Adam Feldman

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

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 remainder of 2025. (Other shows may be added if they are announced.) Recommended: Current and Upcoming Off Broadway Shows

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 family classics like The Lion King. Whether you're looking fo 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

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

Getting seats to the best Broadway shows usually requires quite a bit of advance planning. But what if you haven't planned, and you urgently need to see a show tomorrow or even tonight? Don't panic: There are plenty of options for last-minute tickets, especially if you’re willing to put in some legwork. It partly depends on what you're willing to pay and how much risk you're willing to take—and, of course, on plain old luck. If everything goes your way, you might even luck into cheap Broadway tickets, great seats or a chance to see hit shows that you would never have been able to get into earlier. Here is our insider guide to buying last-minute Broadway tickets. The day before the show: Enter the digital lottery Many Broadway shows—including Aladdin, The Book of Mormon and Hadestown—conduct digital lotteries for cheap tickets on the day before each performance. In most cases, you enter the lottery online, then wait until later the same day to find out by email if you've won; if you do, you'll need to reply to the ticket offer within an hour or you'll lose your chance. A few shows, such as Wicked, do their drawings on the morning of the show itself; others have drawings once a week, notably the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child $40 ticket lottery and the $10 Hamilton lottery, both of which happen on Fridays and cover the week ahead. For a full list of shows that offer lotteries, consult Broadway on a Budget or Playbill's Broadway and Off Broadway listings. The morning of the s

Broadway and Off Broadway shows are essential parts of New York's cultural life, but the ever-rising cost of tickets can make it hard to take full advantage of what the city's stages have to offer. Last season, good tickets to see Denzel Washington in Othello or George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck went for as much as $900 a seat! The situation is not as dire as it may seem, however: Discount Broadway tickets are everywhere, and modern technology makes it easier than ever to find cheap seats, even at the last minute. If you play your cards right, and with a little luck, you can even score affordable tickets to sold-out hits like Hamilton and Oh, Mary! If you’re ready to dive in, click through our guide to getting cheap Broadway tickets. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to all Broadway showsRECOMMENDED: Discount theater tickets TKTS: a Times Square staple with a sibling uptown The classic way to find deeply discounted tickets is to wait in line, on the day of the show, at TDF’s TKTS Booth under the red steps in Duffy Square (47th Street and Broadway). All but the biggest Broadway hits are on sale there, up to 50 percent off. If you are not looking to see a musical, the Times Square booth has a "Play Express" window that will cut down your wait time. The Times Square TKTS Booth is open every day of the week, starting at 3pm for evening performances and 11am for matinees on Wednesdays, Thursdays and weekends. The booth closes at 8pm. You can buy tickets to either same-day performa

It's festival time! Broadway takes an annual summer vacation after the rush of the Tony Awards, with only a trickle of new shows until the fall, and most major Off Broadway companies catch their breaths for a few weeks, too. But theater abhors a vacuum, so festivals rush to fill it with less expensive offerings. Some are rigorously curated, while others are aimed more at beginners. Take some time to look through their offerings; somewhere among these hundreds of shows, there's bound to be something just right for you. RECOMMENDED: The best free and cheap outdoor theater this summer

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 

In many ways, summer is a quiet stage for stages in New York City. Almost no new Broadway shows open until September, and there are also fewer Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway shows and Dance performances to check out. Where the summer theater scene really comes to life is in the world beyond conventional venues: parks, parking lots and amphitheaters where—for free or for very cheap—savvy audiences can enjoy art in the great outdoors. The most famous example is the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park, which returns this year after a season of renovations, but don't sleep on the high-level offerings of New York Classical Theatre and Classical Theatre of Harlem, or the ambitious summer programming at Little Island, or the annual smorgasbord of movement known as the Battery Dance Festival. Here, in chronological order, are your ten best bets this summer. RECOMMENDED: The best current Broadway shows  

When it comes to theater, who says you have to just sit and watch? Immersive theater in New York City puts you right in the middle of the action, and often draws you in to participate. Whereas most Broadway shows still follow the traditional proscenium-arch model, some some immersive Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway productions even dispense with the idea of a stage entirely, letting you follow your own paths through unconventional spaces. To help you navigate the maze of options, here is our list of the city's best immersive and interactive shows. RECOMMENDED: 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

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?

Since the death of Don Rickles in 2017, Jeff Ross has been insult comedy’s top banana. His most famous running gig, throwing barbed one-liners as the host of celebrity roasts at the Friar’s Club and eventually on Comedy Central, has earned him the sobriquet “Roastmaster General.” He has even come to resemble Rickles a bit in recent years; his frame is thick, and a wide mouth dominates his thumblike head. (As a result of alopecia, he is bald as a ping-pong ball except for a scraggly mustache.) But a typical Rickles set found him humorously savaging his audience with brief interludes of sentimentality and an envoi to assure the crowd that it was all in loving fun and he was actually a mensch—whereas Ross, in his Broadway solo show Take a Banana for the Ride, turns that structure inside out. If you’ve come to be insulted, you’ll have to wait: The first 80 minutes are the sweetie part, and only at the end does he walk down the aisles to skewer volunteers on the fly.  Ross avoids the ethnic stereotyping typical of Rickles—and his contemporary Jackie Mason, whose shows were a staple of Broadway from the 1980s through the 2000s—except when it comes to himself. Take a Banana for the Ride is explicitly grounded in Ross’s Jewishness, which he credits in part with his penchant for jokes. (“My real last name is Lipshultz,” he says. “‘That’s an old Hebrew word that means, ‘Hey, you oughta change that.’”) He was a black-belt karate kid, but he quickly learned that humor could also be usefu

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment. Comfort has always been central to this show’s appeal. Mamma Mia! is constructed around nearly two dozen 1970s Europop bops by the Swedish megagroup ABBA, including “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper” and “Take a Chance on Me”: all the ABBA songs you love plus a few others you probably don’t have strong feelings about one way or the other. (Of the 19 tracks on the greatest-hits album ABBA Gold, the only one missing here is “Fernando,” which was sliced from an early draft.) These songs—written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, sometimes with help from Stig Anderson—are easy to swallow and hard to resist, with infectious melodies and lyrics that are, shall we say, direct: Their titles include "Honey, Honey," "Money, Money, Money," "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" and "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do."  Mamma Mia! | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus But while Mamma Mia! originally inspired warm fuzzies for its score, it now off

After a special program to celebrate the reopening of Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, the free annual Battery Dance Festival moves to the North Esplanade of Rockefeller Park for a week of performances by a mix of local and international companies, performing outdoors near the sparkling water at sunset. The lineup for the 44th edition features multiple U.S. or world premieres, and the participating artists include visitors from the Netherlands, India, Bangladesh, Spain, South Korea and Germany, Taiwan, Romania and Indonesia. The slate includes an August 15 program devoted to Indian dance. All six shows are general admission, and there's a rain date on Sunday, August 17. Below is a full schedule of the artists and companies that will be performing. Visit the festival's website for additional details.  Pallavi Krishnan | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist Tuesday, August 12:John Manzari & Band, excerpts from RecenterPace University Dancing to Connect Battery Dance, Sense of BelongingFaizah Grootens, While You’re HereBulareyaung Dance Company, Colors  Wednesday, August 13:UNARTE, Verso Roto Theater Plauen - Zwickau Ballet Ensemble, EdenBulareyaung Dance Company, Colors Faizah Grootens, While You’re Here Platforma 13, Balkan Ballerinas   Platforma 13: Balkan Ballerinas | Photograph: Courtesy Marko Pejovic Thursday, August 14:Kar' mel Small, La Manta de Reina Theater Plauen - Zwickau Ballet Ensemble, Eden Platforma 13, Balkan Ballerinas UNARTE, Verso Roto Buglisi Dance Theatre, Sospir

Writer-director Dan Bianchi, whose Radiotheatre produces an annual festival devoted to the works of horror master H.P. Lovecraft, offers hot aural action in this multimedia audiotheater adaptation of Lovecraft's creepy 1930 novella about alien visitation. 

Taylor Mac is a Fabergé radical: beautiful, ridiculous and full of hidden tricks. In both cabaret-style performances and more formal plays, the writer-performer—whose pronoun of choice is the puckish judy—pilots audiences through fantastical journeys, guided by the compass of a magnetic individuality. This latest work, very loosely inspired by Molière's The Bourgeois Gentleman, sends up the plight of artists who must prostrate themselves before powerful sources of funding. Mac's character is the choreographer of a ballet about Prometheus and gets the play's most outrageously funny running joke, which involves the cuddly character actor and savage playwright Wallace Shawn. But Mac and director Darko Tresnjak generously parcel out the biggest comic scenes to others: Jason O'Connell as a monstrously rich manchild with an unspeakably terrible name; Sierra Boggess as a glorious beacon of celebrity virtue whose name can only be sung in wonder; and Jennifer Regan as a pitifully abject artistic director. Bedecked in Anita Yavich's witty costumes, they're delightfully larger-than-life. The overall spirit is merrily pedagogical, and as always, Mac provides philosophical food for thought; judy bites the hand that feeds judy, then spits the flesh in the audience's mouth like a playfully angry mother bird.  Prosperous Fools | Photograph: Courtesy Travis Emery Hackett

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  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 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  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 attendance is at a historical high, but sales still tend to dip in September and January, even for the very best Broadway shows. To address that issue, the industry has come up with Broadway Week, a twice-annual half-price sale for tickets to nearly every Broadway production. The name is just a bit misleading: The discounted period in question actually lasts for several weeks. The latest iteration will span from September 8 through September 21, 2025—and the twofer tickets go on sale at 10am ET on Tuesday, August 19.  To get the most out of Broadway Week, the trick is to be ready to go when the floodgates open. Visit the Broadway ticket vendors Telecharge and Ticketmaster in advance to make sure that your accounts and credit cards there are up to date. Then, at 10am on August 19, go to Broadway Week website to peruse the list of participating shows and snatch up the best seats for the ones you want most.  RECOMMENDED: A full guide to Broadway Week in NYC The tickets sold through Broadway Week tend to be ones that producers are most eager to sell: in balconies, mezzanines and side areas. But in recent years, the Broadway Week program has offered an additional option: If you want the best seats in the house, you can upgrade your order and pay $125 for tickets that might otherwise cost a whole lot more. One wrinkle: The list of participating Broadway shows is not revealed until the tickets actually go on sale, so you can't decide in advance which ones to try for. But t

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 in 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,

Buzz has been building for weeks that the much-loved musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which depicts an orthographic competition among anguished adolescent nerds, would be returning to New York City for a 20th-anniversary revival. Now it's official: Time Out has learned that the funny and touching 2005 tuner will be back for a spell at Off Broadway's New World Stages, starting this November, in what is billed as a 14-week limited engagement.  The original production of Spelling Bee won two Tony Awards, for Rachel Sheinkin's book and featured actor Dan Fogler, and helped launch the careers of actors including Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jose Llana, Derrick Baskin and Lisa Howard. News of the upcoming revival comes at a bittersweet moment for fans of the show: Its brilliantly idiosyncratic composer, William Finn (Falsettos), died in April at the age of 73, and six Broadway theaters—the Gershwin, the Broadhurst, the Walter Kerr, the Hayes, Circle in the Square and the Vivian Beaumont—will be honoring him by dimming their lights at 6:45pm tomorrow (June 17). Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyThe Kennedy Center cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Hopes for a Spelling Bee revival have been growing since last fall's production of the show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., which was directed and choreographed by Danny Mefford. The New World Stages version will also be overseen by Mefford, who is best known as the choreograph

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

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