The 30 best Off Broadway shows to see in Fall 2024

Red Bull Theater, the city's gutsiest classical-theater company, presents a new vision of the ancient Greek myth of Medea, the mother of all infanticides. Sarin Monae West plays the title role in a modernized, battle-rap adaptation by Luis Quintero, who also serves as the production's Emcee; Jacob Ming-Trent, Stephen Michael Spencer, Mark Martin, Siena D'Addario and Melissa Mahoney fill out the cast. Nathan Winkelstein, who co-conceived the project, directs the Off Broadway premiere.

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.

Major Broadway replacements Nkeki Obi-Melekwe (Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) and Taylor Trensch (Dear Evan Hansen) lead the cast of this original musical, adapted from Derek Connolly’s 2012 indie sci-fi film about a cub journalist assigned to report about a man who plans to go back in time. The stage version is by Nick Blaemire (Glory Days) and songwriter Ryan Miller (of the alt-rock band Guster); Lee Sunday Evans (Dance Nation) directs the world premiere at BAM. 

Anthony Edwards, Amy Warren and Susannah Flood make up the cast of Meghan Kennedy's heartfelt play about a small-town diner where a regular customer asks a surprising favor of a waitress. The always astute David Cromer (Prayer for the French Republic) directs the world premiere for the Roundabout.

This ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama, conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs, depicts the true story of a teenager who reported his right-wing extremist father to the FBI after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The entire script is drawn directly from public statements, case evidence and court transcipts from the 2022 jury trial The United States vs. Guy Wesley Feffitt. Ron Bottitta, Patrick Keleher, Anna Khaja and Larry Poindexter reprise the roles they played in the show's Los Angeles premiere earlier this year.

James Ijames and Public Theater resident director Saheem Ali, who last teamed up for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham, join forces anew for the Off Broadway premiere of a play that explores gentrification in Black communities through the story of a successful woman who returns to her old neighborhood to renovate a charming house there. Susan Kelechi Watson, Khris Davis, Mamoudou Athie and Téa Guarino make up the cast.

The dissident troupe Belarus Free Theatre, which has been banned from its native country, returns to La MaMa with the world premiere of a work based on the life on another Belarusian exile: Katsiaryna "Katya" Snytsina, a star of women's basketball who showed her mettle off the court by coming out as a lesbian and voicing opposition to the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. The piece has been written and directed by BFT’s co-founders, Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada; Snytsina herself performs it with help from London dance-club figure DJ Blanka Barbara.

A gay playwright of partly Cherokee heritage, Lynn Riggs is remembered today mainly for his 1931 drama Green Grows the Lilacs, which Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted into Oklahoma! But he wrote dozens of other plays as well, including this coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl champing at the bit to free herself from her mother's control. Raelle Myrick-Hodges directs Mint Theater Company's production of what appears to be the New York City premiere of this all-but-lost work, which was published in 1928. 

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. 

A singer-songwriter unusually well versed in historic antecedents yet fully in step with the moment, Gabriel Kahane can break your heart with a poignant observation, bend your ear with an arresting chord progression or, more often than not, twist you both ways at once. At Playwrights Horizons, he performs a diptych of solo shows on alternating nights: Book of Travelers, inspired by conversations with strangers during a long train ride around the country; and Magnificent Bird, about his efforts to disconnect from the internet for a year. Both pieces are directed by Annie Tippe, who has worked wonders with a number of numerical shows by Dave Malloy (including Ghost Quartet and Octet.)

Just months after Patriots comes another drama about recent Russian history: Erika Sheffer's drama about a journalist trying to tell difficult truths about Vladimir Putin's first term in ther early 2000s, despite potential repercussions for her and her sources. Francesca Faridany (Manifest) plays the reporter, and Broadway regular Norbert Leo Butz (Catch Me If You Can) co-stars as her editor and friend. The venerable Daniel Sullivan (Proof) directs the world premiere for Manhattan Theatre Club; the supporting players are Erin Darke, Erik Jensen, Olivia Deren Nikkanen, David Rosenberg and Jonathan Walker.

Hannah Gadsby's Nanette was the Netflix comedy special that launched a thousand think pieces: a deceptively mild-mannered solo show that evolved into an impassioned exploration of, among other things, the duplicities and dangers of stand-up comedy itself. The Australian performer's follow-up show, Douglas, explored the challenges that fame presents for a person on the autism spectrum; in this latest set, they continue to unpack their own psyche as it intersects with the world at large.

En Garde Arts and the Vineyard Theatre present a site-specific, decades-spanning theatrical exploration of the ups and downs of Sunny's, a Red Hook bar that has been run by the same family for more than a century. Written by Sarah Gancher and directed by Jared Mezzocchi, the show begins at Brooklyn's Waterfront Museum before making its way to the old saloon itself. Performers include Pete Simpson (before he returns to Gatz duty), Jen Tullock, Jennifer Regan, Paco Tolson and musician Pete Lanctot.

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.

Playwright David Finnigan performs a solo show that weaves a dramatic account of the 2019 bushfires in his native Australia together with a karger survey of the historical turning points that have brought the planet to the verge of ecological catastrophe. His monologue won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at Edinburgh in 2022; its run at the Public is its North American premiere.

On The Rocks Theatre Co., which is currently in residence at Ars Nova, proffers a genre-noncomforming new work that is tantalizingly if enigmatically described as "a twistedly comedic puppet pageant of consumption, corruption and the end of humankind." The piece is written by Christopher Ford and Dakota Rose; Rose also directs a cast composed of Marc Bovino, Cornelius Loy, Rebeca Miller, Gil Perez-Abraham, Phillip Taratula, Ellen Winter and Jeena Yi. The Austrian theremin specialist Dorit Chrysler adds to the weirdness. (Music supervisor Ellen Winter contributes additional compositions.)

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.

The longevous Ensemble Studio Theatre mounts a new work commissioned by company: a comedy by Lloyd Suh (a Pulitzer finalist last year for Far Country) that imagines the difficulties of being the only son of great American writer, inventor and tonsorial cautionary tale Benjamin Franklin. Chika Ike directs a cast of three that includes Noah Keyishian, Mason Reeves and downtown-theater MVP Thomas Jay Ryan. 

Six idealistic young activists use art and music to help bring down the government of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarek in an original musical, by brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, that chronicles the Arab Spring and the fall that followed. Taibi Magar directs the world premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, whose cast includes Drew Elhamalawy, John El-Jor, Nadina Hassan, Michael Khalid Karadsheh, Rotana Tarabzouni and Tommy's impressive Ali Louis Bourzgui. 

Sarah Mantell's dystopian queer adventure tale, which ollows a group of queer warehouse workers down a California coastline ravaged by climate change and unbridled capitalism, won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize last year. Now it hits the stage for the first time at Playwrights Horizons (which commisioned it) in a production directed by Sivan Battat and featuring a multigenerational cast that comprises Barsha, Sandra Caldwell, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Ianne Fields Stewart, Deirdre Lovejoy, Tulis McCall and Pooya Mohseni.

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, Constance Wu, Billy Magnussen, Garret Dillahunt, Genevieve Hannelius and Tramell Tillman. Expect tickets to be scarce for this MCC Theater premiere.

Emmy Rossum (The Phantom of the Opera) and Zoë Winters (Succession) play twin NASA-trained scientists on diverging paths in Amy Berryman's philosophical drama, set in a future when the world is plagued by disaster and space colonization is an ever more appealing option. Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding) directs Second Stage's New York premiere of the play, which debuted in London in 2021, and Motell Foster completes the cast as Rossum's resolutely down-to-Earth fiancé.

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 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. 

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. 

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.

City Center has corraled a very impressive cast indeed for its two-week gala concert staging of this widely cherished 1998 musical. Adapted by composer Stephen Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens and book writer Terrence McNally from E.L. Doctorow's great American novel, the musical offers a panoramic look at seismic shifts in American culture at the turn of the 20th century, as exemplified through the interlocking stories of a fictional WASP family, a Black piano player and a Jewish immigrant. Broadway bold names Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, Brandon Uranowitz, Joaquina Kalukango, Colin Donnell, Ben Levi Ross and Shaina Taub lead the large ensemble in a production helmed by Encores! artistic director Lear deBessonet.

The Civilians, one of Off Broadway's most consistently clever and original troupes, thrust themselves deep into the queer sexual culture of yesteryear in a cheeky docutheater collage adapted from a 1941 medical study. Along with detailed interviews and what passed at the time for scientific evaluation, the show features original songs by composers including Martha Redbone, Stephen Trask and the Civilians' own late (and greatly missed) Michael Friedman.

As a companion piece to his production of the harrowing pogrom play Our Class, Arlekin Players Theatre director Igor Golyak sticks around at Classic Stage Company—along with much of that show's cast—with his new adapation of Shakespeare's troublesome Jew-baiting tragicomedy, a cornerstone of literary antisemitism. Richard Topol plays the bloodthirsty usurer Shylock and Alexandra Silber is his nemesis, the high-born and high-minded Portia; they are supported by Class-mates Gus Birney, José Espinosa, Tess Goldwyn and Stephen Ochsner.

"Tomorrow" never dies! Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin's beloved 1977 comic-strip musical, last seen on Broadway more than a decade ago, comes back to NYC with the tuneful tale of how a coppertop ragamuffin, her dog and an ultrarich industrialist save each other (and the country) during the Great Depression. For most of the show's holiday stint at Madison Square Garden, EGOT winner and View-master Whoopi Goldberg plays the slatternly, orphan-hating Miss Hannigan. Jenn Thompson, a replacement Pepper in the original Broadway run, directs this touring production.