Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

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. 

The prolific Bob and Tobly McSmith, who specialize in silly musicals based on nostalgia objects like Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, take a shot at America's favorite six 1990s white people. Assaf Gleizner, who wrote music for the McSmiths' The Office! A Musical Parody, is there for them like he's been there before, and Ryan David Barto directs.

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

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. 

Nicholas Christopher and Sherie Rene Scott 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

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.

Having already created goofy musical spoofs of shows including Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, Bob and Tobly McSmith—joined again by composer Assaf Gleizner, who wrote the score for Friends! The Musical Parody—take on yet another TV institution. Donald Garverick directs a cast led by Caleigh Lozito, in male drag, as paper tiger Michael Scott.

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

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 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Serralls (Catch as Catch Can) is also in the cast of the play's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club. 

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. 

For just four performances, the Perelman Performing Arts Center imports a musical multimedia production created by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace's modestly named Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa, a space devoted to allowing artists to develop unconvential and even quixotic work. The performers employ 80 pairs of shoes in inventive ways as they chart historical journeys of African migration through speech, song and movement. The show is perrformed in a mix of English and African languages, and is preceded by a two-man rhythmic music performance called Sounds of Limpopo.

When the matchless French actress Isabelle Huppert (Elle) does theater, she likes to do it weird. She has worked twice before with the leading lion of the avant-garde theater establishment, director Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach): in Orlando (1993) and Quartet (2006). Their third collaboration is a 90-minute monologue about the divisive 16th-century royal Mary Stuart (a.k.a. Mary, Queen of Scots) by the American novelist Darryl Pinckney, set to a classical score by Ludovico Einaudi. The production, which premiered in France in 2019 and was seen at London's Barbican Center last year, is performed in French with English titles. Be prepared for strikingly stylized work.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

LaChanze, who shone in the overdue 2021 Broadway premiere of Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, makes her directorial debut 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.

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. 

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.

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.)

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. 

Tommy Dorfman (Romeo + Juliet) plays the trans scion of a Hassidic rabbinical dynasty in Emil Weinstein's stage adaptation of Abby Chava Stein's 2019 memoir. Tyne Rafaeli (Selling Kabul) directs the Off Broadway premiere for New York Theatre Workshop, which is presented offsite at Abrons Arts Center.

Kaci Walfall (Naomi) and Emily Carey (House of the Dragon) play high school track teammates who try to outrun old feelings when reunite the year after they graduate. Knud Adams (English) directs the world premiere of Liana Sonenclar's coming-of-age drama; the supporting cast comprises Melanie Nicholls-King, Arjun Biju, Ella Stiller and the imposing Pete Simpson (Gatz) as the young women's coach.

As half of the Coen Brothers, Ethan Coen has been one of the cinematic auteurs behind such classics as Fargo, The 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.   

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). 

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).

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).

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.

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. 

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 Essandoh, Nedra 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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 Stories. Danny Sharron directs this Playwrights Horizons offering. 

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.)

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.

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.

Our critics list the best Broadway shows. NYC is the place to catch these exciting plays, musicals and revivals.

Adventurous theatergoers looking for great plays and musicals can get details, reviews and tickets for Off Broadway shows in New York

Looking for the best Off-Off Broadway shows? Here are the most promising productions in NYC’s smaller venues right now.