Adam Feldman

The Tony Awards provide a showcase and public record of Broadway performances that are otherwise local and fleeting, and the most memorable numbers from Broadway musicals on the Tonys can echo in theater history for decades to come. But which are the best of the best? We've surveyed every televised number from a nominated musical or musical revival since the first national Tony telecast in 1967 to create this list of the all-time top Tony performances. Note that we're limiting ourselves here to numbers from Tony-nominated Broadway musicals in the years they were nominated, which means no special material, musical guests or opening medleys—but plenty of classic tunes, go-for-broke dance numbers and dazzling Broadway divas. Without further ado, and accepting the possibility that some of your favorite Broadway shows may not have made the cut, prepare to be razzle-dazzled by the greatest of the Great White Way. Note: Some of these videos may gray cover screens that make it look like they don't work. Don't worry. They do. RECOMMENDED: Complete guide to the 2025 Tony Awards 

The unusually bountiful 2024–25 Broadway season has spoiled us for choice. Deciding how to vote for the Tony Awards will be harder than it has been in a long time: Even more than usual, this year's ballot requires Tony voters to make wrenching decisions among candidates who are manifestly deserving. That, in turn, makes it hard for Tony pundits to predict all the winners with confidence. Still, even so, nonetheless: We have studied the 2025 Tony nominations, kept an ear cocked for buzz and talked to a multitude of voters, and now we are ready to make our final calls. Remember: These are our predictions, not our choices, and we are fully prepared—in some cases, even hopeful!—for the possibility that we may be guessing wrong. Here’s who we think will win when Cynthia Erivo host Broadway’s biggest night on June 8, 2025. RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the 2025 Tony Awards and in-depth interviews with select Tony nominees  Photograph: Courtesy Emilio MadridOh, Mary! BEST MUSICAL Buena Vista Social ClubDead OutlawDeath Becomes HerMaybe Happy EndingOperation Mincemeat The race: The field of contenders for the Tony Awards' marquee prize was notably deep this year: 14 new musicals, most of them good. Several shows that might have been shoo-ins for nominations in other years, such as Real Women Have Curves, didn't end up making the cut. Of the five that did, three are intimately scaled—which is not necessarily a handicap in this category, which has trended in recent years toward smal

The 2025 Tony Awards nominations were announced on May 1, and many of the races are real nail-biters this year. We'll all find out who wins on June 8, but the time before then gives us a chance to reflect on some of the season's most exciting work and dig into what goes into making it. Time Out has conducted in-depth interviews with select nominees, and are rolling out new interviews daily this week. Here's the full collection so far.  RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the 2025 Tony Awards

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?

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, 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 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 musicals are the beating heart of New York City. These days, your options are more diverse than ever: cultural game-changers like Hamilton and raucous comedies like The Book of Mormon are just down the street from total originals like Maybe Happy Ending and Dead Outlaw and family classics like The Lion King. Whether you're looking for classic Broadway songs, spectacular sets and costumes, star turns by Broadway divas or dance numbers performed by the hottest chorus boys and girls, there is always plenty to choose from. Here is our list of all the Broadway musicals that are currently running or on their way, followed by a list of those in smaller Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues. RECOMMENDED: The best Broadway shows

Public spaces come alive with free outdoor theater in New York City in the summer, and especially with the plays of William Shakespeare. The top destination, of course, is usually the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park presents excellent productions that among New York's best things to do in the summer. But you can also enjoy plays by Shakespeare and other classical masters elsewhere in the city: in Harlem and Brooklyn, at Battery and Riverside Parks, even in a Lower East Side parking lot. You might be surprised by the magic that can come from wonderful words, inventive actors and a mild summer breeze. (And don't forget to check out the free and cheap offerings on Little Island this summer.) RECOMMENDED: Full guide to things to do outside in NYC

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 the productions that are set to begin their Broadway runs in the remainder of 2025. (Other shows will be added when tickets to them go on sale.) Recommended: Current and Upcoming Off Broadway Shows

Broadway and Off Broadway productions get most of the attention, but to get a true sense of the range and diversity of New York theater, you need to look to the smaller productions collectively known as Off-Off Broadway. There are more than dozens of Off-Off Broadway spaces in New York, mostly with fewer than 99 seats. Experimental plays thrive in New York's best Off-Off Broadway venues; that's where you'll find many of the city's most challenging and original works. But Off-Off is more than just the weird stuff: It also includes everything from original dramas to revivals of rarely seen classics, and it's a good place to get early looks at rising talents. What's more, it tends to be affordable; while cheap Broadway tickets can be hard to find, most Off-Off Broadway shows are in the $15–$35 range. Here are some of the current shows that hold the most promise. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to Off Broadway shows in NYC 

Every summer, people flock to Central Park in New York to score Shakespeare in the Park tickets. This beloved free annual tradition is produced by the Public Theater at the open-air Delacorte Theater. Sure, you could stay at home and stream Shakespeare movies, but the live outdoor theater experience is unique—and certainly one of the best free things to do in NYC. As has been the case since Shakespeare in the Park began in 1962, the Public distributes free tickets, but it takes some dedication to get your hands on them. After two years in which distribution shifted largely to a digital lottery, the traditional in-person lineup in Central Park has returned as one of six different ways to get tickets. RECOMMENDED: Complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park 1. In Central Park at the Delacorte Tickets are distributed in front of the Delacorte Theater on a first-come, first-served basis at 12pm on the day of the show, so you’ll have to wait in line—likely for a long time—if you want to get in. But it's worth it. Before you go, you'll need to register for a Public Theater Patron ID. Click here do that. Central Park doesn’t open until 6am, and although the Public Theater doesn’t condone it, it is legal to camp out before then by the park entrance at Central Park West and 81st Street. A line monitor from the Public will escort any early birds in when the park opens. We recommend this option only for the very desperate; otherwise, arrive no later than 10am—though we recommend much earl

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.

[Note: These are Time Out New York's choices, not the actual Tony Award nominations. A complete list of real 2025 Tony nominations can now be found here.] This morning we are proud to announce the annual TONY* nominations, which honor the best work on Broadway in the 2024–25 season. We do not wish to confuse, so let us be clear: TONY stands for Time Out New York, and the list below is what we at TONY (i.e. Time Out New York) would nominate for the Tony Awards (i.e. the Antoinette Perry Awards) if we were the Tony Award nominating committee, which we are not. Please also note that we are choosing what we think should be nominated for Tonys, not predicting what we think will be nominated when the official nominations are announced at 8:30am on Thursday, May 1. It has been an extremely busy and competitive season, so several categories are overstuffed with deserving candidates. Choosing among them has been hard, but we've forced ourselves to do it, using the eligibility and category decisions of the actual Tony Awards as guidelines. (Two five-slot categories have expanded to six to reflect ties in our process.) Congratulations to the 2025 TONY* nominees!  * Time Out New YorkRECOMMENDED: Complete guide to the 2025 Tony Awards Best Play English by Sanaz ToossiThe Hills of California by Jez ButterworthJohn Proctor Is the Villain by Kimberly BelflowerOh, Mary! by Cole EscolaPurpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Best Musical Dead OutlawDeath Becomes HerJust in TimeMaybe Happy Endin

After taking last summer off for renovations to the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the Public Theater's cherished annual series Shakespeare in the Park returns with one of the Bard's most popular plays: an ever-popular comedy of cross-purposes, cross-dressing and cross-gartered socks. Resident director Saheem Ali (Buena Vista Social Club) directs a starry cast: Lupita Nyong’o and her brother Junior Nyong'o as Viola and Sebastian, nearly-identical siblings separated by a shipwreck; Sandra Oh as the mourning noblewoman who takes a shine to Viola when she is dressed as a boy; and Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Khris Davis, Bill Camp, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Moses Sumney as various figures in the lovely Olivia's orbit. Tickets are, as always, free; see our complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park tickets for details.

Barefoot Shakespeare Company invites you to kick off your shoes and watch a pair of Shakespeare comedies performed by actors who have just a month to learn their parts and are structly forbidden from rehearsing with each other beforehand in any way. The company nicknames it "Shakespeare for Sports Fans," and errors are part of the fun; a referee calls foul for missed lines and cues, and the audience is invited to bet on who will perform the best. The Comedy of Errors bats first on May 31, followed by A Midsummer Night's Dream on July 7. Both performances are free at Central Park's Summit Rock.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Just when you think you’ve figured out what Broadway is throwing at you, along comes a late-breaking curveball. Real Women Have Curves is the final show of the 2024–25 season, and it really is a ball: a joyful night of music and celebration. In many ways, this is a traditional Broadway musical—energetic, melodious, familiarly constructed—that honors traditional American values like loving your family, helping your community and working tirelessly to succeed as an entrepreneur. But since most of its characters are undocumented Latina immigrants to Los Angeles, Real Women is also, unexpectedly, the most relevant musical of the year.  Inspired by Josefina López's 1990 play and its 2002 film adaptation, Real Women Have Curves is set in 1987, well before the recent anti-immigrant scourge of ICE storms. Ana (Tatianna Córdoba) is a bright young woman who has been accepted to Columbia University, but is afraid to tell that to her mother, Carmen (Justina Machado); as a natural born American citizen, Ana plays an essential role in navigating the law on behalf of the dressmaking business that her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), has started with the family’s life savings. Although she is confident about her brains, Ana is less secure about her heavyset body, and Carmen isn’t encouraging on either account. (“You know what your problem is? You’re too smart,” she says. “This is why she don’t got no boyfriend. This and maybe ten…fifteen pounds.”) Re

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Elmer McCurdy wanted to be somebody. Born out of wedlock to a teenage mother in late-19th-century Maine, he grew up dreaming of infamy. (“I’m the outlaw Jesse James! Bang bang—!”) He got drunk, got in fights, moved out west; he joined a gang of Oklahoma train robbers, and he died in a shootout at the age 31. But that’s not where his story ended. McCurdy’s corpse got embalmed and wound up traveling the country as a ghoulish sideshow attraction. (“There’s something ‘bout a mummy that everybody needs.”) It changed hands for decades before landing in a California amusement-park ride, painted DayGlo red and hanging naked from a noose. In 1976, a crewman on TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man ripped an arm from it and only then discovered that this prop was once a man. Exactly which man it had been was by that point a mystery; by then it was just some body.  The weirder-than-fiction true story of McCurdy’s preservation and degradation is the subject of Dead Outlaw, a rowdy and darkly hilarious picaresque musical by the team behind 2016’s bittersweet The Band’s Visit: book writer Itamar Moses, songwriter David Yazbek (joined here by Erik Della Penna) and director David Cromer. These two shows couldn’t seem more different at first pass, but they share a deep curiosity and wry humanity; they embrace the complex and the unknown. “No one knows if it was cuz of that he started getting into trouble,” Dead Outlaw’s Bandleader (a perfectly gruff and rascally Jeb

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.   Unlike most other jukebox-musical sources, Darin doesn’t come with a long catalogue of signature hits. If you know his work, it’s probably from four songs he released in 1958 and 1959: the novelty soap bubble “Splish Splash,” the doo-wop bop “Dream Lover” and two European cabaret songs translated into English, “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife.”  What he does have is a tragically foreshortened life. “Bobby wanted nothing more than to entertain, wherever he could, however he could, in whatever time he had, which it turns out was very little,” Groff tells us at the top of the show. “He died at 37.” Darin’s bum heart—so weak that doctors thought he wouldn’t survive his teens—is the musical’s countdown clock; it beats like a ticking time bomb.  Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s agile scr

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  This show is of a kind that I shall dub an operettical: A British-Broadway hybrid that is cleverly synthetical.It starts with operetta of the comical varietyThat Sullivan and Gilbert wrote to tickle high society.The Pirates of Penzance, a pageant witty and Victorian, Premiered in 1880 on our calendar Gregorian. It still is entertaining but perhaps not in a date-night way; It seems a bit too fusty for revival on the Great White Way. So Rupert Holmes has come along to pump some Broadway jazz in it:To add a little spice and put some Dixieland pizzazz in it.And thanks to these injections, neither rev’rent nor heretical,We now have Holmes’s model for a modern operettical.  Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Best known for Drood (and also for his hit “Piña Colada Song”), He hasn’t wrecked the story or egregiously forgot a song. But to ensure the whole endeavor’s jazzier and bluer leans, He takes the show from Cornwall and resets it down in New Orleans.The Crescent City’s sass and brass have quite rejuvenated it As Joe Joubert and Daryl Waters have reorchestrated it.(They’ve also added melodies that never here have been afore,On loan from Iolanthe, The Mikado and from Pinafore.) With silliness and energy the show is chockablock, well-set Amid the brightly colored NOLA streets of David Rockwell’s set. And now that we have looked at questions musico-aesthetical, We move on to the plot of this diverting operettical. Pirat

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Stranger Things is happening. Nearly three years after plans were announced for a theatrical prequel to Netflix’s hit nostalgia-horror series, and 18 months after the debut of that prequel in London, the show has finally arrived on Broadway. While it calls itself The First Shadow, there’s nothing dark or stealthy about the massive production that is now possessing the Marquis Theatre, a second-floor hotel auditorium built Poltergeist-style on the graves of five old venues that were razed to make way for the Marriott. There’s something apt, inevitable even, about Stranger Things taking over this accursed space. Like it or not: It’s heeeee-eeeere. Directed by Stephen Daldry and co-directed by Justin Martin, Stranger Things announces its maximalist style from the outset with an eye-popping interdimensional disaster. It is 1943, and the U.S.S. Eldridge—yes, a J.K. Rowling–level pun on eldritch—is the subject of a secret experiment by a government outpost that I regret to inform you is named “Project Rainbow base Marquis.” The goal is to make the Eldridge invisible, but instead it moves to a different plane, as though tearing through a timespace map of the known world. Here be dragons, or rather demogorgons: slinky monsters with faces that open like carnivorous flowers. The ship’s captain stares into the Abyss, and the Abyss stares back.  Stranger Things: The First Shadow | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman When this cold open ends, a Stranger T

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  More than a century has gone by since an unfortunate Kentucky spelunker named Floyd Collins, in search of money and glory, made national headlines by getting trapped in a subterranean cavern. “I just know it’s my lucky day!” sings Floyd—played by a hale and hearty Jeremy Jordan—irresistibly tempting the gods of dramatic irony as he grapples through the dark at the start of the musical bearing his name. “There’s a kind of awe / You can’t catch in a photograph,” he continues. “S’like a giant jaw / It’s calling me.” But when he heeds that call, the jaw snaps shut: A passageway collapses and he’s pinned there by debris, all but sealed in a cave of wonders where no amount of wishing can save him. From this point on, there is nowhere for Floyd Collins, or Floyd Collins, to go.  Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Musical theater tends to be dynamic, but Tina Landau, as a writer, seems more interested in stasis. In her new musical Redwood, which opened on Broadway in February, grief drives a woman up a tree; in Floyd Collins, which premiered in 1996, dreams strand a man underground. (Landau wrote the show’s book and additional lyrics, and directed its original production as well as its current one at Lincoln Center.) Both pieces examine a person fixed in place within a vast natural world, but in neither case is the central figure’s interior journey compelling enough to justify the lack of plot. What this one has that the other one doesn

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Smash, adapted from the non-hit TV series of the same name, begins with a canny feint. Its opening number is a fully staged song, “Let Me Be Your Star,” from Smash’s show-within-a-show, Bombshell, a Broadway biomusical about Marilyn Monroe. Robyn Hurder—as Ivy Lynn, the actress cast as Marilyn—sounds great singing it, and she hits all her marks as she rushes through the motions of the screen star’s best-known imagery: laying handprints at Grauman's, holding a white dress as it billows up around her, cooing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Yet something is off; the number feels corny and busy. Doubts about Smash creep in: Is this supposed to be…good? But then the show’s focus pulls back, and we are in a fluorescent-lit studio where Bombshell is being rehearsed, and Bombshell’s director, Nigel—played, in full comic bloom, by Brooks Ashmanskas—has notes. “Is the tempo too bright?” (Yes.) “Are there too many bits?” (Yes.) Does our star have time to breathe?” (Not enough.) For a moment, you feel relief: Phew! They know. But knowingness, it turns out, is not the same as knowledge, and it certainly isn't power.  Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The TV version of Smash, which ran on NBC in 2012 and 2013, was a series that many theater fans loved to hate-watch. The same people who were grateful to see backstage-Broadway representation in mass culture at all were also highly sensitive to its potential for embarrassment, of which there was plenty. By

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “Old friends do tend to become old habit,” sings a character in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, and when it comes to work by Sondheim—one of the best friends American musical theater ever had—it’s a habit that Broadway is happy to indulge. Not a year goes by lately, not a blessed year, without at least one Sondheim show on the big boards, all of them worth seeing: West Side Story in 2020, Company in 2021, Into the Woods in 2022, Sweeney Todd and Merrily in 2023, Gypsy in 2024. Artists keep returning to this well because the well is so deep; they can still throw down a bucket and come up with something new. That’s less true of Old Friends, a revue of Sondheim songs that includes selections from all of the musicals listed above and several others besides. Devised by the British überproducer Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Matthew Bourne (Swan Lake), the show began as a 2022 gala concert, which was then reworked into a 2023 London production that featured some of the concert’s performers, most notably the great leading lady Bernadette Peters in what was somehow her West End debut. Now Manhattan Theatre Club has brought a copy of that copy to Broadway, with seven members of the 2023 cast—Peters, Lea Salonga, Bonnie Langford, Joanna Riding, Jeremy Secomb, Gavin Lee and Jason Pennycooke—performing alongside eight new additions, including The Prom's Beth Leavel.  Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy To those unfamiliar wit

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Try to imagine this: a family-friendly Broadway musical based on a beloved cartoon character from the Great Depression. Maybe she has distinctive hair and a signature red dress. Maybe she’s looking to find out who she is, so she runs away and gets dazzled by the bright lights and bustle of NYC. Her best friends could be, I don’t know, a dog and an orphan girl. And this may sound crazy, but: What if her sunniness and can-do optimism had the power to inspire progressive political change?  It’d never work. Just kidding, just kidding! It worked like the dickens in the 1977 moppet musical Annie, and it works again—minus Annie’s more Dickensian elements—in Boop! The Musical. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, this is an old-fashioned candy shop of a show, where tasty confections are sold in bulk. When Boop! is corny, it’s candy corn. Gorge on the multicolor gumdrops of its high-energy production numbers; chew the jelly beans of its gentle social-mindedness; let the caramel creams of its love story melt slightly oversweetly in your mouth. And above all, savor this show’s red-hot cinnamon heart: Jasmine Amy Rogers, making a sensational Broadway debut as the 1930s animated-short icon Betty Boop.   Boop! The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In our world, Betty is the quintessential cartoon jazz baby, a Fleischer Studios flapper inspired by singer Helen Kane (famous for her "boop-oop-a-doop" tag in songs like “I Wanna Be Loved by

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  When viewed in retrospect, at least, some matches are doomed from the start. That’s half the story in Jason Robert Brown’s he-sang, she-sang musical The Last Five Years, which looks at a failed relationship—between Jamie, a rising novelist, and Cathy, a plateaued actress—from both sides and in two temporal directions. It is also half the story in the show’s woefully uneven new revival with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren, directed by Whitney White. The balance is broken: She has all the weight.  As its Playbill insert helpfully illustrates, The Last Five Years lays out the narratives of its two exes in the form of an X: His side of the story moves forward, starting at the end of their first date; hers unfolds in reverse, starting at the end of their marriage. They’re at cross-purposes, and aside from a wedding song at the intersection of their timelines—the lovely “The Next Ten Minutes,” which cleverly incorporates the words “I do”—their stories are never on the same page. Until the counterpoint finale, there’s only one duet in this whole two-person show; the rest of the score is apportioned into alternating solos.  The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Brown’s structural choice suggests an insurmountable problem in Jamie and Cathy’s romance. If they can’t connect, maybe it’s because each of them puts the other on a pedestal. They love each other’s types. Jamie, who sees himself as a little Jewish nebbish, is excited by the

Broadway's unusually rich 2024–25 season comes to an end on Sunday, June 8, when the 2025 Tony Awards get handed out at Radio City Music Hall. The nominations have been made, the in-depth profiles of nominees have been written, our predictions have been nervously lodged. Now there's nothing left but the cheering—and, of course, the singing and dancing. The CBS broadcast on Sunday night will include musical performances by nine of this year's contenders: Best Musical nominees Dead Outlaw, Death Becomes Her, Maybe Happy Ending, Operation Mincemeat and Buena Vista Social Club; and Best Musical Revival nominees Gypsy, Sunset Blvd., Floyd Collins and Pirates! The Penzance Musical. If that's not enough to sate your hunger for Broadway, there will also be numbers from Real Women Have Curves and Just in Time. But wait, there's more! The original cast of Hamilton is scheduled to take to the stage to commemorate the show's tenth anniversary on Broadway. The show is also sure to include some original numbers—including, we assume, at least one for this year's host, the wickedly talented Cynthia Erivo. RECOMMENDED: A complete guide to the 2025 Tony Awards   Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyJust in Time   Here are seven tips for watching the Tony Awards this year. 1. The Tony Awards will air live from coast to coast Theater is all about the thrill of the live moment. But until recently, viewers who weren't in the Eastern Time Zone watched the Tony telecast hours after happened. In the

Jessica Hecht has never won a Tony Award, which is a fact so surprising that it barely even makes sense as a sentence. Tonys are not, of course, the only of marker of artistic achievement in theater, or even a consistently reliable one at all. But Hecht is not just an extraordinary actor with a unique individual style that might be described as intensely grounded flightiness. She is also a pillar in the New York theater world, and especially its nonprofit division: In a career that spans more than 30 years, she has starred in six Broadway shows that were produced by either Manhattan Theatre Club or the Roundabout, plus Off Broadway offerings by the likes of the Public, Lincoln Center Theater and Playwrights Horizons. (She has starred in commercial productions, too, like 2010's A View from the Bridge, opposite Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson, and 2015's Fiddler on the Roof, opposite fellow stage treasure Danny Burstein; TV fans may know her from her recurring roles as Susan Bunch on Friends or Gretchen Schwartz on Breaking Bad.) In her spare time, she serves as the executive director of a nonprofit operation of her own: the Campfire Project, which provides arts-based therapy for displaced people in refugee camps around the world. Her third Tony nomination is in the category of Best Featured Actress in a Play, for her unforgettable performance in Eureka Day as a staunch antivaxxer at a progressive day school. We spoke with her in depth about her approach to acting, her fa

"I'm obsessed with roller coasters," says Sam Pinkleton, the director of the Broadway smash Oh, Mary! "Much more than theater, unfortunately." He's semi-joking about that last part, but it does give a sense of the sensibility he has brought to Cole Escola's zany pseudo-historical farce about Mary Todd Lincoln—who, in Escola's fevered comic vision, is a raging boozehound clinging to delusional hopes of stardom as a cabaret chanteuse. It has been Pinkleton's job to keep the play on track as, not unlike a roller coaster, it races through Mary's wild highs and lows, evoking screams of laughter. The assignment is harder than the result makes it look: not only to keep the comedy rolling, nearly without stopping for breath, but also to sustain the right tonal balance of irreverence and celebration, and even to tease out latent strands of feeling. Pinkleton has worked on nine Broadway shows, but mostly as a movement director or choreographer; he earned his first Tony nomination for his excellent work on Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Oh, Mary!, his Broadway debut as a director, has earned him a second nomination this year. We talked with him about about actresses, camp and what makes Oh, Mary! such a wild ride. In advance of the Tony Awards on June 8, Time Out has conducted in-depth interviews with select nominees. We’ll be rolling out those interviews every day this week; the full collection to date is here. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. RECOMMEND

Director Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey make real magic onstage, and they've been practicing it for more than 25 years. The two met when they were teenagers at Interlochen, the Michigan boarding school for the arts, where they became fast friends and roommates. "Our mischief started then, and we've been working together ever since," Arden says. Their collaboration intensified in the 2010s, when Arden shifted from acting to directing, and they've recently been on a stunning Broadway roll. In the 2022–23 season, the two gave us A Christmas Carol and Parade; they are now at work on a pair of new musicals, The Queen of Versailles and The Lost Boys, that are scheduled to open in the season ahead. And this past season, they poured their creative energies into the most enchanting show on Broadway: Maybe Happy Ending, for which they have both earned Tony Award nominations. (It's the fourth for Arden and the third for Laffrey; Arden won in 2023 for Parade.) Maybe Happy Ending, an entirely original musical by Will Aronson and Hue Park, is the bittersweet story of two helper robots consigned to a retirement home in a near-future Seoul, where they find ways to connect in the shadow of obsolescence. The show's excellent cast is small: Darren Criss and Helen J Shen as the bots, Oliver and Claire; Marcus Choi as Oliver's former owner, James (and James's son Junseo); and Dez Duron as Gil Brentley, a 1950s jazz crooner for whom James and Oliver have a special affection. But while

Brooks Ashmanskas has been doing his thing so well for so long that it's easy to take him for granted. In a Broadway career that has spanned nearly 30 years and included 16 shows, he has been one of the Great White Way's most valuable musical-comedy players, with a speciality in playing flamboyant gay men. Nobody does it better, and this past season found him lending his talents to two different productions: a revival of the fairy-tale musical Once Upon a Mattress, in which he played the scheming court wizard, and the new backstage tuner Smash, in which he stars as the stressed-out director of a struggling Marilyn Monroe biomusical called Bombshell. Smash has earned him a Tony nomination (his third) in the category of Best Featured Actor in a Musical, but his character, Nigel, is many ways the show's central role. That in itself is remarkable, especially on the heels of his leading performance in 2018's The Prom as Barry Glickman, a vain actor on a misguided mission to enlighten midwestern homophobes. The kind of person Ashmanskas has mastered playing—a gay man who is highly theatrical but not a drag queen—has long been relegated to the margins; it is a sign of changing times, but also of Ashmanskas's prodigious skills, that this type can now be trusted to hold center stage. The actor deserves more credit for that than he has received (or than, ever self-effacing, he would probably accept): It is partly thanks to the strength and the brilliant colors that he brings to it, an

If you ride the curves well enough, sometimes you come full circle. One of Justina Machado’s first major roles as an actor was in a 1992 Chicago production of Josefina Lopez’s Real Women Have Curves, in which she starred as Ana, the play’s big-dreaming and full-figured teenage Latina heroine. Machado went on to become a beloved TV star on such series as Six Feet Under and the reboot of One Day at a Time; meanwhile, Lopez’s play went Hollywood, too, where it was made into a 2002 indie film. Now that Real Women Have Curves has been further adapted into a warm, funny and entertaining new Broadway musical, Machado has been reunited with the material—but this time as Ana’s loving but hard-headed mother, Carmen. Her performance is a master class in presence, timing and old-fashioned comic knowhow, and it has garnered her a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. We chatted with Machado about her history with the show and her experience of performing it for adoring audiences today.  In advance of the Tony Awards on June 8, Time Out has conducted in-depth interviews with select nominees. We’ll be rolling out those interviews every day this week; the full collection to date is here. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the 2025 Tony Awards This isn’t your first Broadway musical: You also did a stint in In The Heights in 2009. How is this experience different from that one? Well, in In The Heights, I was just taking over for

The nominations for the 2025 Tony Awards were announced this morning, honoring productions from the 2024–25 Broadway season. The Tonys are given out each year by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing to honor outstanding achievements in 26 categories of Broadway artistry. The actors Sarah Paulson and Wendell Pierce revealed the full list of nominees live on YouTube at 9am. Among the 2024-25 Broadway productions earning the most nominations are the new musicals Maybe Happy Ending (10), Death Becomes Her (10), Buena Vista Social Club (10) and Dead Outlaw (7) and Just in Time (6) and the new plays The Hills of California (7), John Proctor Is the Villain (7), The Hills of California (7), Purpose (6), The Picture of Dorian Gray (6) and Oh, Mary! (5), as well as the revivals Sunset Blvd. (7), Floyd Collins (6) and Gypsy (5).    The Tony Awards ceremony, hosted this year by Cynthia Erivo, will be held at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 8, 2025, and the main part will be televised on CBS in a three-hour broadcast starting at 8pm ET. (The event can also be watched live throughout the country by premium subscribers to the streaming service Paramount+.)  RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the 2025 Tony Awards Here is a complete list of the official nominations for the 2025 Tony Awards (not to be confused with the 2025 TONY* nominations, which we revealed yesterday). Best Play English by Sanaz ToossiThe Hills of California by Jez ButterworthJohn Proctor Is the Villain by Kim

In the four years since it opened its gates, Little Island has become one of New York's primo warm-weather destinations: 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. Performances have been part of Little Island's mission from the start, but the offerings have gotten more and more ambitious. Last year, the park upped its game to present a sold-out season of world premieres. Building on that success, Little Island has just announced its lineup for its 2025 season, which includes many new works by major artists. Many of the shows are free, and those that aren't cost just $25; to buy tickets to them, visit Little Island's ticketing page on TodayTix.   Photograph: Courtesy Julieta CervantesTwyla Tharp's How Long Blues (2024) Curated by artistic director Zack Winokur, The 2025 season includes three long multiweek runs at the Amph. The first is The Counterfeit Opera, Kate Tarker and Dan Schlosberg's new adaptation of The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's 1728 satirical music

Before Tina Fey's movie Mean Girls (2004) there was Daniel Waters's Heathers (1988): a pitch-black comedy about how high-school popularity can be murder. And before the Broadway musical Mean Girls (2018), there was Off Broadway's Heathers: The Musical (2014). And this June, more than a decade after its original run, that Heathers musical—which has acquired, like the film, an enthusiastic cult following—will return to New York City in a revised version that is likely to appeal to newcomers as well as to the show's loyal fans (known as Corn Nuts, after one character's dying words). Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up. Heathers has been adapted for the stage by Kevin Murphy, who also made a 2005 musical out of Reefer Madness, and Laurence O'Keefe, who co-wrote the score for 2007's Legally Blonde with his wife, Mean Girls lyricist. The show had plenty of admirers in its initial five-month run at New World Stages—including Time Out critic David Cote, who graded it "a solid A" and praised it for "a depth of feeling and a lyrical polish that elevate the material above a retro goof." But it has really caught fire in the United Kingdom since then; a 2018 version of Heathers, tweaked by Murphy and O'Keefe, has enjoyed several hit runs on the West End and a trio of tours of the UK and Ireland. We've known since last year that the British production, directed by Andy Fickman, was planning to move to New York. Now it's official: Heathers the Musical will return to New York Stages for a limited

The wait is over! Last August, it was announced that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who played lovable slacker doofuses in the 1989 time-travel comedy Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and its 1991 and 2000 sequels, would reunite to play the inertial tramps in Samuel Beckett's masterwork Waiting for Godot. But no specific theater or dates were given for this revival, which rialto wags instantly dubbed Bill and Ted's Existentialist Adventure, and after more than eight months, skeptics wondered if the production might never come to pass—which would have been, I think we can agree, bogus.   This week, however, Waiting for Godot's producers nailed many of the details down. Directed by England's Jamie Lloyd, who also helmed the recent Broadway revivals of A Doll's House with Jessica Chastain and Sunset Blvd. with Nicole Scherzinger, the production will run at the Hudson Theatre—which has a fascinating history—from September 13, 2025, through January 4, 2026, with an official opening on September 28. Reeves will play the role of Estragon and Winter will be Vladimir; casting for the play's other two major roles has not yet been announced.    Photograph: ShutterstockKeanu Reeves Waiting for Godot, which Beckett wrote in French, debuted in Paris in 1953; his English version premiered in 1955 and reached Broadway the following year, where it starred Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall. The show depicts a pair of men in a barren landscape, killing time as they await the long-delayed arrival o

Hear ye, hear ye! And gather round! Audible Theater is teaming up with Together, a new accessible-theater initiative led by megastar Hugh Jackman and superproducer Sonia Friedman, for an eight-week series of programming at Off Broadway's Minetta Lane Theatre this spring. The centerpiece of the series will be full productions of two new plays in rep, performed by casts that include Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, Justice Smith and Ella Beatty. Tickets to these engagements will be made affordable in two different ways. A quarter of the total will be free: Audible and Together are working with the cheap tickets experts of TDF—best known for its TKTS discount booths in Times Square and at Lincoln Center—to distribute 25% of the seats at each performance, gratis, to TDF's community partners. (That includes seniors, students, veterans, teachers and more.) An additional quarter of the house will be priced at a mere $35 and set aside for same-day purchase at the box office or through a digital lottery. Tickets for the remaining half of the house go on sale at noon on Monday, April 7; the prices for those ones have not been announced, but it's safe to say they'll be quite a bit higher than $35.  Photograph: Courtesy of the artistLiev Schreiber Starting April 28, Jackman will play a university professor and Beatty (Ghosts) will be his star pupil in the U.S. premiere of Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a prize-winning 2020 two-hander by Canada's Hannah Moscovitch. Starti

Is the Cats in the fabulous hats coming back? Last year's Ballroom-culture revival of Andrew Llloyd Webber's fanciful musical Cats, adapted from lightly comic poems by T.S. Eliot, was one of the happiest theater surprises in recent memory. The original Broadway production ran for a then-record 18 years, but a taxidermic 2016 revival and a widely derided 2019 film dampened whatever enthusiasm was left for the property—until directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch found a way to make the old engine purr again. "It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat," I wrote in my review of the 2024 production. "But now along comes a thrilling reconception at the Perelman Performing Arts Center that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights."   Photograph: Courtesy Evan ZimmermanCats: The Jellicle Ball Reader, I bought merch. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, as the fur-and-whisker-free revival was titled, became the talk of the town, and when its PAC run came to an end there was much speculation about whether and when it would transfer to Broadway. Since the production is staged in the round, the natural choice for a venue would be Circle in the Square, but it's a small house—which makes profitability hard for a show as big as Cats—and it was already booked for the fall; and completely redesigning the seating of a regular venue, a