Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Dan Butler (Frasier) stars as a middle-aged alcoholic who must get his life together after a DUI arrest in this 12-step comedy by Spike Manton and Chicago radio personality Harry Teinowitz (on whose experience it is loosely based). Jackson Gay directs the Off Broadway premiere of a show that had a successful 2021 run in Chicago under the too-cute title When Harry Met Rehab. Gregg Mozgala, Chiké Johnson, Quentin Nguyễn-duy and Pump Up the Volume's Samantha Mathis play fellow addicts, and Portia is their therapist. 

Marisa Tomei and Arliss Howard play successful music producers whose world is rocked by a new A&R employee, played by Gracie McGraw, who challenges the way things have gone down in their business. Scott Elliott directs the New York premiere of Jessica Goldberg's three-person drama, which marks the beginning of the New Group's 30th-anniversity season. The seasoned alt-rock trio BETTY provides original songs. 

Playwright Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) concludes her multiyear Signature Theatre residency with a world premiere co-produced by Manhattan Theatre Club. Tiffany Nichole Greene directs this culture-clash tale of a first-generation Haitian-American woman who journeys to Port-au-Prince to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish that she reconnect with her cousin. Pascale Armand, Kelly McCreary, Fedna Jacquet, Andy Lucien and Jude Tibeau consitute the cast of five.

On the high heels of her grand success as Celine Dion in Titanique, the delightful actor-writer Marla Mindelle has created another campy star vehicle for herself: a Schmigadoon!-ish musical about a modern normie who wakes up from a bender to find herself trapped in a 1940s-style Broadway musical. In addition to starring, Mindelle has co-written the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the score with Philip Drennen; her costars include Titanique co-creator Constantine Rousouli as well as Natalie Walker, Paris Nix and the charming SNL alum Alex Moffat. Connor Gallagher serves as director and choreographer.

While Lincoln Center Theater presents Ayad Akhtar's McNeal in its Broadway venue, it is devoting its Off Broadway house to the New York premiere of a play by another recent Pulitzer Prize winner: Katori Hall's 2015 drama about four half-sisters who gather in Georgia to sew a quilt in honor of their late mother, but soon wind up testing the limits of their family bond—especially after the dead woman's will is read. Resident Director Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Skin of Our Teeth) directs a cast of five women: Crystal Dickinson, Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore, Lauren E. Banks and Susan Kelechi Watson.

Eric William Morris and Noah Weisberg play the ambulance-chasing celebrity lawyers Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes—who became household names in the early 2000s thanks to a catchy jingle and an extremely simple phone number—in this very goofy romp by Michael Breen and David Rafailedes. The general outline of the story is factually based, but the overall approach is sketch comedy, not biography. Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse share directorial duties.

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. But the main attraction remains the Rockettes, whose 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.—Adam Feldman

Broadway ensembler Matthew LaBanca made headlines in 2021 when his same-sex marriage got him fired from his job teaching music at a Catholic school. His solo show explores that experience and challenges the dichotomy between religious faith and LGBTQ equality. Kira Simring directs the Off Broadway premiere at Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre, where she is the artistic director.

The witty drag empress Alaska Thunderfuck stars in her own original musical comedy, co-written with Tomas Costanza and Ashley Gordon, about a wigged-out war between a pair of rival drag houses bent on domination. The cast features popular drag performers (Jujubee, Jan Sport, Luxx Noir London, Lagoona Bloo) alongside significant traditional-musical-theater talents (Nick Adams, J. Elaine Marcos, Eddie Korbich, Bre Jackson). Through November 24, the token straight man is played by Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block. Prepare to be properly gagged.

Broadway's loyal opposition, Gerard Alessandrini, returns with a new edition of his beloved satirical revue Forbidden Broadway, which has ribbed the Great White Way since 1982. Hell’s Kitchen, The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby, Back to the Future and Merrily We Roll Along are among the targets this time; the cast includes Jenny Lee Stern, Chris Collins-Pisano, Danny Hayward, Nicole Vanessa Ortiz and Fred Barton at the ivories.

Elevator Repair Service's jaw-dropping literary installation—in which 13 actors in a crummy office, led by Scott Shepherd, read every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—is thoroughly aural, even musical, but also acts upon the eye. Directed by John Collins and Steve Bodow, the show opens up a space between Fitzgerald’s writing and real life in all its silliness, randomness and banality.—David Cote

Soho Rep bids farewell to its longtime digs on Walker Street with a metathetrical collaboration between big-shot playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins—whose brilliant An Octoroon premiered at Soho Rep in 2013—and performance artist Alina Troyano, who has been doubling as Latin spitfire Carmelita Tropicana since the 1980s. The play imagines what ensues when Jacobs-Jenkins offers to buy the character from Troyano, and takes off from there into a larger conversation about avant-garde art and generational change. The cast, directed by Eric Ting, include Tropicana as well as Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Ugo Chukwu, Will Dagger and Keren Lugo.

Kenneth Lonergan's shaggy but engaging down-home dramedy, about a narcissistic country star whose life falls apart after the death of his mother, got a handsome premiere production at the Atlantic in 2016. Now it returns at the West Village's Lucille Lortel Theatre, directed again by Neil Pepe but with a different leading man: Star Wars baddie and Girls boy Adam Driver, returning to his Off Broadway roots. Three actors from the original cast—Keith Nobbs, Adelaide Clemens and CJ Wilson—are back for another go, this time joined by Heather Burns and Frank Wood. 

Kenneth Branagh plays the foolish title character, one of the great tests of stage mettle—one might say it's the Mama Rose of classical theater—in Shakespeare's great tragedy of being, nothingness and elder abuse. The rest of the cast is made up of fledgling graduates from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; Branagh himself shares directing duties with Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck. As in London last year, the production is set in prehistoric Britain, so expect a lot of fur pelts. 

Audience members choose their own paths through a specially designed multifloor complex in the Financial District in this all-new immersive theatrical experience from Emursive, the producers of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. Dozens of performers evoke life in the Gilded Age through narratives loosely inspired by real New York City history as well as literary sources like the Faust legend and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Teddy Bergman directs the show, which is written by Jon Ronson and features scenic design Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and costumes by Emilio Sosa.

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Kate Hamill has enjoyed considerable success as the star of her own stage adaptations of literary classics including Little Women, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Now she turns the page from 19th-century novels to delve further back& in history with a bioplay about the Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi, who became a great painter despite the overwhelming obstacle of being a woman in 17th-century Italy. Jade King Carroll directs the play's Off Broadway premiere for Primary Stages, with a cast of six led by Hamill as Artemisia. 

It's been more than two decades since Marissa Jaret Winokur, Laura Bell Bundy and Kerry Butler shared the stage as the teen queens of the original Broadway cast of Hairspray. Reuniting for a theatrical cabaret show at New World Stages, they stare stories and songs from that musical, plus a sprinkling of mashups, medleys and parodies. Andrew Byrne is their musical director. 

Writer-director John Fisher's musical farce takes us backstage at a campy musical version of Euripides's kill-the-kiddies tragedy, where mayhem ensues when the production's gay star unexpectedly falls in love with his leading lady. Decades after its acclaimed runs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the show finally makes its New York City debut in an open-ended Off Broadway run with a cast of nine. 

Bedlam presents a new musical about the hopes and travails of Nashville songwriters with a score by a real-life one: J.T. Harding, who has written for artists including Keith Urban, Blake Shelton, Kenny Chesney, Darius Rucker and Uncle Kracker. The book is by Peter Zinn; Bedlam's Eric Tucker directs the New York premiere for his company. The cast includes Stephen Michael Spencer, Jonathan Judge-Russo, Casey Shuler, Leenya Rideout, Drew Bastian and Andrew Rothenberg. 

Since its 2016 release, the hit Italian film Perfect Strangers—in which a group of friends play a highly revealing party game—has been remade a record 24 times in countries around the world (though not yet in English). Now it is the basis of a satirical stage comedy by writer-director Robert O'Hara, the auteur behind the delectable Bootycandy and Barbecue, who has assembled a staggering cast of stars: Neil Patrick Harris, Debra Messing, Jane Krakowski, Constace Wu, Billy Magnussen, Garret Dillahunt, Genevieve Hannelius and Tramell Tillman. Expect tickets to be scarce for this MCC Theater premiere.

Vagina dentata! What a wonderful phrase! Vagina dentata ain't no passing craze for the Christian teen played with fearsome abandon by Alyse Alan Louis in this savagely raunchy and gory musical dark comedy, adapted by Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) and Anna K. Jacobs from the 2007 cult horror flick about a girl with nether regions of doom. After a hit debut at Playwrights Horizons, Sarah Benson's savage production now moves to New World Stages, where supporting actors Will Connolly, Jason Gotay and Jared Loftin are newly joined by Andy Karl.—Adam Feldman

The songs of Québécois nightingale Celine Dion are the stately vessel—or are they the iceberg?—in this campy spoof of James Cameron's 1997 romantic disaster film, written by Marla Mindelle (Sister Act) and Constantine Rousouli (Cruel Intentions) with director Tye Blue. The highly game musical-comedy cast currently includes Dee Roscioli, Michael Williams, Cayleigh Capaldi, Joel Waggoner, Lisa Howard, Tommy Bracco, Brandon Contreras and Marcus Antonio.

Puppet master Jonathan Rockefeller's kaleidoscopic adaptation of Eric Carle’s classic children’s stories is a pure, kid-pleasing joy. The ravenous larva doesn’t appear until the final quarter, but there are plenty of colorful puppets, dancing and music to entrance youngsters until then. Along with the main story, the show dramatizes three other Carle books; a different combo is performed at each show.

Having dipped his toe into science fiction in his 2017 song cycle The Outer Space, the singular musical storyteller Ethan Lipton now applies his very human smarts to the question of artificial intelligence, playfully investigating the ways in which robots reflect our own flaws and values. He is joined as usual by Vito Dieterle on sax, Eben Levy on guitar and Ian Riggs on bass; longtime collaborator Leigh Silverman (Suffs) directs.