Adam Feldman

Theater is a big part of what makes New York shine. This city is bursting with talent that even the youngest among us can appreciate, and at the best Broadway shows for kids, everyone in your crew will be captivated. The Lion King, with its dancing wildlife and catchy songs, is a perennial favorite, but Disney aficionados will also get a kick out of the magical tale of Aladdin. At Wicked, you can visit the land of Oz and its conflicted green-skinned protagonist; at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you can enter an entirely different world of witches and strange creatures. These long-running hits are joined by newer offerings like Six and & Juliet and Back to the Future. RECOMMENDED: More theater for kids in NYC If you've already caught these shows or are looking for something a little different, you won't have to go far: Be sure to explore our favorite Off Broadway shows for kids, too, where the stories can be just as memorable as their Broadway counterparts and the talent equally impressive. Make the day more memorable by hitting up one of our favorite fun restaurants for kids before or after the show. And as always, keep abreast of the what is on Broadway with our A-Z list.

What do Rose Byrne, Ayo Edebiri, Don Cheadle, Nathan Lane, Luke Evans and Ebon Moss-Bachrach have in common? They're just some the many stars that will be coming to Broadway in the opening months of 2026. Seeing a broadway show can require quite a lot of planning—and sometimes a leap of faith. You can wait try to see only the very best Broadway shows by waiting until everything opens and gets reviewed, but by then it is harder to get tickets and good seats. So it's smart to keep an eye on upcoming productions—whether they're original musicals and plays or revivals of time-tested classics—and pick out some promising options in advance. Here, in order of their first performances, are all the productions that are set to begin their Broadway runs in the opening months of 2026. (Other shows may be added if they are announced.) Recommended: Current and Upcoming Off Broadway Shows

If you're looking to find the best Broadway shows, or are curious about what's happening Off Broadway or Off-Off Broadway, we can help. Time Out New York's theater critics are constantly on the lookout to guide you to the most exciting, original and moving shows in the city—and to steer you away from the ones that might not be worth your time. Here is a complete list of our reviews of productions that are currently playing in New York City. RECOMMENDED: Where to find cheap Broadway tickets

The best Broadway shows represent the pinnacle of live entertainment in New York City. Every year, millions of people flock to the Times Square district to see large-scale theater at its finest, and every season brings a crop of new productions, from glitzy musicals to provocative plays. Some Broadway shows are strictly limited runs, which others might stick around for years or even decades. Choosing among them can be dizzying. You can't see them all, and you probably shouldn't anyhow: For every Tony Award–worthy hit, there's a swing and a miss. But we have seen them all, and we're happy to help guide you to the ones we think are more deserving of your money and your time. (Cheap tickets can be hard to find.) Here are our theater critic's top choices among the shows that are currently on Broadway.   RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z listings of all Broadway Shows in NYCRECOMMENDED: Current and upcoming Off Broadway shows

New York theater ranges far beyond the 41 large midtown houses that we call Broadway. Many of the city's most innovative and engaging new plays and musicals can be found Off Broadway, usually in venues that seat between 100 and 499 people. These more intimate spaces present work in a wide range of styles, from new pieces by major artists at the Public Theater or Playwrights Horizons to crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the top Off Broadway shows usually cost less than the best Broadway shows (even if you score cheap tickets to them). Use our comprehensive listings—current shows are at the top, upcoming shows are farther down the page—to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows. RECOMMENDED: Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

Broadway shows are central to the experience of New York City. The word Broadway is sometimes used as shorthand for theater itself, but it officially refers to the set of 41 large theaters near Times Square, nearly all of which were built before 1930 and most of which seat more than 1,000 people. The most popular Broadway shows tend to be musicals, from long-running favorites like The Lion King and Hamilton to more recent hits like Hadestown and Moulin Rouge!—but new plays and revivals also represent an important part of the Broadway experience. There’s a wide variety of Broadway shows out there, as our complete A–Z listing attests. (For a full list of shows that are coming soon, check out our list of upcoming Broadway shows.) RECOMMENDED: Find the best Broadway showsRECOMMENDED: Current and upcoming Off Broadway shows

As usual, it will be a busy spring on Broadway, especially in April. But also as usual, many of the season's best productions will open Off Broadway, especially in February and March. The 2026 Off Broadway season provides a wide range of options. There are new works by playwrights including Wallace Shawn, Aya Ogawa and Lauren Yee, and intimate original musicals by the Bengsons, the Lazours and the venerable team of Maltby and Shire. There are revivals of classics ranging from the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone through 2014's You Got Older. And there are many happy returns: acclaimed 2025 shows—such as Cold War Choir Practice, Rheology and Burnout Paradise—that are coming back for second runs. (Not included on this list, but very much worth checking out, are the Encores! series's star-packed concert revivals of the musicals High Spirits and The Wild Party.) We've sorted through the dozens of upcoming Off Broadway shows to choose 35 that seem especially exciting. Here, in chronological order, are the Off Broadway shows we're most looking forward to seeing in the next three months.  RECOMMENDED: Complete list of current Broadway shows  

We all need magic in our lives, and New York offers an awful lot of it—and we don't just mean Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Some of the city's best magic shows are proudly in the old presentational tradition of men in tuxedos with tricks up their sleeves; others are more like Off Broadway shows or immersive theater experiences. Performed by some of the world's top magic artists, they welcome you to suspend disbelief in a special zone where astonishing skill meets showmanship and wonder. Sure, it's all a bunch of tricks. But why not allow yourself a few illusions?

Human beings have been creating theater for millennia, and for probably just as long they have been looking for ways to pay less for seats. There are many strategies for finding cheap Broadway tickets and Off Broadway tickets, but the easiest involves discount codes, which allow you to buy in advance and choose your seats so you don't have to scramble for last-minute tickets. We here at Time Out have partnered with a number of Off Broadway productions to set up deals to cut your costs.

As the nights draw in and the chill sets through the air, there’s no denying it: spooky season has officially arrived. The pumpkins are carved, the costume’s nailed and now there’s just one thing left to summon… a Halloween playlist wicked enough to get even the undead on their feet. Sure, the classic Halloween songs still reign supreme – we’re talking ‘Thriller’, ‘Ghostbusters’ and all the usual heavy-hitters. But lately, a new wave of pop phantoms has emerged to soundtrack your October nights. From Olivia Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend bleeding her dry, to the enchanting spellwork of Lady Gaga a.k.a Mother Monster herself, with a detour through the slick, otherworldly beats of K-Pop’s most stylish demons – Halloween playlists have, quite literally, come back to life. Our favourite Halloween playlist songs for 2025 at a glance: Most iconic Halloween track: ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson Best new Halloween anthem: ‘Abracadabra’ by Lady Gaga Most dramatic Halloween song: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras Best Halloween anthem with a K-Pop twist: ‘Your Idol’ by Saja Boys Best Halloween track to dance to: ‘Monster Mash’ by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers RECOMMENDED: 👻 The best Halloween movies of all time 🎤 The best karaoke songs 🎵 The best songs of 2025 so far 🕺 The best albums of 2025 so far

There's more than one way to crack a nut! December in New York abounds with opportunities to see The Nutcracker ballet, which for dance fans is always among the best Christmas shows around. The most famous Nutcracker options are all returning in 2025, including New York City Ballet’s iconic Balanchine production and the the Radio City Christmas Spectacular (which includes a number devoted to the Nutcracker story). Some are aimed predominantly at kids; some others are very much not. Here are this year's ways to get your sugarplum fix. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to Christmas in NYC

Christmas shows are an essential part of the New York holiday experience. How can you make a yuletide gay without a generous array of Nutcrackers and A Christmas Carols? With that in mind, we've found the best holiday-themed theater and dance shows to help you stay in high spirits in 2025, from shows aimed at kids to a few that are definitely not. Check out our chronological list of holiday shows and find the ones that are right for you. We'll be updating and filling out this page if and when new show dates become available. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to Christmas in NYC

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant hits the current historical moment like a targeted strike. The play unfolds on a single afternoon, interrupted only by intermission, at the English country home of Roald Dahl. It is the summer of 1983, and the beloved children’s author has come under fire for his review of a book about Israel’s siege of West Beirut, in which Dahl opined of the Jews that “never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Rosenblatt began writing his play in 2018, five years before the October 7 attacks that would prompt both a wave of Israeli military action and a spike in anti-Zionism that has often blurred with—or overtly embraced—antisemitism. Giant couldn’t be timelier: It arrives on Broadway in the same month as a new Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.  The play’s topicality is only partially anesthetized by the historical distance that separates us from its story. Back at the Dahl house, the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach—played superbly by master thespian John Lithgow—is examining the proofs of his latest project, The Witches, as those in his orbit try to convince him to apologize for his comments about the Jews or at least walk them back a bit. These include his flinty but gracious fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), and his accommodating British publisher, To

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (this play i read in high school), the Chorus has an uncanny encounter with a teenage girl on an airplane. This Chorus is nicknamed Dicey, and is played with perforated steeliness by Celia Keenan-Bolger; the girl, a student played by Susannah Perkins, is reading Antigone, Sophocles’s tragedy of protest and punishment in ancient Thebes. Antigone’s behavior in the face of punishment has haunted Dicey throughout her life: an implicit spirit of reproach to her own lack of courage. She finds herself explaining, she says, “how literary characters can stalk you sometimes.”  Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The sense of being shadowed by Antigone may feel familiar to New York theatergoers. Variations on her story are everywhere now. She was a side character in Robert Icke’s Oedipus on Broadway; Alexander Zeldin's modern British take on her, The Other Place, just closed at the Shed, but Jean Anouilh’s 1944 version is at the Flea and Barbara Barclay’s Antigone in Analysis begins next week at La MaMa. The challenge resides in finding ways to adapt a 2,500–year-old tragedy—in which Antigone’s cause relates to the burial of her disgraced brother—to modern purposes. The girl on the plane, for one, is unimpressed with the Sophocles original. “Is it even about her?” she complains with with insouciant directness. “It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.” Dicey, who i

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Christmas is just around the corner, and Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers), a 10-year-old Black girl in 1987, has a modest wish list for Santa: “I want a Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.” None of these is likely to be provided by her financially strapped single father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), a former Black Panther who owns a roller rink in the south side of Syracuse, New York. But through her participation in a children’s choir called the Seedlings of Peace, Meek has started writing to a Soviet stranger. (“War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”) And her pen pal in the Urals soon sends Meek a very special Speak + Spell: one that not only teaches her the Russian translations of useful terms like “revolution” and “armageddon” and “government official,” but also recruits her into a scheme that may affect upcoming disarmament talks between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Spasibo, comrade!  Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova That’s just a taste of the mayhem wrought by the playwright and composer Ro Reddick in Cold War Choir Practice, an offbeat dark comedy that may be set in the 1980s but whose genre-fluid blend of surrealist humor, satirical songs and looming menace recalls the 1970s plays of John Guare. Reddick’s brand of ridiculous, though, adds a current of racial conflict, as reflected in the tense relationship between

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The titular heroine of Petite Rouge dances with wolves aplenty in Company XIV’s latest neoburlesque spectacle, but don’t worry for her safety: She’s as voracious a predator as any of them. Director-choreographer Austin McCormick and his Brooklyn company have a penchant for twisting classic children’s stories into naughty ones for adults, fashioning baroque extravaganzas out of such tales as the Nutcracker, Cinderella, Snow White and Alice in Wonderland. This latest pageant gives a decadent spin to the adventures of Little Red Riding Hood through a decadent mélange of slinky dance, explosive live singing and suggestive circus acts. This little lady knows her way around a basket. Petite Rouge | Photograph: Courtesy Deneka Peniston Like all Company XIV shows, Petite Rouge unfolds as a series of vignettes performed by a troupe of versatile performers in outrageous costumes by Zane Pihlström, who has also designed the louche, ruched set in a panhistorically rococo spirit. The aesthetic is femme-forward and playfully queer-flavored; the men may have lupine masks on their heads, but they are also often dolled out in corsets and heels (and, in one case, tasseled pasties on each buttock). Among the attractions provided by the men are a triple aerial act, a toe dance and a comical turn by PhillVonAwesome, in mask, as Petite Rouge’s grandma.  Related: See more photos from Petite Rouge. Petite Rouge | Photograph: Courtesy Deneka Peniston But while most

Theater review by Adam Feldman  When people talk about physical theater, they usually mean the kind of shows that prioritize movement over text, with elements of mime and dance. The Monsters is physical in a different way. Its two characters are mixed up in the world of mixed martial arts: Big (Okieriete Onaodowan) is a champion MMA combatant who, pushing 40, is nearing his professional expiration date; Lil (Aigner Mizzelle) is his estranged half-sister, a decade or so younger, whom he finds himself training for a career of her own. When they work out together or act out matches, the actors throw their whole bodies into action, and in the intimate confines of Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II, everyone gets a cageside seat. The Monsters| Photograph: Courtesy T. Charles Erickson Writer-director Ngozi Anyanwu stages these sequences with thrilling immediacy, aided by choreographer Rickey Tripp and fight director Gerry Rodriguez. (Veteran bantamweight competitor Sijara Eubanks is the production’s MMA consultant.) But Big and Lil’s sparring outside the ring is, in a quieter way, just as compelling. He is stoic and intensely guarded, but she keeps jabbing at him until she can get through his defenses. In flashbacks, they play younger versions of themselves: The adolescent Lil is spoiling for battle, but gives up high-school wrestling because boys keep trying to pin her in the wrong ways; obversely, Big is gentler than he will become, but people pick fights with him so often—he has

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Putting the word shitshow in the title of your play seems almost like a dare to the writer of an unenthusiastic review. I will resist the easy jab, though, because writer-director Aya Ogawa’s carnivalesque pageant—which explores and explodes different facets of motherhood through satirical vignettes, musical numbers and bouffon body horror—is audacious in more than its name. The show is intent on airing ugly and troubling aspects of maternity, and Ogawa delivers them cesarean style: with a few deep cuts and a lot of mess.  Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Meat Suit is being produced by Second Stage, and it has aptly created a secondary space for itself at the Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage. The venue’s usual seats are cordoned off, and the audience is guided instead to a womblike playing area that scenic designer Jian Jung has festooned with lumpy, pendulous blobs that suggest internal organs as drawn by Dr. Seuss. In a similar spirit, Jung attires the cast’s five actresses—Marina Celander, Cindy Cheung, Robyn Kerr, Maureen Sebastian and Liz Wisan, proven talents all—in bodysuits bursting with grotesque stuffed appendages that evoke internal and sexual organs. (They also recall Jill Keys’s fetus costumes in Lightning Rod Special’s The Appointment.)  Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Unfortunately, the show’s goop is not just of the visceral variety. A

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The talk in Clare Barron’s icky, tender, gorgeous You Got Older is sometimes so small it nearly vanishes completely. Alia Shawkat plays Mae, a youngish lawyer whose life is in ruins—she has lost her job, her apartment and her boyfriend in one fell swoop—and who has moved back to rural Washington to spend time with her father (Peter Friedman). Between awkward pauses in the play’s opening scene, they discuss gardening, toothbrushes, sleeping arrangements; what they don’t discuss is his recent cancer diagnosis. You Got Older is less about disease than about the unease that surrounds it, and it beautifully captures elusive things about avoidance: It’s about the denial of death, but also the denial of living. You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin You Got Older mostly unfolds as well-observed comedy that often ventures into morbid territory. When Mae and her siblings—blunt older sister Hannah (a hilarious Nadine Malouf), amorphous middle brother Matthew (Misha Brooks) and excitable youngest sister Jenny (Nina White)—gather around their dad’s hospital bed, they spend their visit bickering, teasing and commiserating about the off-putting family odor they share: “Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg.” A similar sense of bodily dysfunction informs the flirtation between Mae and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), a former schoolmate she encounters at a local bar; she shares details of her painful rash, and he reveals that he is into that sort of t

Theater review by Adam Feldman  An interesting fact: In the early 1940s, before he became the world’s most celebrated mime, a young Marcel Marceau was part of the clandestine French Jewish Resistance, which helped smuggle kids out of Nazi-dominated France. ''Marceau started miming to keep children quiet as they were escaping,” a fellow FJR member would later say. “It had nothing to do with show business. He was miming for his life.'' That certainly sounds dramatic, but—as illustrated by Marcel on the Train, a fictionalized biodrama by actor Ethan Slater and director Marshall Pailet—what makes a great footnote does not always make a great play.  Marcel on the Train | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid As he proved in SpongeBob SquarePants and more recently in the Wicked movies, Slater has a real gift for movement. Marcel on the Train gives him ample opportunity to showcase it as Marceau tries with varying success to entertain his 12-year-old charges, Life Is Beautifully, and distract them from the dangers outside. The adolescents, all played by adult actors, include the virtuous Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore), the mischievous Henri (an amusing Alex Wyse), the sour and pessimistic Berthe (Tedra Millan) and the cowering Etiennette (Maddie Corman), who—perhaps in response to unspeakable trauma—never says a word.  Marcel on the Train | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Most of the play unfolds in a single train car, but director Pailet makes the most of a claustrophobic situation w

In the years since it opened its gates in May 2021, Little Island has become one of New York's primo warm-weather destinations. Open from 6am daily, the “floating” greenspace is an elevated oasis of trees and knolls and winding paths that rises—as though suspended on a bed of coupe cocktail glasses—above Pier 55 in the Hudson, just west of the Meatpacking District. In the same brief period, it has established itself as one of the city's most vital sources of low-cost high culture in the summer. Concerts, plays, dance shows, operas: These and more can be found on Little Island all summer long, whether at its 687-seat open-air amphitheater (the Amph), its smaller performance stage (the Glade) or at pop-up locations throughout the space.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In his program note for The Dinosaurs, playwright Jacob Perkins describes how a support group for alcoholics helped him deal with traumatic memories—including that of being surrounded by a group of men to be “exorcised,” at the age of 8, from a homosexuality that had already become legible to others. In the weekly sessions he attended in a church basement, which have now inspired his elegantly elliptical and tender new play, Perkins also found a community of people wrestling with demons: drawing on one another’s strength to stay cleansed of the spirits, whether liquid or figurative, that once controlled them and which still threaten, at any moment, to slip into their weakest places.  The Dinosaurs | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes This theme becomes explicit only once in The Dinosaurs: When Joan (Elizabeth Marvel), speaking of the mysterious maladies she suffered as a child, compares herself to “that little girl in The Exorcist after she gets possessed by the devil.” Her illnesses were harbingers of her future alcoholism, she later realized, but at that time “my disease was manifesting as restlessness, irritability, discontentedness”—problems that later, frustrated by her inability to control them, she would turn to drinking to escape. Perkins approaches alcoholism not as a physical ailment but a spiritual one. “I didn’t believe that God saw me, that God could ever wanna take care of a person like me,” Joan says, but the community of wo

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How well do you know Sean Hayes? You probably think of him as a master of broad comedy, as he demonstrated in 11 seasons as Jack on Will & Grace (and as Jerry in Martin and Lewis and Larry in The Three Stooges). Maybe you enjoy his good-natured enthusiasm on the podcast Smartless. Maybe you saw him quip, scowl and play classical piano in his Tony-winning portrayal of Oscar Levant in Broadway’s Good Night, Oscar. Even so, you might still be surprised by how well he plays a basically regular guy in The Unknown: Elliott, a somewhat isolated, somewhat depressed, mostly sober middle-aged writer who has been having a hard time devising a screenplay, perhaps because his own life has so little drama.   David Cale’s one-man play whips some up for him. While clearing his head at a rural retreat, Elliott hears someone singing a love song about romantic disappointment—a song that Elliott wrote years earlier for a musical. When he returns to the city, a seemingly chance encounter with a handsome Texan at a West Village gay bar leads to a growing fear that he is being shadowed by a marginal figure from his past—and/or, perhaps, by that man’s identical twin. On Hayes’s old sitcom, this scenario might have been played for laughs: Jack and the Bein’ Stalked. Instead, it spirals into a dark-hued exploration of obsession and the porous line that separates life from art.  The Unknown | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Elliott's journey, however, doesn’t travel

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In times of tyranny, there can also be resistance, and in times of resistance, there is always Antigone. The title character of Sophocles’s ancient tragedy refuses to accept a decree by her uncle Creon, the king of Thebes, that the corpse of her rebellious brother should be left unburied for beasts to devour; and the unbending Creon, who thinks the young lady protests too much, confines her to die in a cave. This mythic tale continues to resonate, and it has now inspired two concurrent Off Broadway adaptations. The first of them, imported by the Shed after premiering at London's National Theatre, is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other play is Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), which hits the Public later this month.  Like Robert Icke in Oedipus and Simon Stone in Medea, writer-director Zeldin squeezes the old story into a mold of contemporary psychodrama. Creon is now Chris (Tobias Menzies), who has been working with his new wife, Erica (Lorna Brown), to renovate his late brother’s house; they have opened up the living room by knocking down one wall and installing sliding glass doors in another, filling a symbolically dark and secretive space with equally symbolic sunlight. He also plans to disperse his brother’s crematory ashes outdoors—a plan that does not sit well with his niece Annie (House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy), a bisexual drifter who has gone off the grid and, apparently, her meds. Although Annie’s

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanRating: ★★★★ (four stars)Ticketing: Buy tickets to Schmigadoon! Who here wants some more corn puddin’? The wholesome townsfolk of Schmigadoon, first seen on Apple TV+’s spoofy musical series, have relocated to Broadway, where they’re serving a generous second helping of their corny and sweet local specialty—and, of course, singing and dancing its praises in a delightfully pointless musical number. That sort of thing comes naturally to the denizens of this special place; they are familiar character types from musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s a bit overwhelming for modern timers Melissa (Sara Chase) and Josh (Alex Brightman), a squabbling couple of doctors who find themselves in Schmigadoon after crossing a magical bridge. Only true love can break the spell that keeps them there; meanwhile, they might as well enjoy what the town has to offer.   Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphySchmigadoon!   Schmigadoon!’s love for classic musical theater may not be 100% true—everything about it is in quotation marks—but good gosh, is it enjoyable. Writer-composer Cinco Paul, adapting the first season of his series for the stage, has retained most of its plot and songs: knowing and affectionate pastiches inspired mainly by The Music Man and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. (Other shows evoked include Finian’s Rainbow, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and, of course, Brigadoon, whose premise Paul bor

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanRating: ★★★ (three stars)Ticketing: Buy tickets to Proof “Mathematicians are insane,” says Hal (Jin Ha), in what could be the tag line for David Auburn’s Proof. What Hal means is that he and his fellow geeks party too hard, but the statement resonates beyond that. His former mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert (Don Cheadle), was a math legend who revolutionized his field in his early 20s—“There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around 23 and it’s all downhill from there”—but went mad shortly thereafter. That’s very much on the troubled mind of Robert’s daughter, Catherine (Ayo Edebiri), on the night of her 25th birthday. She has inherited her father’s mathematical mind; has she also inherited his mental illness? When she discusses this concern with her dad in the haunting opening scene, he tries to be reassuring. But it’s unusual that they’re talking at all, since—as Robert reveals—he has been dead for a week. As he points out, gently: “It could be a bad sign.”   Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyProof Bang! Q.E.D. And with Robert’s scene-ending line, Proof is off racing. Although its subject is advanced number theory, Auburn’s approach to mathematics is abstract. There’s an intellectual atmosphere, but this is not a Tom Stoppard play of heavy ideas; it’s an ingeniously crafted psychological thriller that continually toys with audience expectations—there are dizzying sequences of minor reversals, zigzagging within single scenes—a

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanRating: not recommendedTicketing: Buy tickets to The Fear of 13 When adapting one-person stage shows for other media, it is common to open them up with multiple actors and locations, whether in films such as A Bronx Tale and My Big Fat Greek Wedding or even whole TV series such as Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. Lindsey Ferrentino’s drama The Fear of 13 reverses this process. The play is closely based on David Sington’s 2015 documentary about Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who spent more than 20 years on Death Row before being exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. The film is an absorbing 95-minute monologue in which Yarris describes his long ordeal in detail; Ferrentino’s adaptation, though still anchored in narration by Yarris, builds out his stories for an onstage cast of eight. The end result is bigger but not, I fear, better.   Photograph: Courtesy Emilio MadridThe Fear of 13 It’s not that this version of The Fear of 13 is bad. It’s a respectable telling of a worthy story. Adrien Brody, who played Nick in the play’s 2024 London premiere and reprises the role on Broadway, is effective throughout Yarris’s journey from teenage criminal and meth addict to the victim of a system that is infuriatingly flawed; he also conveys enough broken charm to make us believe that he could spark with the Jacki (a quite luminous Tessa Thompson), a charitable volunteer whose prison visits blossom into more. Jacki’s part in the story has been expanded significantly

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanRating: ★★★★★ (five stars)Ticketing: Buy tickets to Cats: The Jellicle Ball  A revival of Cats, at least in theory, might well give you paws. After a then-record 18-year run on Broadway—with a tagline, “NOW AND FOREVER,” that began to sound a bit like a threat—Andrew Lloyd Webber's synthtastic 1980s musical finally hung up its leotards and yak-hair wigs in 2000. Its comeback efforts since then have been less than overwhelming: a taxidermic 2016 revival, a widely mocked 2019 film. It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat. But now along comes a thrilling reconception that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights. After an already-legendary Off Broadway debut at the Perelman Arts Center in 2024, this production—under the chosen name Cats: The Jellicle Ball–has now re-inhabited Broadway, where it remains a categorical triumph.  Photograph: Courtesy Evan ZimmermanCats: The Jellicle Ball Is Cats good or bad? That’s a question without an answer. Cats is beyond good and bad. Cats is Cats. Cats is about cats competing to be sent into the ionosphere. Cats is about cats who sing light verse from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, an exercise in high silliness that sits at the classy end of an anthropomorphic-cat comedy genre that includes, at lower stations, New Yorker cartoon

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanRating: ★★★★★ (five stars)Ticketing: Buy tickets to Death of a Salesman A boxy old car drives onstage at the beginning of Death of a Salesman, its headlights glaring out at the audience, and sad-sack schlepper Willy Loman gets out of it, defeated, a heavy briefcase in each hand. At first, this may seem like the wrong kind of omen: When yet another revival of Arthur Miller’s 1949 drama pulls up on Broadway, beat up and weighed down by 75 years’ worth of travel and baggage, it is fair to wonder whether this vehicle has any tread left on the tires, any gas left in the tank. You might even be inclined to walk right by the Winter Garden Theatre—where this version has parked itself, directed by Joe Mantello and starring Nathan Lane—without a second thought. But that would be a grave mistake: This shattering new production cannot be overlooked. Attention, as Willy’s wife famously declares, must be paid.  Photograph: Courtesy Emilio MadridDeath of a Salesman Linda Loman (Laurie Metcalf) says that line as a call of duty to her sons, Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers), who have neglected their father's slide into depression and dementia. Miller never tells us what Willy has been selling on his long road trips for 36 years, but it’s clear he has no business doing it anymore, if indeed he ever did. “I don’t say he’s a great man,” she allows. “But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.” This c

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Rating: ★★★★★ (five stars) On the page devoted to Becky Shaw on Second Stage’s website, the description is vague: Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 comedy, it says, is about a blind date that “spirals spectacularly off the rails.” That’s a misleading gloss on what happens in the play, but it’s also basically true. We never even see the blind date in question, which takes place over intermission; but it is nonetheless the pivot point of Gionfriddo’s piercingly funny and well-observed parable of romance, finance, honesty and ethics. Becky Shaw is a romcom with teeth, and the unseen scene is when those teeth start getting bared, whether as smiles or threats or both.  Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. FranklinBecky Shaw Love is never blind in Becky Shaw, but it is often, by choice, blindfolded. It might harm the many small surprises of Gionfriddo’s plot—which emerge like the natural twists of enmeshed vegetation, its flowers protected by thorns—to reveal too much about what that means, so I’ll endeavor to tread with discretion. The play’s central character is not Becky but Susie (Lauren Patten, with an appealing Bebe Neuwirth wryness): a thirtysomething graduate student in psychology who, in the opening scene, is coping with the recent death of her father, who has left his family less rich than they had supposed. Her responsible sort-of-brother Max (Solo star Alden Ehrenreich, fronting superbly), who was taken in by her parents as a child, is on hand to pick up

Theater review by Adam Feldman Rating: ★★★★ (four stars) Revenge, in Titus Andronicus, is a dish best served family-style: In its infamous finale, a woman is tricked into eating her children. But there’s plenty of revenge to go around in Shakespeare’s early tragedy, a Roman fountain of blood so outrageously lurid and gory—and so relatively meager in poetic value—that Shakespearean scholars mostly ignored it for hundreds of years, treating it as the kind of mortifying spectacle to which the only suitable response was to avert one’s eyes. More recently, however, Titus has had a comeback, viewed more often than not through a lens of ultradark slasher-flick humor. How else can you handle a play in which the title character, whose left hand has just been sawed off, turns to his daughter—who has no hands at all—and tells her, “Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth”? Photograph: Courtesy Carol RoseggTitus Andronicus The multiple limb hackings in Titus Andronicus are part of a smorgasbord of grotesque recrimination that also includes adultery, murder, rape and mutilation. It is probably safer to approach such a text with comic distance and an emotional attitude that is, essentially, hands-off. But Red Bull Theater, New York’s hottest-blooded classical company, rarely aims for safety. Its stylish new production of Titus, directed by troupe leader Jesse Berger and starring the formidably sonorous Patrick Page, sustains a difficult balance instead, employing smart gallows

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Rating: Not starred Sometimes everything just goes wrong. Friends get together to snag valuable property from a vault, but they haven’t planned the operation well enough; they make unforced errors, they panic, and soon they’re holding people hostage in a sorry and confusing situation that drags on for hours. That is the story told in Dog Day Afternoon, the classic 1975 film about a real-life 1972 Brooklyn bank heist turned tense and sweaty standoff. It is also the story of Dog Day Afternoon, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s confounding new Broadway play, in which the heat never rises past lukewarm and it’s the paying audience that winds up robbed.  Photograph: Courtesy Evan ZimmermanDog Day Afternoon What gave the original crime an extra frisson of sensationalism was that the would-be robbers, John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturile, were known in the local gay community; Wojtowicz was planning to use the money to finance a sex-change operation for his lover, whom he had married the year before. The Life magazine article that inspired the movie—titled “The Boys in the Bank,” a nod to Mart Crowley’s closet-breaking play—described Wojtowicz as “a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino.” Journalistic dream casting came true when Pacino ended up starring in director Sidney Lumet’s motion picture, playing the Wojtowicz character, Sonny, opposite the haunted-hangdog John Cazale as Sal and a raw, unstable Chris Sarandon as Sonny’s wife, Le

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Rating: ★★★★ (four stars) Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant hits the current historical moment like a targeted strike. The play unfolds on a single afternoon, interrupted only by intermission, at the English country home of Roald Dahl. It is the summer of 1983, and the beloved children’s author has come under fire for his review of a book about Israel’s siege of West Beirut, in which Dahl opined of the Jews that “never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Rosenblatt began writing his play in 2018, five years before the October 7 attacks that would prompt both a wave of Israeli military action and a spike in anti-Zionism that has often blurred with—or overtly embraced—antisemitism. Giant couldn’t be timelier: It arrives on Broadway in the same month as a new Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.  The play’s topicality is only partially anesthetized by the historical distance that separates us from its story. Back at the Dahl house, the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach—played superbly by master thespian John Lithgow—is examining the proofs of his latest project, The Witches, as those in his orbit try to convince him to apologize for his comments about the Jews or at least walk them back a bit. These include his flinty but gracious fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), and his accommodat

Off Broadway review by Adam Feldman Rating: ★★★ (three stars) Imagine the surprise that Henry Darger’s landlords must have felt in 1972 when, in clearing out the cramped Chicago rooms where this reclusive menial worker had lived for decades, they discovered what he had left there: reams upon reams of writings—from an 15,000-page fantasy novel to an unfinished autobiography and a ten-year weather diary—as well as hundreds of watercolor illustrations in a bizarre and fascinating style, some as wide as ten feet across, many depicting young girls. Much of Darger’s work remains shocking even today, when he has been posthumously celebrated as an outsider artist for more than half a century. Idiosyncratic and colorful, it is also often disturbing in its violence and nudity: a singular vision of apocalyptic kitsch, rather as though Heironymous Bosch were illustrating 1920s children’s books.   Photograph: Courtesy Carol RoseggBughouse   While Darger’s secret life as a graphomaniacal hoarder was characterized by obsessive excess—within the cloisters of his home, at least—the portrait of him on display in Bughouse is exceedingly slim. John Kelly, fastidious and precise, plays the artist in a brief solo show whose text has been culled by Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) from Darger’s copious scribblings. We learn a bit about his troubled youth, much of it spent at a home for feeble-minded children. “I was taken several times to be examined by a doctor who on the second time I came sai

Theater review by Adam Feldman Rating: ★★★★ (Four stars) There are plants in the audience at the Bengsons’ latest theatrical song cycle—not spectators who are secretly part of the show, but actual potted greens. Abigail Bengson, the distaff side of the couple, entrusts two of them to people seated in the front row at the very beginning of the performance. My Joy Is Heavy looks back at the Covid pandemic of 2020, when she “was one of the lucky ones who spent lockdown in their terrifying, untouched childhood bedroom.” One of the small plants, she says, represents the people who died during that time; the other represents those who were born. If this gesture is slightly precious, it is nonetheless apt in a production that asks its audience to hold and consider life and death in tandem.  Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. FranklinMy Joy Is Heavy “It’s an old house,” Abigail says of her mother’s modest place in Vermont. “This house was built at a time when people gave birth and died at home.” Lee Jellinek’s set provides a deconstructed version of it: wooden platforms, a futon, a keyboard, a kitchen table crowded with pills and honey, a section in back for the six-piece band, a staircase going nowhere just for show. Colorful drawings on the fridge attest to the presence of the Bengsons’ three-year-old son, Louie; Abigail and her husband, Shaun, get an oasis of alone time for two hours every day when Grandma Kathy is watching him. Although Louie can be a handful—in one hilariously gross

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Rating: ★★★ (three stars) Ice cream, water fights, Miss Piggy, chocolate, Christopher Walken’s voice and hair: These are entries from the catalog of commonplace wonders assembled by the narrator in Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, who has spent most of his life compiling a list of the items that make it worthwhile. His ever-growing roster in the plus column is meant to guard against at least one giant minus: the gnawing depression he has felt since his mother’s first attempt at suicide, when he was seven years old.   Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyEvery Brilliant Thing On the subject of reasons for existing, one might well wonder: What is the raison d’être for the Broadway production of Every Brilliant Thing, which had a successful run in 2014 at the West Village’s cozy Barrow Street Theatre but did not seem to call out for revival a decade later at a venue four times the size? The answer to that question is brief: Daniel Radcliffe. Compact and scruffy in a casual outfit of sneakers, jeans and a lavender shirt, Radcliffe has a wired underdog energy that represents stage celebrity at its most approachable. And that matters a great deal in Every Brilliant Thing, a huge amount of which is built around audience participation. Before the play begins, its star is already onstage, greeting audience members and helping to cast some of them in parts to play in the story he will tell as the narrator. Some of these roles are important to t