The 25 best Off Broadway shows to see in Spring 2024

Gabby Beans (The Skin of Our Teeth) plays a scholarship student who falls for a seemingly perfect classmate at her boarding school in a twisty coming-of-age story by Rachel Bonds. Danya Taymor—who is directing another troubled-teen tale, The Outsiders, on Broadway this season—helms the world premiere at the Roundabout, with a cast that also includes Hagan Oliveras, Samuel Henry Levine and John Zdrojeski.

Ben Levi Ross plays the central role of a fast-rising journo with ethics problems, and Hannah Cruz is a copy editor who smells a rat, in the world premiere of a show with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown (Parade) and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman that takes inspiration from the Stephen Glass fake-news scandal at The New Republic in 1998. Daisy Prince, who also directed Brown's The Last Five Years, shepherds a cast that includes Scott Bakula—who made his name in musicals (including Romance/Romance and the infamous Marilyn: An American Fable) before he jumped to national stardom in Quantum Leap—as well as longtime pros Daniel Jenkins, Jessica Molaskey, Mylinda Hull and Michael Winther.

Soho Rep joins forces with the National Asian American Theatre Co. to present the premiere of writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury's family drama, which explores queer desire across generations, cultures and languages. Performed in a mix of English and Bangla, the play follows a grad student (Abrar Haque) and his boyfriend (Jakeem Dante Powell) on a trip to Kolkata, where an old camera exposes past secrets. The play had a healthy run last year; now Theatre for a New Audience brings it back for an encore run.

The sly queer comedic genius Cole Escola (Search Party) stars as Mary Todd Lincoln in their own new play, which imagines the notoriously troubled First Lady in the weeks leading up to her widowhood. Broadway choreographer Sam Pinkleton (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) directs this historically fanciful dark comedy, whose supporting cast includes Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht as well as Fire Island crushes Conrad Ricamora and James Scully.

Stage and screen force Christine Lahti (Chicago Hope) plays the supervisor of a social-media chaos factory in Sarah Gancher’s original comedy (yes, comedy) about the kind of international internet chicanery that has helped make politics such a cesspool in recent years. Inspired by transcripts of operations by the real-life, Russia-financed Internet Research Agency, the show was a pandemic hit in its 2020 digital production. This production, directed by Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder), features Renata Friedman, Haskell King, John Lavelle and Hadi Tabbal.

While Broadway's Days of Wine and Roses uses music to explore alcoholism and recovery in the 1950s, Sean Daniels's play takes the road of contemporary drama. Joe Tapper plays the central character, who is based on the playwright himself: a successful theatrical artistic director whose life and career are nearly destroyed by his wild spins with the bottle. Sheryl Kaller (Next Fall) directs the production, which costars Crystal Dickinson and Jason Tam.

A Brooklyn woman is reunited with her father, a former black radical, in Dominique Morisseau's 2012 drama about modern identity politics. Steve H. Broadnax III directs the revival for Signature Theatre, where Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) is a Premiere Writer-in-Residence; the cast comprises Russell Hornsby, Moses Ingram and J. Alphonse Nicholson.

Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black) plays the supervisor of an apiary in a not-so-distant future when wild bees have gone extinct, and April Matthis (Toni Stone) and Carmen M. Herlihy are the lab assistants who accidentally discover that the bees have a peculiar predilection for a gruesome kind of food. Kate Whoriskey directs the world premiere of Kate Douglas's dark comedy for Second Stage; Nimene Wureh completes the cast.

Mona Pirnot, one of New York Theatre Workshop's Usual Suspects, explores private questions in a public sphere in this unconventional concert play, in which she performs her own songs but a computer delivers the monologues. Playwright Lucas Hnath—no stranger to high concepts himself, as he recently proved in Dana H.—directs for NYTW.

The sublimely freaky Taylor Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) is a Fabergé radical—beautiful, ridiculous and full of hidden tricks—who pilots audiences through fantastical journeys, guided by the compass of his magnetic individuality. This newest big Mac specacle—described as "part rock opera, part reimagined pride parade"—includes 55 original songs (with music by Matt Ray) to mark each year since Stonewall. Niegel Smith and choreographer Faye Driscoll share directing duties with Mac; the outrageously maximalist costumes, as always, are by Machine Dazzle. 

Fans of playwright John Patrick Shanley (and who isn't?) have had a rare opportunity this season to track his career at 20-year intervals, thanks to prominent revivals of 1983's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and 2004's Doubt and, now, the world premiere of his newest work: a story of three sisters and the owner of their local laundromat. Shanley himself directs for his NYC home base, Manhattan Theatre Club; the cast is made up of David Zayas, Florencia Lozano, Andrea Syglowski and the supertalented Saturday Night Live alum Cecily Strong.

Former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon plays a celebrated performance artist who vanishes for seven years—then reappears just as mysteriously with a big request for her son, played by Taylor Trensch (Dear Evan Hansen)—in an exploration of mamas and boys by Jordan Seavey (Homos, or Everyone in America). Scott Elliott directs the world permiere for his company, the New Group.

A photographer in New York City navigates the cultural sea change of the 1960s in this new jukebox musical by Lindsey Hope Pearlman, which incorporates period pop hits by the likes of Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and Lesley Gore. Gabriel Barre directs the New York premiere for the York Theatre Company; JoAnn M. Hunter choreographs, and Joseph Church (The Lion King) oversees and arranges the music. Chilina Kennedy, Ryan Silverman, Justin Matthew Sargent, Crystal Lucas-Perry and Akron Lanier Watson lead the cast.

The ever inventive Fiasco Theater mounts an intimate version of one of Shakespeare's strangest plays: a kind of Ancient Mediterranean Flash Gordon adventure—often co-attributed to Elizabethan ne'er-do-well George Wilkins—that includes shipwrecks, contests to win a princess’s hand, a pirate abduction, a virgin in a brothel and a guest shot by the goddess Diana. Eight members of the company fill out the entire dramatis personae: Jessie Austrian, Noah Brody, Paul L. Coffey, Andy Grotelueschen, Devin E. Haqq, Paco Tolson Emily Young and director Ben Steinfeld.

In previous Lincoln Center Theater productions, J.T. Rogers has dramatized world events from the 1980s (Blood and Gifts, about Afghanistan) and the 1990s (Oslo, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). In this latest outing, he skips ahead to the 2011 phone-hacking scandal that rocked the U.K.'s media and political landscapes, exposing ethical and criminal misconduct in Rupert Murdoch's tabloid empire. The Off Broadway premiere reunites Rogers with LCT resident director Bartlett Sher, who helmed both previous plays. Toby Stephens (Die Another Day) plays British MP Tom Watson—whose book with Martin Hickman, Dial M for Murdoch, is the basis of the play—and Saffron Burrows is Murdoch exec Rebekah Brooks; the stacked supporting cast includes Dylan Baker, John Behlmann, K. Todd Freeman, Seth Numrich and Michael Siberry.

In Itamar Moses's tense and timely drama, Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) plays a progressive Jewish college professor who gets caught in a sticky wicket of social-justice issues when a student petitions him to sign a manifesto. The busy Lila Neugebauer (Appropriate) directs the world premiere at the Public Theater; Cherise Boothe, Elijah Jones, Michael Khalid Karadsheh, Joy Osmanski, Ben Rosenfield and Madeline Weinstein are also in the cast. 

Tobias Menzies (The Crown) plays a rural schoolteacher who is falsely accused of sexually abusing a child in David Farr's stage adaptation of the 2012 Dutch film Jagten (not to be confused with the 2020 American film The Hunt). The play's U.S. premiere at St. Ann's Warehouse is a remount of Rupert Goold's 2019 production at London's Almeida Theatre, including the striking set by Es Devlin (The Lehman Trilogy). 

Vagina dentata! What a wonderful phrase! Vagina dentata ain't no passing craze for the Christian teen played by Alyse Alan Louis (Soft Power) in this musical dark comedy by Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) and Anna K. Jacobs (Pop!), adapted from Mitchell Lichtenstein's 2007 cult horror flick about a girl whose nether regions spell doom for would-be assailants. Sarah Benson directs and Raja Feather Kelly choreographs the show's world premiere at Playwrights Horizons; the supporting cast includes Will Connolly and Jason Gotay.

Eric Tucker and his company, Bedlam, have a knack for modern-minded stagings of historical dramas, as their hit revival of Arcadia last year demonstrated anew. This time around, Tucker combines Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra into a multishaded portrait of the Roman military hero and would-be emperor. 

Audible Theater's first commissioned musical reunites the team behind the lovely, Tony-winning musical The Band's Visit—book writer Itamar Moses, composer David Yazbek and director David Cromer, now joined by songwriter Erik Della Penna—to tell the very weird story of Elmer McCurdy: a Wild West outlaw whose corpse toured the country for decades as a side-show mummy. The ensemble comprises Jeb Brown, Eddie Cooper, Andrew Durand, Dashiell Eaves, Julia Knitel, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and Thom Sesma.

Ever since 1984's Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Charles Busch has been working toward the title of First Lady of the American Stage, delivering hilariously nuanced portraits of defiant yet vulnerable women, in the style of the great film stars of the 1940s; he cut his teeth on cinematic tough cookies with melty centers, and he has their style in his bones. In his latest outing, directed by longtime collaborator Carl Andress for Primary Stages, Busch portrays a widow driven to great lengths to protect the reputation of her late husband: the pioneering social-realist playwright Henrik Ibsen. 

Director-choreographer Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet's resident choreographer, turns Sufjan Stevens's 2005 concept album, Illinois, into a dance-theater piece with a narrative throughline he has devised with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. Three vocalists and an 11-piece band perform the music while a cast of 16 dancers—including Gaby Diaz, Robbie Fairchild, Ben Cook, Ahmad Simmons and Ricky Ubeda—brings new blasts of movement to Park Avenue Armory's massive Drill Hall.

Lucy Prebble's unsettling issue drama, first seen in NYC in 2013, depicts a pair of volunteers who fall for each other during a clinical trial for an antidepressant—without knowing if they're experiencing love or a chemical reaction, if indeed there's a difference between the two. This revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd (A Doll's House) and starring Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, debuted at the U.K.'s National Theatre last year, and is now being imported by the Shed. 

Laurence Fishburne's extraordinary career has included many top-flight performances onstage (Two Trains Running, Thurgood) as well as movies (<What's Love Got to Do With It, Othello, the Matrix films) and on television (Pee-Wee's Playhouse, Blackish). In the world premiere of his autobiographical solo show—directed by Leonard Foglia at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center—he explores what he describes as "the stories and lies people have told me, and that I have told myself."

Public Theater playwright-in-residence Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog) is highly adept at picking at the scabs of unhealed racial wounds. Her new dramedy seems sure to do just that: It's about a small, well-meaning NYC theater troupe that mounts a play about the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, with the playwright and director in the lead roles. Steve H. Broadnax III directs the NYC premiere, presented at the Public in association with Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater (where the play debuted in 2022). Gabriel Ebert and Sheria Irving play the title figures.