Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman “Why do we learn language?” asks Marjan (Marjan Neshat) to the English class she teaches in Iran. There are practical reasons, to be sure; several of her students need to pass the standardized international Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) so they can travel abroad. But for Marjan, who once spent nine years living in the U.K., the answer goes deeper than that. We learn language, she says, "to speak our souls": “To speak. And to… [motions to her ear] listen. To the insides of others.” That’s the guiding philosophy of Sanaz Toossi’s ear-opening English, which premiered at the Atlantic in 2022. Now, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it has migrated to Broadway under the sponsorship of the Roundabout, with its identity entirely intact. Director Knud Adams and his original cast of five re-create the magic of the original production without a stammer, stumble or waver.  English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus If Toossi’s thoughtful and searching play has things to teach us—about character, culture, postcolonial identity—it does so through immersion. We first see Marjan’s classroom from the outside, through a window. But Marsha Ginsberg’s boxed set soon rotates to invite us inside; it keeps turning throughout the play to give us new angles, and Toossi does the same. Like any grammar, English has rules and structures that it carefully maintains, but enough exceptions and variations to provide character and texture. It unfolds...

In this two-person thriller by Rajiv Joseph (Guards at the Taj), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal at the turn of the 21st century veers by accident into a secret world of State Department intrigue. Abubakr Ali, Mia Barron costar in the show's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, which commissioned it; May Adrales directs.

The versatile playwright Bess Wohl (Small Mouth Sounds) looks at Ohio women's dreams of liberation in two time periods—1970 and fifty years later—in a world premiere directed for the Roundabout by Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding). The highly promising cast comprises Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood, Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion and Charlie Thurston.

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.

Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart play the parents in the latest revival of Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm. Scott Elliott directs the production for his New Group, with a supporting cast that comprises Cooper Hoffman, David Anzuelo, Kyle Beltran, Jeb Kreager and Stella Marcus.

The neocircus cabaret show AirOtic Soirée, which combines acrobatics and aerial artistry with scanty costumes and erotic themes, concocts a special show for the Valentine's season. Canoodle with your date as impossibly lithe bodies work themselves into positions you dare not imagine trying yourself. For an extra $110–$120 you can augment the experience with dinner and drinks (or a bottle of Prosecco to share).

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How is she? Ever since May, when it was confirmed that Audra McDonald would star in the latest revival of Gypsy, Broadway fans have speculated about how Audra would be as Mama Rose—or, more nervously, whether Audra could be Mama Rose, the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters themselves. The casting seemed inevitable: the pinnacle role for a woman in musical theater, essayed by the most accomplished musical-theater actress of her generation. It’s Audra’s turn. Yet to some, the casting also seemed unlikely: Rose has traditionally been played by big belters, from Ethel Merman in 1959 through Patti LuPone in 2008, not dramatic sopranos like McDonald. So let’s get that question out of the way up front. How is Audra as Rose? She’s a revelation.  So, too, is the rest of George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent and beautifully mounted production, which comes as a happy surprise. Gypsy is a model musical in every regard, from Arthur Laurents’s airtight book, inspired by the memoirs of striptease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, to Jule Styne’s thrilling music, which grabs you at the overture and doesn’t let go, to Stephen Sondheim’s dazzlingly witty and insightful lyrics. But this is the show’s fifth Broadway revival, and its third in the 21st century alone. One might reasonably wonder what is left to reveal in a show as well-known as this one. But like the monster some people believe...

The playwright Jordan Harrison memorably peered into the possibilities of technology in the prescient A.I. drama Marjorie Prime, a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Now he ventures back to the future in a play that imagines how post-human cultures might look back on the way we live now. The world premiere at Playwrights Horizons—a coproduction with Chicago's Goodman Theatre—is co-directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan; the cast of nine is made up of Cindy Cheung, Marchánt Davis, Layan Elwazani, Andrew Garman, Aria Shahghasemi, Kristen Sieh, Ryan Spahn, Julius Rinzel and Amelia Workman.

Steve Cohen, billed as the Millionaires’ Magician, conjures high-class parlor magic in the marble-columned Madison Room at the swank Lotte New York Palace. Audiences must dress to be impressed (cocktail attire is required); tickets start at $125, with an option to pay more for meet-and-greet time and extra tricks with Cohen after the show. But if you've come to see a classic-style magic act, you get what you pay for. Sporting a tuxedo and bright rust hair, the magician delivers routines that he has buffed to a patent-leather gleam: In addition to his signature act—"Think-a-Drink," involving a kettle that pours liquids by request—highlights include a lulu of levitation trick and a card-trick finale that leaves you feeling like, well, a million bucks.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In the 1950 film masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood glamour is a dead-end street. Stalled there with no one coming to find her—except perhaps to use her car—is Norma Desmond: a former silent-screen goddess who is now all but forgotten. Secluded and deluded, she haunts her own house and plots her grand return to the pictures; blinded by the spotlight in her mind, she is unaware that what she imagines to be a hungry audience out there in the dark is really just the dark.  One of the ironies built into Billy Wilder’s film, which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, is that there really was an audience in the dark watching Norma: the audience of Sunset Boulevard itself, whom Norma is effectively addressing directly in her operatic final mad scene. That slippage between the real and the imaginary is even more pronounced in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical adaptation of the story, by dint of its being performed live onstage. And Jamie Lloyd’s very meta and very smart Broadway revival of the show—which stars the utterly captivating Nicole Scherzinger as Norma and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the handsome sell-out screenwriter drawn into her web—pushes it even further through the prominent use of live video. The tension between the real and the imaginary is expanded to include a mediating element: the filmic, whose form can range from documentary to dreamscape.  Thus described, Lloyd’s approach may sound academic—but in practice, it is often...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Great expectations can be a problem when you’re seeing a Broadway show: You don’t always get what you hope for. It’s all too easy to expect great things when the show is a masterpiece like Cabaret: an exhilarating and ultimately chilling depiction of Berlin in the early 1930s that has been made into a classic movie and was revived exquisitely less than a decade ago. The risk of disappointment is even larger when the cast includes many actors you admire—led by Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee of the show’s decadent Kit Kat Club—and when the production arrives, as this one has, on a wave of raves from London. To guard against this problem, I made an active effort to lower my expectations before seeing the latest version of Cabaret. But my lowered expectations failed. They weren’t low enough. Cabaret | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner So it is in the spirit of helpfulness that I offer the following thoughts on expectation management to anyone planning to see the much-hyped and very pricey new Cabaret, which is currently selling out with the highest average ticket price on Broadway. There are things to enjoy in this production, to be sure, but they’re not necessarily the usual things. Don’t expect an emotionally compelling account of Joe Masteroff’s script (based on stories by Christopher Isherwood and John Van Druten’s nonmusical adaptation of them, I Am a Camera); this production’s focus is elsewhere. Don’t expect appealing versions of the songs...

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.

Jerry Lieblich (Mahinerator) writes confounding, inventive works that interrogate the relationships between language, knowledge and power. This latest piece, presented by Lieblich's company Third Ear Theater, is set in a world of politics, science and war. The seasoned experimentalist Paul Lazar (of Big Dance Theatre) directs a cast of downtown all-stars: Jess Barbagallo, Jennifer Ikeda, Naren Weiss, Chloe Claudel, Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Anne Gridley and Mac Wellman muse Steve Mellor.

The eminent Shakespearean actor and scholar Dakin Matthews adapts the two parts of Henry IV into one long three-act history play. Matthews also plays the title role, and Elijah Jones is his restless heir, Hal, who falls in with a feckless crowd. The plum role of Hal's principal bad influence, the expansive and mendacious Sir John Falstaff, falls to the reliably marvelous Jay O. Sanders (Uncle Vanya). The cast of 16 also includes James Udom as Henry "Hotspur" Percy and Cara Ricketts as his wife. Bedlam's Eric Tucker directs for TFANA. 

A frozen marionette of the blinded Oedipus, wandering in disgrace with his daughter Antigone, gradually melts into nothingness in this evocative string-puppet work, created by Élise Vigneron and Hélène Barreau for France's Théâtre de l’Entrouvert. Inspired by Henry Bauchau's novel Oedipus on the Road, the piece has been adapted for an American production—performed by Mark Blashford and Ashwaty Chennat—that premiered at the 2023 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and is making its New York debut under the aegis of HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program. 

Audience members sit in a circle along with seven actors in Nick Thomas's hyper-intimate drama about an addiction support group that is forced to confront new challenges when its leader fails to show up. The scrappy troupe spit&vigor, formerly of Gowanus, has been performing the show roughly once a month since 2023; now it settles in for a longer run in a tiny studio space above the West Village's Players Theater. The cast includes company co-founders Sara Fellini and Adam Belvo (who alternates performances with Thomas himself). 

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.

The expert Jack O'Brien directs the latest revival of Henrik Ibsen's once-scandalous 1882 play about the roots of deadly social disease, a classic indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Stage A-listers Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup and Hamish Linklater star opposite second-generation acting stars Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty in this Lincoln Center Theater production, which marks the New York debut of a new translation by Ireland's Mark O’Rowe. 

The Chain links more than 90 short works into one jam-packed festival, divided into 25 different lineups and presented over 15 days. The keystone, Program 1, is performed five times and includes the NYC premieres of playlets by two big names, David Rabe (Hurlyburly) and Lyle Kessler (Orphans), and well as an A.I.–themed piece by John Arthur Long whose cast includes a robot dog. The other 24 programs are performed three times apiece; they include works by Gus Kaikkonen, Jeryl Brunner, Duncan Pflaster, Delaney Kelly, JP Skocik, Raven Petretti-Stamper and the acid-penned cultural critic Joe Queenan. Programs 1–5 feature Equity actors; the others offer one livestreamed performance each for remote viewers. Visit the festival's website for a full calendar of shows.

Fred Weller and Kate Arrington star as the two main characters, Jake and Alice, in Len Jenkin's new play about a pair of lovers whose journeys on the roller coaster of life sometimes find them seated next to each other. Aimée Hayes directs for the Tent, the elder-artist-friendly company she recently founded with longtime Playwrights Horizons honcho Tim Sanford.  Jason Bowen and Delfin Gökhan Meehan complete the cast.

Signature Theatre resident playwright Samuel D. Hunter (The Whale) has been justly celebrated for a suite of sensitive works that focus on crises of self-knowledge and connection in rural Idaho. This time, Paul Sparks and Brian J. Smith play half-brothers—one of whom has moved to the Netherlands—who communicate long-distance to address their mother's failing health. Jack Serio directs 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.