The best Christmas shows in NYC this holiday season

You’ll get a kick out of this holiday stalwart, which still features Santa, wooden soldiers and the dazzling Rockettes. In recent years, new music, more eye-catching costumes and advanced technology have been introduced to bring audience members closer to the performance. In the signature kick line that finds its way into most of the big dance numbers, the Rockettes’ 36 pairs of legs rise and fall like the batting of an eyelash, their perfect unison a testament to the disciplined human form. This is precision dancing on a massive scale—a Busby Berkeley number come to glorious life—and it takes your breath away.

This magical 1954 production, set to Tchaikovsky's incredible score, includes the full New York City Ballet company and two casts of School of American Ballet students, as well as an onstage blizzard and a Christmas tree that grows from 12 to 40 feet. In the end, however, Balanchine's choreography is what holds it all together. It's enchanting.

Austin McCormick and his risqué neo-Baroque dance-theater group Company XIV present a lavish erotic reimagining of the classic holiday tale, complete with circus performers, operatic singers and partial nudity. The word nutcracker has customarily conjured innocent wonder; now be ready to add glitter pasties, stripper poles and comically large stuffed penises to the toys in wonderland. Definitely leave the kids at home.

This hour-long original musical adaptation of Dickens's yuletide fable, created by composer Michael Sgouros and librettist-director Brenda Bell, returns for its 15th year at the West Village's Players Theatre. The updated set is inspired by traditional British panto.

John Kevin Jones goes to the Dickens in this one-hour account of the novelist's classic holiday ghost story, adapted with director Rhonda Dodd. The Merchant's House Museum, formerly the home of a wealthy 19th-century family, provides an atmospheric candlelit setting for Jones's tenth annual engagement. Select performances include a preshow reception at which the audience sips mulled wine and Jones recites Clement Moore's “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

Chiara Ajkun’s company continues its Face To Face Series with six performances of her own account of the holiday-ready Tchaikovsky ballet, danced in a sixth-floor studio space at New York City Center. The evening includes a postshow conversation with the artists. 

The mammoth Québécois neocirque troupe revives its first holiday-themed production, an extended riff on Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Writer-director James Hadley's show follows a young girl who is yanked, on Christmas Eve, into a magical world where acrobatics and elaborate spectacle take the place of those boring old dancing sugar plums. 

Local bump-and-grind impresario Johnny Porkpie reimagines Scrooge as a greedy strip-club owner named Ebeneza who rips off her dancers—and, of course, her clothes—in this risqué burlesque-theater adaptation of Charles Dickens's holiday chestnut. If you like your spiritual redemption stories perked up with pasties and tassels, this is the Carol for you. (But leave the kids at home for this one, folks.)

Dances Patrelle offers its annual performance of Francis Patrelle's The Yorkville Nutcracker, set in 1895 New York and featuring adorable child dancers alongside the professionals. This year's edition stars New York City Ballet soloist Miriam Miller as the Sugar Plum Fairy, joined again by NYCB principal Jared Angle as her Cavalier.

As part of its Once Upon a Ballet series, which is aimed at young children, NYTB presents its annual hour-long Art Nouveau version of the holiday ballet, complete with clockwork elves and an owl that flies over the audience. The set design is by Gillian Bradshaw-Smith and the costumes by Sylvia Taalsohn Nolan.

Brooklyn Ballet's take on The Nutcracker, choreographed by artistic director Lynn Parkerson, emphasizes cultural and artistic diversity. Alongside sequences that hew to the classic 19th-century tradition are interludes featuring street dance, flamenco, belly dancing, Chinese dance, hoop dance, hip-hop and the Hopak, a traditional Ukrainian dance. The 2023 edition features Ingrid Silva and Dylan Santos in the pas de deux and krump specialist Brian "HallowDreamz" Henry as the Rat King, along with Aliesha Bryan, the Eva Dance Studio, Sira Melikian, ShanDien LaRance and Michael “Big Mike” Fields. Live music is proviced by beatboxer Baba Israel, violinist Zafir Tawil, accordionist Mikhail Smirnoff and dizi floutist Yimin Miao.

Novelist and comic-book auteur Neil Gaiman, the creative force behind The Sandman and American Gods, recounted Charles Dickens's supernatural Christmas novella in a celebrated 2013 reading at the New York Public Library. Now he dons a top hat and beard once more in a pair of shows at the Town Hall; writer and podcaster Molly Oldfield provides historical background to set the scene.

The British jack-of-all-theater-trades Guy Masterson, who directed the recent Broadway comedy The Shark Is Broken, specializes in multicharacter solo performances. Here, he plays all the roles in a one-man version of Charles Dickens's beloved novella in a holiday production adapted and directed by Nick Hennegan. 

The Secret Theatre, which had a near-death experience during the pandemic, decks the halls of its new Woodside venue with its version of Charles Dickens's haunted tale of a pinchpenny's redemption. Company founder Richard Mazda, who wrote the adaptation, also directs the show and leads the cast as Scrooge. 

Random Access Theatre’s boozy-geeky Drunk Texts series muddles classical texts—or modern ones reimagined as classical—into a cocktail of drinking games, improv and audience interaction, in which the audiences chooses which thespians take shots. Now the gang toasts the holiday season with its highly spirited annual version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. 

This production interprets the classic with hip-hop choreography and an updated version of the holiday story; directed and choreographed by Jennifer Weber and adapted by Mike Fitelson, the production features onstage DJs, an amped-up version of the Tchaikovsky score and a short opening act by rap pioneer Kurtis Blow.