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Roundabout Theatre Company, a giant among New York City nonprofit theaters, announced its plans today for the 2025–26 season. On Broadway, the lineup will include a new version of the Ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus, a revival of The Rocky Horror Show and a Noël Coward comedy. The Roundabout also revealed plans to renovate its flagship Broadway venue, the Todd Haimes Theatre.
“This season is a testament to transformation—on our stages, in our spaces, and in the stories we tell," says interim artistic director Scott Ellis. "We’re bringing audiences work that spans the iconic to the unexpected and welcoming artists who challenge us, thrill us, and move us forward.”
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The 2025–26 Broadway lineup has a decidedly British bent. In the fall, the Roundabout will import a modernized version of Sophocles's Oedipus, the complex tale of a mother-loving leader whose hubris blinds him to a terrible truth. Created and directed by Robert Icke, who also oversaw 2017's 1984, the play stars Mark Strong (A View from the Bridge) and Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread) as a self-serious politician and his wife. The production debuted in London last year, and Icke, Strong, Manville and the revival itself were all nominated for Olivier Awards just two days ago. In his four-star review, Time Out London's Andrzej Lukowski called the production "really bloody good, with two astonishing leads," and noted that Icke's version of Oedipus "benefits from a lethal but compassionate decluttering, a singularity of purpose that distills a famously lurid story into something empathetic, lucid and quite, quite devastating."
Next on the agenda is a revival of Richard O'Brien's kinky B-movie musical spoof The Rocky Horror Show, whose original Broadway production in 1975 ran for just a month but which attained immortality later the same year as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the drag mother of all cult movies. The show follows the miseducation of two college squares, Brad and Janet, who get stranded at the creepy mansion of the alien mad scientist and cross-dressing libertine known as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Director Sam Pinkleton, high on the heels of his Broadway smash Oh, Mary!, will finally get to coordinate the sexy madness—including the timeless "Time Warp"—after his planned 2020 production of the show in San Francisco was scuttled by the actual horror of the COVID pandemic.
Both of these shows will be mounted at Studio 54, which the Roundabout owns but frequently leases out to other producers. Meanwhile, the company will be overhauling its 42nd Street headquarters at the Todd Haimes Theatre in the venue's first substantial makeover since it rose from the ruins of the Selwyn Theatre 25 years ago as part of the New 42nd Street redevelopment project; the Selwyn was completed in 1918, but in 2000 it hadn't hosted a Broadway show since 1950. (Originally called the American Airlines Theatre, the space was renamed last year in honor of the Roundabout's longtime artistic director, Todd Haimes, who died in 2023.) The ameliorations will include improvements to the space's restrooms, elevators, safety systems and accessible seating.
“As we revitalize the Todd Haimes Theatre—twenty-five years after Todd reimagined the Selwyn—we’re not just restoring a building; we’re creating a space dedicated to inspiring artists and audiences for generations," says Ellis. "Theatre thrives on reinvention, and this season is about honoring our past while shaping what’s next.”
The Haimes will reopen in the spring with the Roundabout's final Broadway offering of the season: a centennial revival of the once-scandalous 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, by the master English wit Noël Coward, directed by Ellis himself. Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids) and Kelli O'Hara (Days of Wine and Roses) will star as a pair of wives considering stepping out on their dull spouses with a dashing man who had been a lover to both of them before they got married.
The Roundabout has also announced two plays to be mounted at the company's main Off Broadway space, the Laura Pels Theater (at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre). Rajiv Joseph's darkly comical Archduke, directed in the fall by Darko Tresnjak, depicts the dreams and disaffections of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip—whose assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicked off World War I—and his fellow lean-and-hungry radicals. The cast includes the great Broadway baddie Patrick Page (Hadestown). And in the winter, Chay Yew will direct Chinese Republicans, a satirical drama by Alex Lin, in which the arrival of a young woman upsets the stomachs of a group of fat cats meeting for lunch.
Additional news and casting for these productions will be revealed in the months ahead. Visit the Roundabout's website for more information.
