The best Halloween theater in 2025

Frigid New York gives you the chills in its fourth annual festival inspired by Mexico's dead-lifting Día de los Muertos. The lineup features spooky variety shows, short horror plays, Edgar Allan Poe works, a traditional ofrenda, psychic mediums, a tiny interactive matchbox theatre, a murder ballad musical, necromancer burlesque and other tales of the macabre. Among them are Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, Andrew Agress's The Witching Hour and Maeve Aurora Chapman and Liam Corley's Death Owns an Ice Cream Parlor. Visit the festival's website for a schedule and a full list of offerings for shows.

The world of Harry Potter has arrived on Broadway, Hogwarts and all, and it is a triumph of theatrical magic. Set two decades after the final chapters of J.K. Rowling’s world-shaking kid-lit heptalogy, Jack Thorne's epic—richly elaborated by director John Tiffany—combines grand storytelling with stagecraft on a giant scale. It leaves its audience awestruck, spellbound and satisfied.

The exceedingly charming Jay Armstrong Johnson has won audiences' hearts in shows including On the Town, Hands on a Hardbody and The Most Happy Fella, and in recent years he has also created a string of Hocus Pocus-themed shows for Halloween. This edition, directed by Heath Saunders, finds the movie’s witchy Sanderson Sisters—Johnson as Winifred, flanked by Allison Robinson and Amanda Williams Ware—recruiting other baddies to join in a wicked scheme. Among the Broadway types joining the fun this year are Saunders, J. Harrison Ghee, Robyn Hurder, Stephen Brower, Yeman Brown, Max Clayton, Emma Sofia, Karma Jenkins, Maddox Martin and Kathryn Priest. Proceeds benefit the Ali Forney Center, which provides services for homeless LGBTQ+ youth.

Thomas Doherty and Madeline Brewer 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 enjoyable revival.

The Phantom of the Opera ended its 35-year Broadway run in 2023, but the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is somehow here again in a surprising new form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris opera house where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the killer who lives in the basement. The complexity of the enterprise is staggering, and if you have any affection for Phantom at all, it’s a blast. Get dressed up, hide your face and give yourself over to the phantasy. 

Composer Michael Sgouros and librettist Brenda Bell adapt Washington Irving's classic tale of horror and decapitated equestrianism into a spooky 90-minute musical aimed at family audiences. Directed by Bell, the show has had several previous New York runs, most recently in 2021.