New York premiere, which stars Hale Appleman, Molly Bernard, Eli Gelb, Nate Mann, Molly Ranson and Zoë Winters as the sextet, plus Liz Larsen as a mother. 

Magic shows have been popping up like mushrooms in New York City. They tend to fall into two categories: close-up magic shows for very small audiences and, more rarely, full Broadway productions like The Illusionists or Darren Brown’s Secret. The British conjurer Jamie Allan stakes out an appealing middle ground between those scales in Amaze, his long-running show at New World Stages (directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond). The venue is big enough to accommodate a few large-scale effects, including levitation and a motorcycle, but sufficiently intimate for Allan’s personal narrative, which centers on his discovery of magic as a child.  Allan has built much of his reputation on incorporating new technology into his acts, as he sometimes does here—a particularly lovely sequence employs animation on multiple iPads—but it’s the show’s many retro 1980s references and props that provide much of its nostalgic charm: a Rubik’s Cube, a Fisher Price magic set, The Neverending Story. As one might expect from a two-act magic show that is more than two hours long, some of the routines are more impressive than others, but the skill level is consistently high and you get a lot of dazzlement for your dollar. And although the story Allan tells is tinged with loss, it is lifted by the obvious joy he takes in expertly plying his craft.

Romeo and Juliet, the earliest of Shakespeare's major tragedies, is the timeless story of teenagers who, in rebellion against their disapproving parents, have sex and then die after scoring drugs from a local priest. This version is helmed by the Public’s associate artistic director, Saheem Ali, whose credits include last year's Twelfth Night in the Park as well as Broadway's Buena Vista Social Club. Daniel Bravo Hernández and Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens play the star-crossed lovers; the supporting cast includes Deirdre O'Connell, Francis Jue, LaChanze, Glenn Fleshler and Caleb Joshua Eberhardt. Tickets are free, as always; see our complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park tickets for details.

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Masquerade wth director Diane Paulus on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly altered to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex,...

As the middle show of its summer schedule, Hudson Classical Theater Company presents Shakespeare's wordy revenge tragedy, where a ghost and a prince meet and everyone ends in mincemeat. Company honcho Nicholas Martin-Smith directs; attendance is free and reservations are not required.

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...

By rights, Dylan MarcAurele’s raunchy musical spoof of HBO's skate-away success about gay hockey players should not be nearly as funny as it is. But as directed by Alan Kliffer, this scrappy show is an unexpected delight in the irreverent camp tradition of Silence! The Musical! and the original Asylum production of Titanique. Writer-composer MarcAurele rolls out a seemingly inexhaustible series of double entendres, and the high-spirited cast of five actors—led by grade-A cuties Jimin Moon and Jay Armstrong Johnson as the central couple—score with nearly every shot they take. Most of the show’s comedy stems from the tonal clash between the steamy subject matter and the earnestness of traditional musical theater, and it wouldn’t work if the cast (which also includes Ryann Redmond, Ryan Duncan and Cherry Torres) weren’t experts at the latter. It’s knowingly silly but also, sneakily, just a little sexy, too. It knows how to wink both ways at once. Read the full review.