New and upcoming Broadway shows headed to NYC in 2025

Newcomer Jasmine Amy Rogers stars as the muffin-headed 1930 cartoon sexpot Betty Boop in a new musical that finds Betty leaving ToonTown for the sometimes harsh realities of non-animated New York. The book is by the clever Bob Martin (The Drowsy Chaperone); the score is by veteran pop hitmaker David Foster—who has given us such hits as Chicago's "You're the Inspiration" and Whitney Houston's "I Have Nothing"—and  lyricist Susan Birkenhead (Jelly's Last Jam). Director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell (Kinky Boots) oversees a colorful production whose supporting players include Faith Prince, Erich Bergen, Ainsley Melham, Stephen DeRosa and Anastacia McCleskey.

Broadway fans had a love-hate relationship with Smash, NBC's campy backstage series about the making of a musical about Marilyn Monroe, but everyone agreed that the show's highlights were its original songs by the Hairspray team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Many of those numbers will also be featured in this original adaptation by Rick Elice (Jersey Boys) and Bob Martin (Boop!), directed by Susan Stroman (The Producers) and choreographed once again by Joshua Bergasse. Robyn Hurder and Caroline Bowman star as Ivy and Karen, the story's competing would-be Marilyns, and the TV version's Krysta Rodriguez; other attractions include two of Broadway's most delightful comic actors, Brooks Ashmanskas and Kristine Nielsen, and two of its studliest muffins, John Behlmann and Casey Garvin.

George Clooney makes his Broadway debut in a stage adaptation of his 2005 film portrait of the storied CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, who helped turned the tide against McCarthyism in the 1950s. In the Oscar-nominated movie version—which Clooney directed and co-wrote, like the play, with Grant Heslov—he played Murrow's colleague Fred Friendly; this time around, he steps into the lead role originated by David Strathairn. David Cromer (The Band's Visit), one of the theater world's most reliably intelligent and insightful directors, directs the world premiere. 

This 2002 he-sang, she-sang musical by the gifted Jason Robert Brown (Parade) tracks soon-to-be exes along different lines of an X-shaped structure, in which his story moves forward in time and hers is told backward (in the sliced vein of Merrily We Roll Along). The callous rising novelist Jamie is played by pop pin-up Nick Jonas, and his "shiksa goddess" Cathy, an aspiring actress, is essayed by Tina idol Adrienne Warren. Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) directs the show's belated Broadway premiere. 

Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) in a new comedy by Kimberly Belflower, in which a high school English class in rural Georgia challenges the conventional interpretation of The Crucible, Arthur Miller's classic witch-trial drama, and its martyred hero, John Proctor. Danya Taymor, who won a Tony last year for The Outsiders, directs the Broadway premiere.

Two cherished Broadway leading ladies, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, are among the performers in this revue of songs by the peerless showtunesmith Stephen Sondheim, whose popularity has only grown since his death in 2021. Peters and Salonga were also in the show when it debuted in London in 2023; for the U.S. premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne (Swan Lake), they are flanked by several of their West End costars (Gavin Lee, Bonnie Langford, Jeremy Secomb, Jason Pennycooke) and a few new additions, such as Kate Jennings Grant and the priceless Beth Leavel. 

Jeremy Jordan was most recently seen on Broadway as the star of The Great Gatsby. Now he takes on a radically different 1920s title character: a Kentucky spelunker who became a national sensation when he got trapped underground in what is now Mammoth Cave National Park. More than a quarter century after its Off Broadway premiere, this ambitious cult-favorite musical—with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza) and a book by Tina Landau—finally makes its Broadway debut. Landau, who is also helming Redwood this season, directs the Lincoln Center production; the supporting cast includes Jason Gotay, Lizzy McAlpine, Marc Kudisch and Jessica Molaskey as Floyd's family members, Taylor Trensch as a reporter on the scene, and Wade McCollum, Sean Allan Krill and Cole Vaughan as worried locals. 

On the heels of his Tony-winning performance in last season's Merrily We Roll Along, Broadway sweetie Jonathan Groff returns to star as pop and nightclub star Bobby Darin, who peaked in the late 1950s with such hits as "Dream Lover," "Beyond the Sea" and "Mack the Knife." Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!) directs an immersive production at Circle in the Square, with a cast that features Michele Pawk, John Treacy Egan and Caesar Samayoa. The hits are strung together through an original book by Warren Leight (Side Man) and comic essayist Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot).

The spectacularly designed stage prequel to Stranger Things expands the universe of the popular Netflix show with an original story set in the late 1950s. The play depicts the early years of central series characters including Joyce Maldonaldo, Jim Hopper, Bob Newby and Dr. Martin Brenner; playwright Kate Trefry, a longtime staff writer for the TV version, has devised the story with series creators Matt and Ross Duffer and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child playwright Jack Thorne. The West End production, directed by Billy Elliot's Stephen Daldry with Justin Martin, earned many glowing notices; Louis McCartney reprises his star performance, buttressed by Yanks including Alex Breaux, T.R. Knight and Gabrielle Nevaeh. 

Josefina López's 1990 play, about a Latina teenager torn between her family's garment factory and her college dreams, has already been the basis of the 2002 film that introduced the world to America Fererra. Now playwrights Lisa Loomer (Living Out) and Nell Benjamin (Legally Blonde) adapt it into a musical with music and lyrics by Joy Huerta (of the Mexican pop duo Jesse & Joy) and Benjamin Velez. Following a warmly received 2023 premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the show is moving to Broadway under the guiding eye of director-choreographer Sergio Trujillo (Ain't Too Proud).

The Roundabout teams up with "Escape" artist Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) for a boldly jazzy adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance, the best-known show by the Victorian operetta masters W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan: a romp that bustles with sweet-hearted pirates, bumbling cops and pretty young lasses, now reset in New Orleans. Scott Ellis directs a power cast that includes, on the outlaw side, Ramin Karimloo as the Pirate King, Nicholas Barasch as his naive apprentice and RuPaul's Drag Race champion Jinkx Monsoon as the slatternly Ruth; and, on the side of the law, the justly beloved David Hyde Pierce as the Major General, Samantha Williams as his fetching daughter and Preston Truman Boyd as the Sergeant of Police.

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—reunites 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 show's Off Broadway premiere last year earned it multiple prizes, includes the Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical; the cast for the Broadway transfer has not yet been announced.

Jean Smart (Hacks) moves to extend her recent cultural dominance into relatively uncharted territory for her—the Broadway stage—as a rural Louisiana woman with a secret in this darkly comic one-woman play by the writer, actor and erstwhile CBS News correspondent Jamie Wax. The production will be Smart's first Broadway role since her Tony-nominated turn in the 2000 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner; prior to that, her only Broadway credit was a brief turn as Marlene Dietrich in the 1981 bioplay Piaf. Sarna Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George) directs the world premiere. 

Here we go yet again: The smash ABBA jukebox musical Mamma Mia! returns for a six-month engagement at the Winter Garden, where it originally ran from 2001 through 2014. The show features two dozen Eurodisco bops by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus—including “Dancing Queen,” "Waterloo" and “The Winner Takes It All”—pleasingly arranged by Catherine Johnson into a feel-good plot that combines romance, mother-daughter bonding and female friendship. The entire original creative team, led by director Phyllida Lloyd and choreographer Anthony Van Laast, is back on board for this latest trip to the Greek Isles. Casting has not yet been announced.