Jonathan Groff in Little Shop of Horrors
Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid-Kuser | Little Shop of Horrors
Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid-Kuser

Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Here is where to find reviews, details, schedules, prices and ticket information about Off Broadway shows in New York

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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. (Those that seat fewer than 100 people usually fall into the Off-Off Broadway category.) 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 revivals at the Signature Theatre and crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the best Off Broadway shows usually cost less than their cousins on the Great White Way—even if you score cheap Broadway tickets. Use our listings to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows.

RECOMMENDED: Full list of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals in New York

Off Broadway shows to see in New York right now: reviews, tickets and listings

  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Five college girls face a big test of their friendship when they stay up together to polish off their final coursework in Natalie Margolin's new play, directed by Jaki Bradley. Expect, if not outright slumber-party games, at least some Adderall-driven version of Truth or Dare. Tony nominees Julia Lester (Into the Woods) and Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) share the stage with Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu and Alyah Chanelle Scott in the world premiere.

  • Comedy
  • Upper East Side

59E59's second annual Amplify Festival, devoted to the work of playwright Chisa Hutchinson (Somebody's Daughter), concludes with the NYC premiere of this fraught drama about a rural Marylander whose desire to join a white supremacist group is at odds with the results of his ancestry test. Jade King Carroll directs the production for Primary Stages, which helped develop the play and featured it in the 2018 edition of its Fresh Ink Reading Series. Daniel Abeles, Molly Carden, Luke Robertson, Tobias Segal, Andrea Syglowski, Amber Reauchean Williams and Victor Williams form the cast.

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  • Drama
  • Midtown West

Urban Stages presents the winners of its open-submission Dynamic Duos writing competetion in a double bill of one-act, two-character plays: Lynda Crawford's The Audit, about a straightlaced, ex-military IRS agent finds unexpected connections with a wild-living hippie songwriter; and Juan Ramirez Jr.'s The American Dream, about a would-be immigrant trying to be smuggled across the U.S. border. Joel Ripka and Disnie Sebastien perform the former, directed by Leigh Selting, and Ramirez and Libe Barer costar in the latter, directed by Maria Mileaf.

  • Musicals
  • Upper West Side

Singer-songwriter Dina Fanai's mythopoetic original musical, which draws inspiration from the Sufi mysticism of Rumi and the analytic acuity of Joseph Campbell, returns for an encore run after a successful workshop in January, directed once more by Dodd Loomis. Jenna Rubaii plays the title heroine on journey of spirtitual discovery; the large supporting cast is led by Broadway ringers Constantine Maroulis (Rock of Ages) and Maya Days (Aida), and also includes Madeline Serrano and Fanai herself.

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  • Musicals
  • Greenwich Village

Michael Sgouros and Brenda Bell's child-oriented musical adaptation of the classic folktale— as rendered in books by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont and Madame De Villeneuve—celebrates a bookish girl's ability to see past the hirsute appearance or her kidnapper. Pierce Cassedy directs this 70-minute production; the first performance of each two-show day is preceded by an hour-long arts workshop at which kids can meet members of the company and create a mask to take home.

  • Drama
  • Chelsea

The Irish Rep gathers three short works by Nobel savage Samuel Beckett in a tryptich directed by the company's own Ciarán O’Reilly. The always compelling F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) stars as a bitter man reflecting on his wasted life as he listens to recordings he made 30 years earlier in the evening's longest piece, Krapp's Last Tape (1958). That show is preceded by a pair of stark curtain-raisers: Not I (1972), a mouth-running monologue performed by Sarah Street; and Play (1964), in which Street, Roger Dominic Casey and Kate Forbes play a trio of inurned figures who babble about their love triangle. 

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  • Comedy
  • Hell's Kitchen

Mamma mia! That's a spicy comedy! Matthew Lombardo's one-act two-hander, party inspired by his own experience, traces the volatile relationship between a formidable Italian-American woman and her less self-assured son gay son. Caroline Aaron (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Matt Doyle (Company) share the stage, directed by Noah Himmelstein.

  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play Curse of the Starving Class, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm, was revived at the Signature just six years ago, and the New Group's current revival of it in the same theater complex provides no good reason to see it anew. Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart are deeply miscast as the screwy Tate parents—each trying to sell the place out from under the other—as is the gentle-miened Cooper Hoffman as their violent son. (The scenes between Slater and Hoffman should be ticking time bombs; instead, they just tick.) Stella Marcus fares better as the outlaw Lisa Simpson of the factious clan, and Jeb Kreager adds a jolt of real energy in his brief turn as a local barman. But the star of this version is unquestionably a fluffy live sheep named Lois, who provides moments of authenticity that are otherwise rare in Scott Elliott's torpid, disjointed production. When Lois takes a poop onstage, at least she does it literally.—Adam Feldman

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  • Drama
  • Midtown West

In this two-person thriller by Rajiv Joseph (Guards at the Taj), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal at the turn of the 21st century veers by accident into a secret world of State Department intrigue. Abubakr Ali, Mia Barron costar in the show's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, which commissioned it; May Adrales directs.

  • Drama
  • Noho

This ensemble play by Abe Koogler (Fulfillment Center), about nature lovers in the Pacific Northwest investigating the disappearance of an orca pod, was a highlight of the 2023 Summerworks festival. Now Clubbed Thumb brings it back for a longer encore run at the Public, directed once again by Arin Arbus (Waiting for Godot). Returning original cast members—including Crystal Finn, Jan Leslie Harding, Armando Riesco and stage treasure Maryann Plunkett (The Notebook)—are joined by newbies Miriam Silverman, Mia Katigbak, Arnie Burton, Ryan King and Carmen Zilles.

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  • Musicals
  • Hell's Kitchen
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

The jokes are well-worn but the costumes are worn well in this campy new musical, which is exactly what you'd expect: high heels, big hair, sassy one-liners and enough RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants to fill their own season. The script—by Tomas Costanza, Ashley Gordon and Justin Andrew Honard (a.k.a. Alaska Thunderf**k)—provides a fishnet-thin plot about two rival drag clubs facing different sets of troubles. But Marco Marco’s sculptural outfits are bejeweled works of art, the wigs are amazing and director-choreographer Spencer Liff works in some terrific hairography. The current cast includes Alaska, Nick Adams and Adam Pascal.—Melissa Rose Bernardo

  • Interactive
  • Hell's Kitchen
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are inherently theatrical: The players are all playing roles, after all. But the idea of building an actual stage show around the game—an entirely improvised one, guided by audience suggestions and decisions—seems, well, a little dicey. But an element of the unexpected is one of the things that makes this goofy fantasy show such fun. Whether or not you know much about D&D going in, it’s an adventuring party you won't want to miss.—Shaye Weaver

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  • Comedy
  • Hell's Kitchen

The dramatic archeologists of the Mint Theater Company bring another obscure play to light: a 1915 political satire by the British playwright Harold Brighouse (Hobson's Choice), in which a working-class Mancunian with a gift for oratory stands for election to the House of Commons. Matt Dickson directs the play's quite extremely overdue New York debut, which features Daniel Marconi in the title role. 

  • Drama
  • Upper West Side

The expert Jack O'Brien directs the latest revival of Henrik Ibsen's once-scandalous 1882 play about the roots of deadly social disease, a classic indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Stage A-listers Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup and Hamish Linklater star opposite second-generation acting stars Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty in this Lincoln Center Theater production, which marks the New York debut of a new translation by Ireland's Mark O’Rowe. 

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  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Samuel D. Hunter's consistently beautiful plays are like ships in a bottle: exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes with endless variety and sympathy. His new two-hander, directed by Jack Serio, stars Brian J. Smith as a gay artist who has fled his hometown to live in the Netherlands, and Paul Sparks as his older half-brother and former bully, who reaches out when their mother is dying. The play renders their relationship with touching delicacy: the back and forth of two damaged people for whom reconciliation may or may not be in the cards.—Adam Feldman

  • Comedy
  • Hell's Kitchen

Soho Rep, having recently been squeezed from its longtime home on Walker Street, begins a several-year residence at Playwrights Horizons with the U.S. premiere of Nia Akilah Robinson's debut play: an ambitious exploration of the treatment of black bodies in America that moves between 1830s Philadelphia—when grave robbery for medical research was not uncommon—and a modern summer camp on the same location. The implacable Crystal Lucas-Perry (Ain't No Mo') and current Juilliard student Clarissa Vickerie play the central mother-daughter pairs in both parts of the play, joined by Miles G. Jackson and the mononymic Holiday as men they encounter. Off Broadway newcomer Evren Odcikin directs. 

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  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Julián Mesri, who co-adapted last year's Comedy of Errors for the Public Theater's Mobile Unit, satirizes the conventions of magical realism and the practice of economic imperialism in Latin America through this farcical tale of a woman left to run her husband's factory, an outpost of a multinational corporation called Cantilever—in a surrealistic jungle. Kathleen Capdesuñer directs INTAR Theatre's world-premiere production, whose cast includes include Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Reece dos Santos, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Keren Lugo, Lilian Rebelo and Katie Rodriguez.

  • Musicals
  • East Village

Back in 2018, the oral historian and producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper—a gale force of musical-theater fandom—created a series of concerts at 54 Below devoted to airing unheard songs from the trunk of Jonathan Larson, who died suddenly on the eve of his breakthrough with Rent. Now that project has been expanded into an Off Broadway revue with a very talented cast: Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus and Jason Tam. John Simpkins directs; the orchestrations are by Charlie Rosen, co-arranged with Natalie Tenenbaum. 

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  • Drama
  • Harlem

National Black Theatre presents the U.S. premiere of an original theater piece, directed by the Dutch team of Ira Kip and Winston “Winnie” Bergwijn, that explores the reclamation of Black identity in the shadows of mass migration, racism, colonialism and war. The text by Munganyende, Veronique Efomi and Smita James is in English, peppered with other languages (Papiamentu, Tigrinya, Sranantongo, Kikongo, Kimbundu, Lingala, Portuguese and Dutch). It is performed by its original Netherlands company: Saron Tesfahuney, Revé Terborg, Rubiën Vyent, Ayesha Jordan, Melvin Aroma, Daniel Pando and Giovanni Pisas. (The 2024 Dutch tour kicked off, appropriately enough, in Haarlem.)

  • Comedy
  • Greenwich Village

Greta Quispe plays a terminally ill Latina woman who gets enmeshed in a crisis of healthcare and alternative medicine in a family dramedy by Queens playwright Anna Capunay. Gregory Lipson directs a cast that also includes Yessenia Rivas, Danny Borba, J. Santiago Suarez and Jared Trevino. 

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  • Drama
  • Midtown West

The versatile playwright Bess Wohl (Small Mouth Sounds) looks at Ohio women's dreams of liberation in two time periods—1970 and fifty years later—in a world premiere directed for the Roundabout by Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding). The highly promising cast comprises Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood, Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion and Charlie Thurston.

  • Interactive
  • Financial District

Audience members choose their own paths through a specially designed multifloor complex in the Financial District in this all-new immersive theatrical experience from Emursive, the producers of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. Dozens of performers evoke life in the Gilded Age through narratives loosely inspired by real New York City history as well as literary sources like the Faust legend and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Teddy Bergman directs the show, which is written by Jon Ronson and features scenic design Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and costumes by Emilio Sosa.

RECOMMENDED: A guide to Life and Trust, NYC’s most intricate immersive theater experience

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  • Circuses & magic
  • West Village
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Vinny DePonto reunites with the team behind his 2013 show Charlatan, co-writer Josh Koenigsberg and directeor Andrew Neisler, for an ambitious new theatrical magic act that revolves largely around audience participation. DePonto is an engaging crowd worker, and he has devised several clever variations on the standard mentalist repertoire, so the show is a pleasant diversion. But a conceptual throughline about dementia feels underdeveloped, while its corresponding physical set is overdone: a high-concept space that at first evokes a 1970s office and then morphs into walls of metal deposit boxes that represent where memories are stored. What should be impressive reveals sometimes get lost in elaborate set-ups, which is too bad: A mind trick is a terrible thing to waste.—Adam Feldman

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  • Comedy
  • Upper West Side

Rotating casts of dynamos star in a new comedy by View master Joy Behar that looks at love, marriage and the end of both. Behar herself anchors the first cast (Jan 29–Feb 23) alongside Tovah Feldshuh, Susie Essman and Adrienne C. Moore. The second (Feb 26–Mar 23) comprises Susan Lucci, Cathy Moriarty, Tonya Pinkins and Judy Gold; the third (Mar 26–Apr 20) includes Veanne Cox, Jackie Hoffman and Andrea Navedo, joined by Gina Gershon at the start of April. Randal Myler directs the world premiere. 

  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Brian Lee Huynh stars as Toraichi Kono, a Japanese immigrant to the U.S. who served as Charlie Chaplin's valet for nearly 20 years but was confined to an internment camp amid the anti-Japanese fervor of World War II, in a historical drama by Philip W. Chung. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. The cast of eight also includes Kiyo Takami as Kono's wife, Conlan Ledwith as Chaplin and Emma Kikue as Paulette Goddard. 

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  • Experimental
  • Soho

The Wooster Group has been on the front lines of postmodern, tech-forward, intensely detailed avant-garde performance in America for 50 years, and much of its recent output has a somewhat haunted quality. This latest piece revisits a 1978 piece by original members Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray, Nayatt School, which was Gray's first foray into the monologue format that would later bring him worldwide fame. Fellow Wooster founder Kate Valk shares archival video of Gray and reflects on the original production; she then joins other performers in re-creating scenes from it, including portions of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (an LP of which figures into Gray's monologue). Wooster deity LeCompte designs and directs the production, in which troupe regulars Volk, Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy and Omar Zubair are augmented by guest artists Suzzy Roche, Scott Shepherd and Maura Tierney.

  • Musicals
  • Lenox Hill

The York Theatre Company's New2NY series offers spare stagings of original musicals. This year's spring lineup begins with Platinum Dreams, the latest effort to rescue the flop 1978 musical Platinum, which originally starred Alexis Smith as a 1940s movie-musical star striving to make a comeback in the 1970s. The score by composer Gary William Friedman and lyrics by Will Holt—who previously collaborated on The Me Nobody Knows—remains, but the books that Holt wrote with Bruce Vilanch for the Broadway production and by himself for a previous revision, Sunset, have been replaced with a new one by Friedman's wife, the singer-songwriter Stevie Holland (who also contributes new lyrics). The York's acting artistic director, Joseph Hayward, directs; Holland plays the central role, flanked by Conor Ryan (Desperate Measures) and Jovan E’Sean (Cats: The Jellicle Ball) as two younger men in the music industry. 

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  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

D.A. Mindell's play juxtaposes Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their expulsion from Eden with the dilemma of a modern-day pregnant transgender man and his twin sister, a genetic scientist who has made an important discovery about gender dysphoria. Jess McLeod directs the world premiere for Second Stage, which has recently been cast out of its own little corner of heaven—midtown's Tony Kiser Theater—but has found shelter at the Signature Theatre complex.

  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

The Village Theater Group revives Arthur Miller's 1968 family drama, in which estranged brothers sift through their dead father's belongings and weigh their value, ethical and otherwise. Noelle McGrath directs the cast of four: Bill Barry as the loyal cop Victor, Janelle Farias Sando as his dissastisfied wife, Cullen Wheeler as his wealthy brother and Michael Durkin as Solomon, a very old but still savvy appraiser. 

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  • Comedy
  • Noho

Melissa Gilbert (Little House on the Prairie) and Mark Moses (Desperate Housewives) play ex-lovers whose reunion, after 30 years, is complicated by a political divide: He is running for Congress as a Republican, and she is a liberal with a past that could hurt him. Colt Coeur's Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs this return engagement of Lia Romeo's two-hander, which she also directed last year with different actors. 

  • Drama
  • Fort Greene

The Irish stage and screen actor and international lust object Paul Mescal, who beefed up to star in Gladiator 2, now plays the most famous sexy brute in dramatic history: Stanley Kowalski, the role that made Marlon Brando a star in Tennessee Williams's steamy 1947 masterwork. Patsy Ferran co-stars as the cracked belle Blanche DuBois; Anjana Vasan is Stanley's wife, Stella, and Dwane Walcott is his poker pal Mitch. This revival, which premiered at London's Almeida Theatre in 2022, is directed by Rebecca Frecknell, who also guided the misguided Broadway revival of Cabaret, so be prepared for some wildly stylized choices. Tickets through BAM have already sold out, so if you want to get your hot hands on a ticket, you'll have to depend on the kindness of scalpers.

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  • Drama
  • Noho

A young wrestler begins physical and spiritual training at a Tokyo sumo facility in this weighty new drama by Lisa Sanaye Dring, whose New York premiere is directed by Ralph B. Peña for Ma-Yi Theater Company and the Public Theater. The cast includes Scott Keiji Takeda, Red Concepción, Michael Hisamoto, Ahmad Kamal, Earl T. Kim and David Shih.

  • Comedy
  • Gramercy

In this popular solo show, which he has performed to acclaim at festivals in Australia and the U.K., comedian Sam Kissajukian examines the five-month period in 2021 when a manic bipolar episode drove him to paint 300 large works of art. Some of those paintings are on display at the Vineyard Theatre, where Kissajukian's show has returned after a successful run in the fall. 

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  • Musicals
  • Hell's Kitchen

Tony Sportiello and Al Tapper's Zanna Don't!–ish new musical comedy imagines a world where gayness is the norm and a pair of musical-theater writers entertain the crazy notion of writing a show about heterosexual love. Director-choreographer Taavon Gamble directs the production, whose cast is led by Jeffrey Kringer, Matthew Liu and Brogan Nelson.

  • Drama
  • Midtown West

Joshua Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic) reteams with his Significant Other director, Trip Cullman, for a new dark comedy in which original Into the Woods star Joanna Gleason plays a dying woman who asks her young playwright grandson—played by Andrew Barth Feldman, an estwhile Evan Hansen—to write a vicious dramatic exposé of their family. The estimable Jeanine Serralles (Catch as Catch Can) is also in the cast of the play's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club. 

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  • Drama
  • East Village

LaChanze, who shone in the overdue 2021 Broadway premiere of Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, makes her directorial debut at CSC with another work by the pioneering playwright: a 1969 drama, set against the backdrop of the 1964 Harlem riot, that she originally wrote for the Boston public-television series On Being Black. Grantham Coleman plays a painter working on a triptych about Black womanhood, and Olivia Washington—the daughter of Denzel and sister of John David—plays a downtrodden woman he thinks would be a good model for the unflattering final panel.

LONG-RUNNING OFF BROADWAY SHOWS

  • Shakespeare
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Five classically trained actors gather to perform a Shakespeare play, but this dramatic cocktail is served with a twist: One of them gets boozed up before the show—in the vein of Comedy Central's Drunk History—and hilarity ensues as the four sober cast members try to keep the script on track. 

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  • Hell's KitchenOpen run
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Self-described “bubble scientist” Fan Yang's blissfully disarming act (now performed in New York by his son Deni, daughter Melody and wife Ana) consists mainly of generating a dazzling succession of bubbles in mind-blowing configurations, filling them with smoke or linking them into long chains. Lasers and flashing colored lights add to the trippy visuals.—David Cote

  • Comedy
  • Hell's KitchenOpen run

The Canadian performer Katsura Sunshine, billed as the only Western master of the traditional and rigorously trained Japanese comic stortellying art of Rakugo, performs a monthly show at New World Stages. In keeping with the genre's minimalist practice, Sunshine performs in a kimono using only a fan and a hand towel for props. 

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  • Musicals
  • Hell's KitchenOpen run
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Milo Manheim, Elizabeth Gillies and Jeremy Kushnier currently star in the latest revival of this dark, tuneful and utterly winsome 1982 horror-camp musical about a flesh-eating plant who makes dreams come true for a lowly flower-shop worker. Composer Alan Menken and librettist Howard Ashman wrap a sordid tale of capitalist temptation and moral decay in layers of sweetness, humor, wit and camp. Michael Mayer directs the feeding frenzy in this deeply satisfying revival.—Adam Feldman

  • Musicals

The boys are back in town! Five nice-looking men take it all off and vocalize in this collage of musical vignettes on gay themes, revamped since its 1999 debut with new jokes and more up-to-date references. Although sex is central to most of the numbers, the goofy nudism has no erotic charge (and when the show tries to be serious, it's sometimes hard to watch). After a hiatus of several years, NBS has returned to NYC at a new venue in 2023.

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  • Drama
  • Midtown WestOpen run

A wily cop tries to psych out a possibly homicidal shrink in Warren Manzi’s moldy, convoluted mystery. The creaky welter of dime-store Freudianism, noirish attitude and whodunit gimmickry is showing its age. (Catherine Russell has starred since 1987.)—David Cote

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  • Comedy
  • Hell's KitchenOpen run
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Ah, the joy of watching theater fail. The possibility of malfunction is part of what makes live performance exciting, and Mischief Theatre’s farce takes that notion to extremes as amateur British actors perform a hackneyed whodunnit amid escalating calamities. Depending on your tolerance for ceaseless slapstick, the show will either have you rolling in the aisles or rolling your eyes. Directed by Mark Bell, the mayhem goes like cuckoo clockwork on Nigel Hook’s ingeniously tumbledown set.—Adam Feldman 

  • Musicals
  • Midtown West

Four single and neurotic New Yorkers get up to no good in this long-running section of the Theatre Center's must-stage-TV repertory lineup, which also includes shows inspired by Friends and The Office. Like those, Singfeld! has a libretto by Bob and Tobly McSmith; the music in this case is by fellow musical spoof artist Billy Recce (A Musical About Star Wars). Marc David Wright directs.

UPCOMING OFF BROADWAY SHOWS

  • Drama
  • West Village

The excellent Andrew Scott, who has played the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock and the titular sociopath on Ripley but will always be Fleabag's Hot Priest in our hearts, assumes every role in this solo version of Anton Chekhov's 1897 masterwork Uncle Vanya, a bitterly comic meditation on the wages of self-sacrifice. The piece—which Scott co-created with adaptor Simon Stephens, director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize—was received ecstatically in London in 2023. Now it comes to the West Village's venerable Lucille Lortel Theatre for an eight-week run. 

  • Drama
  • Tribeca

The queer Pakistani-American writer-performer Adil Mansoor recounts his experience collaborating on a translation of Sophocles's political tragedy Antigone with his mother—a hijabi Queranic scholar—in an autobiographical solo show co-directed with Lyam B. Gabel. The show, which premiered at Washington, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theater last year, makes its NYC debut at the Flea, which helpfully allows spectators to purchase tickets at prices ranging from $10 to $100 according to their ability to pay. 

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  • Comedy
  • Financial District

Two bold Québécois theater makers, director Alix Dufresne and playwright Étienne Lepage, slip a little Freud into PAC's spring season with a darkly playful metatheatrical comedy in which four imbecilic people wander onto an empty stage and mayhem ensues. This absurdist philosophical look at accident and urges was created in French; in its New York incarnation, half of the performances are in English and half are bilingual with English surtitles.

  • Drama
  • Noho

Mark Povinelli plays the remarkable Benjamin Lay, a 4-foot-tall Quaker who moved to Pennsylvania from England by way of Barbados and established himself as one of the 18th century's most fervent abolitionists. (His antislavery book All Slave Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1737.) A collaboration between the playwright Naomi Wallace (One Flea Spare) and the historian and activist Marcus Rediker, the play debuted in London in 2023, directed by Ron Daniels; it now hops the Pond to make its U.S. premiere at the Sheen Center, a project of the Archdiocese of New York that focuses on works that engage with questions of religious faith. (A companion exhibition about Lay's life is also at the Sheen Center from March 7 through April 13, and is open between the hours of 10am and 5pm.)

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  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Elizabeth A. Davis (Once) and Dan Amboyer (Younger) play a couple whose marriage is sorely tested when she disappears into the bathroom of their mobile home and refuses to come out—not in a cute Plaza Suite kind of way, but in a major depressive episode kind of way. The Off Broadway premiere of Max Mondi's two-hander is directed by Chad Austin for his Abingdon Theatre Company. (The play made its New York debut in the 2015 edition of the much-missed Fringe Festival.)

  • Puppet shows
  • Midtown West

Designer-director Hamid Rahmanian's dazzlingly cinematic multimedia epic, set in ancient Persia, uses hundreds of handmade shadow puppets to cast the tale of a brave young woman who must escue the man she loves and prevent an imminent war between the kingdoms of Iran and Turan. The story is adapted by Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard from a section of Ferdowsi's seminal 10th-century poem Shahnameh. Having made its U.S. debut with three performances at BAM for Kids in 2023, it now reveals its treasures again in a brief encore run at the New Vic. 

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  • Comedy
  • Chelsea

As half of the Coen Brothers, Ethan Coen has been one of the cinematic auteurs behind such classics as FargoThe Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men—but in his spare time, he likes to write short comedies for the stage. Neil Pepe has already directed two collections of them for his Atlantic Theater Company (2008's Almost an Evening and 2011's Happy Hour) and was set to bring in another in 2020, A Play Is a Poem, before Covid interfered. With the Atlantic embroiled in a labor dispute, there's a fairly good chance that this one will be postponed as well.   

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  • Musicals
  • Chelsea

Warehouse workers reenact legends of their high-school heydays, which loosely correspond to myths from The Iliad, in an original synthwave musical written and composed by Loading Dock Theater's Leegrid Stevens, with an ear to evoking 1980s nostalgia via vintage instruments and tape loops. The gender-fluid cast of 16, directed by Eric Paul Vitale, includes Daphne Always, Deshja Driggs, Arya Grace Gaston, Max Raymond, Jen Rondeau and Loading Dock co-founder Erin B. Treadway (Spaceman). 

  • Musicals
  • Hell's Kitchen

Jonathan Silverstein directs the world premiere of Adam Kwon's chamber musical, the first tuner to be commisioned by Silverstein's Keen Company. Fresh from his fast-singing turn as the panicky gay groom in the national tour of Company, Matt Rodin stars as a small-town high school teacher in the 1990s whose efforts to help an ambitious theater kid run afoul of the local church. The rest of the cast comprises Jon-Michael Reese, Eliza Pagelle and the versatile Broadway leading lady Elizabeth Stanley (Jagged Little Pill).

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  • Comedy
  • DUMBO

Nina Hoss, who gave a riveting performance in 2018's Returning to Reims, is now returning to St. Ann's Warehouse to star in writer-director Benedict Andrews's new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's 1903 tragicomedy about a family on the edge of ruin in a country on the brink of revolution. Hoss plays the profligate Ranevskaya, an aristocrat stymied by nostalgia, and Adeel Akhtar is the rich but lower-class merchant with designs on her family estate. The production arrives at St. Ann's on the heels of a highly acclaimed U.K. run at the Donmar Warehouse (no relation).

  • Musicals
  • Midtown West

City Center's invaluable concert-staging series Encores! continues its 2025 season with this 1948 rarity by Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Victoria Clark. Kate Baldwin and Nicholas Christopher star in this high-concept tale of an American family that, à la The Skin of Our Teeth, spans 150 years of American history without aging. The score includes "Here I'll Stay" and "I Remember It Well" (which Lerner later repurposed for Gigi); Rob Fisher conducts the orchestra.

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  • Puppet shows
  • Midtown West

The Chicago collective Manual Cinema (Ada/Ava) combines live actors and musicians with puppetry, overhead projectors and filmic techniques to create virtuosically handmade theater experiences. The company visited the New Vic in 2022 with Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster, which was aimed at very young kids. This time, it aims a little older with a reprise of its first show for family audiences: its 2017 adaptation of Edith Nesbit’s 1910 novel about a girl who finds herself trapped inside the miniature metropolis she has been building out of household objects to avoid the annoyances of real life. 

  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Three Black artists from different disciplines, cultures and generations compete for attention and opportunity at an international conference for artists of the African diaspora. WP Theater partners with Colt Coeur to present the world premiere of Francisca Da Silveira's drama; Ato EssandohNedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wureh play the clashing trio. To ensure greater access, tickets are sold at pay-what-you-can prices (from $30–$100) and a row of very good seats is priced at $10 for each performance. 

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  • Drama
  • Hell's Kitchen

Stage treasure Jessica Hecht (Eureka Day) stars in a new play, conceived by Hecht and playwright Neena Beber, that updates the gist of Bertolt Brecht's pedantic 1932 drama The Mother, about an impoverished Russian woman's journey toward Marxist revolutionary consciousness. Beber's version relocates the story to Miami in a period that includes the 1980 race riots that followed the murder of motorist Arthur McDuffie by a group of policemen. (Adapted from a novel by Maxim Gorky, Brecht's original is seldom revived, though the Wooster Group took at shot at it in 2021). Maria Mileaf directs the premiere, which features choreography by Shura Baryshnikov and an eclectic score overseen by musical director Mustapha Khan. The supporting cast includes Zane Pais, Portia Johnson and Delilah Napier.

  • Drama
  • Fort Greene

Awoye Timpo, who directed Theatre for a New Audience's beautiful 2019 revival of Alice Childress's Wedding Band, returns to TFANA with another overlooked work of Black drama: The first major play by Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. This 1958 one-act tells the story of a young man from the flooded Niger delta who is mistreated by his rapacious twin brother and disappointed by the overfed Yoruba priest of the Serpent of the Swamp. 

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  • Drama
  • Noho

Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine) is among the finest, strangest and most wonderful playwrights in the English language, so it's always a treat to get something new from her. This time it's a quartet of mostly short experimental works that debuted to acclaim at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2019 and 2021: Glass, about a girl made of, you guessed it, glass; Kill, a monologue for the bloodstained Gods of Olympus; What If If Only, in which a grieving man receives a strange visitation; and the longest piece, Imp, in which an elderly woman threatens to unleash a magical spirit in a bottle. Churchill's frequent collaborator James Macdonald (Escaped Alone) directs.

  • Musicals
  • Fort Greene

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's scabrous musical, a cynical Weimar update of John Gay's 1728 satire The Beggar's Opera, returns in a new production by Germany's Berliner Ensemble, which mounted the original version in 1928. The show still centers on the charismatic killer and lothario Macheath—known as Mackie Messer ("Mack the Knife")—but Barrie Kosky's staging, on a geometrical set by Rebecca Ringst, is far from traditional the production makes numerous trims and changes to the notoriously unwieldy script by Brecht and his finally credited collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Performances are in the original German, with English titles.

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  • Comedy
  • Hell's Kitchen

Ryan J. Haddad burst onto the NYC performance scene in 2015 with Hi, Are You Single?, his one-man show about being a horny gay man with cerebral palsy. Ten years later, the funny and talented writer-performer offers a sequel of sorts to that show, perhaps addressing how he has changed in the intervening decade, during which he has raised his profile significantly as an actor (including with a recurring role on The Politician) and won an Obie for Best New American Play for his 2023 show Dark Disabled StoriesDanny Sharron directs this Playwrights Horizons offering. 

  • Musicals
  • Fort Greene

Whitney White has become one of the industry's leading directors, earning a Tony noms for last season's Jaja's African Hair Braiding and helming Liberation at the Roundabout this spring. In April, however, she takes center stage as the writer and performer of this musical dive into the dark soul (and R&B and gospel and pop and rock) of Lady Macbeth, as seen therough a lens of Black womanhood. The play is directed by Tyler Dobrowsky and Taibi Magar, the married artistic directors of Philadelphia Theatre Company, where the musical was seen in 2023; Raja Feather Kelly is the choreographer. (In previous iterations of the musical, the Macbeth role was played by Charlie Thurston, who is in the cast of Liberation; it is unclear whether he will reprise his role.)

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  • Musicals
  • Hell's Kitchen

Writers Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and director Rory Pelsue are the Fake Friends gang behind 2020's uproarious Circle Jerk, a Charles Ludlam–style satirical farce about technology and white supremacy that was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Expect wild things from their follow-up at the New Group: an original musical that envisions a trio of Gen Zers on a quest to track down a missing pop star from the 2000s. The cast of the world premiere includes Sara Gettelfinger, Natalie Walker, Patrick Nathan Falk, Keri René Fuller, Luke Islam and the distinctive Milly Shapiro, who shared an honorary 2013 Tony Award for Matilda and famously lost her head in Hereditary.

  • Musicals
  • Noho

The fabulous Amber Iman, who most recently dazzled in Broadway's short-lived Lempicka, plays a Kenyan musical deity on the prowl at an Afro-jazz nightclub in this original musical conceived and directed by the Public's resident Saheem Ali, with a book by Jocelyn Bioh (Jaja's African Hair Braiding) and songs by the composer and former Late Show bassist Michael Thurber. Iman originated her role—the goddess Marimba, masquerading as a singer named Nadira—in the show's 2022 premiere at Berkeley Rep; her co-stars this time are Austin Scott as a sax pistol who strikes Nadira's fancy, Destinee Rea as his fiancée and J Paul Nicholas as the father who wants him to go into the family business: politics. The choreography is by Darrell Grand Moultrie, and Nick Rashad Burroughs and Arica Jackson play the comic second couple. 

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  • Musicals
  • Midtown West

The final installment of this year's Encores! season at City Center was meant to be Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party, but scheduling issues kicked it forward to next year. In its place, the musical-theater staged-concert revival series offers another look at the 1953 musical comedy Wonderful Town, which it first presented 25 years ago in a production that wound up transferring to Broadway three years later. The show features music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; the story, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov from short stories by Ruth McKenney, follows two sisters—played here by Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson—who move from Ohio to Greenwich Village to pursue their dreams and maybe find love along the way. Zhailon Levingston (Cats: The Jellical Ball) is the director and Mary-Mitchell Campbell is the music director.

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