Halloween is the most theatrical of American holidays. Every year, people of all ages put on costumes and makeup and bring the world of make-believe to the streets, and the theater world joins the fun with Halloween shows to celebrate the season. We’ve scared up this list of horror-themed theater events—including musicals, plays, burlesque shows and even a few Broadway productions—to help you get in the spooky spirit. Here they are, in alphabetical order.
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Brenda Bell narrates her own anthology of spookish playlets, poems and dance pieces inspired by the writings of women from the 1890s through the 1930s, including Emily Brontë, Edith Wharton and Mary Howitt. Michael Sgouros provides live accompaniment with original music.
Frigid New York gives you the chills in a festival inspired by Mexico's dead-lifting Día de los Muertos. The lineup includes more than a dozen shows on themes of mortality and the afterlife, each performed as many as three times; among them are Mark-Eugene Garcia's Chupacabra story Goat Blood, Eve Blackwater's folk-noir survey Brokeneck Girls: The Murder Ballad Musical!, Laurel Mora's family-history drama This House Is Haunted, Michael Hagins's fright-flick All Hallow's Eve, Christina Rose Ashby's poetry session Poe's Children and David Lawson's solo show Horror Helps.
You’ll find plenty of tricks and treats at Jonny Porkpie’s ghoulish burlesque comedy, which is back—from the dead?!—after a hiatus of several years. Joining the core cast of Porkpie, Jo Weldon, Syn Sultress and Tigger! for this monster mash note are guest stars Peekaboo Pointe (October 12 and 19), Mr. Gorgeous (October 19) and the Maine Attraction (October 26).
In this spooky-season variation on the long-running Drunk Shakespeare, five actors gather to perform a vampire-in-New-York story loosely adapted by Lori Wolter Hudson from Bram Stoker's batty gothic thriller. The twist? One of them gets plastered before the performance and it's up to the four remaining cast members to keep the show from going down for the Count.
Thy favorite scary movie, oh, what is't? Brooklyn’s 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 returns for Halloween with a pair of cheap Friday-night shows: Thou Wilt Scream (October 18), Robert Price's mock-Shakespearean gloss on horror flicks; and All Hallows Eve or, The Tragedy of Michael Myers (October 25), Andrew Sanford's take on Halloween.
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 scale heretofore unimagined. It leaves its audience awestruck, spellbound and deeply satisfied.
Woof! In this winking neoburlesque pageant, the Mystery Machine quintet teams up with the brothers from Supernatural to investigate eerie goings-on at the Home for Wayward Girls and Fallen Women. Expect the villains to lose more than just their masks. Cherry Pitz, Handsome Brad and Andy Ross host a show that includes routines by Scooby snacks Perse Fanny, Luna Femme Appeal, GoGo Gadget, Jack Barrow, Rocco Chanel, Venatrix and Esme D'Avril.
Riley Elton McCarthy's queer horror play, which had a buzzy trial run at the Tank last year, returns in a new production directed by Brandon Urrutia and featuring Kai Justice Rosales, Alvin Christmas and Danielle Breitstein. Rosales plays a road-tripping geologist whose pica gives him a bad habit of eating rocks, and Christmas is the crazy ex-boyfriend with a tendency toward arson. (Be warned that the cheapest tier of tickets is for seays in the front-row "splash zone," where you may have to contend with overflows of blood, gore, bugs, puke and other gnarly stuff.)
For years now, the exceedingly charming Jay Armstrong Johnson has created Hocus Pocus-themed shows for Halloween. This one, 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 are J. Harrison Ghee, Robyn Hurder, Stephen Brower, Yeman Brown, Max Clayton and Emma Sofia; proceeds benefit the Ali Forney Center.
John Kevin Jones, whose annual performance of A Christmas Carol at the Merchant's House Museum has become something of a local tradition, has expanded into Halloween territory with a one-man performance of classic works by 19th-century scare king Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Rhonda Dodd. From Halloween night through November 10, Jones will summon the seminal author in the museum's landmark 1832 double parlors, sharing by candlelight such timeless tales as "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Cask of Amontillado" and, of course, "The Raven."
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