New and upcoming Broadway shows headed to NYC in 2026

Having won a Tony Award for Merrily We Roll Along, Daniel Radcliffe returns to make more magic in the Broadway premiere of Duncan Macmillan's interactive dark comedy about a British man who makes lists of the world's good things, at first to ease his mum's depression and later to temper his own. The show ran Off Broadway in 2014 with Jonny Donahoe, who also contributed to the script; this version is co-directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin (Wolf Hall). It's theatrical candy cane: slim and sweet, tempered by sharpness and striped with bright nostalgia.

Two of the very brightest lights on the marquee of modern stage stars—Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf—star as Willy and Linda Loman in another revival of Arthur Miller's 1949 working-stiff tragedy, the third to hit Broadway in the past 15 years. Director Joe Mantello has worked with both actors to excellent effect in the past, so hopes run high for this production (if not for lowly Willy). The stacked supporting cast includes Christopher Abbott as Biff, Ben "Clock Twink" Ahlers as Happy, Jonathan Cake as Uncle Ben, and K. Todd Friedman and Jake Silbermann as the enviable neighbors. 

Heist, heist, baby! The Bear co-stars Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach play would-be bank robbers who find themselves in a sweaty standoff with the police in this stage adapation of Sidney Lumet intense 1975 thriller, which was itself inspired by a real-life 1972 incident in Brooklyn. England's Rupert Goold (King Charles III) directs the world premiere; grit master Stephen Adly Guirgis, who earned a Pulitzer Prize for Between Riverside and Crazy), adapts Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning screenplay. Supporting casting has not yet been announced.

Welcome to the Dahl house: Stage and screen lion John Lithgow plays kid-lit icon Roald Dahl, the author of brilliant and often quite vicious books and short stories, in a bioplay by Mark Rosenblatt that explores the antisemitism scandal that tarnished Dahl's reputation in the early 1980s. The production's 2025 West End premiere earned Olivier Awards for Best New Play as well as for Lithgow and supporting actor Elliot Levey; on Broadway, they and Rachael Stirling reprise their London performances, now joined by Aya Cash (The Boys). Two UK theater pillars, director Nicholas Hytner directs and designer Bob Crowley, set the scenes.

One salutary recent trend has been the Broadway premieres of major 21st century plays that had previously only been seen Off Broadway. The latest is Gina Gionfriddo's blind-date-gone-wrong comedy, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer that was initially mounted in New York by Second Stage and that is returning in a larger venue under the aegis of the same company. The cast of five, directed by Trip Cullman (Significant Other), includes Patrick Ball (The Pitt), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo) and stage marvel Linda Emond (Homebody/Kabul)—plus two women yet to be named.

This thrilling reconception of Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot's musical not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it to unexpected heights. Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch embrace the musical’s inherent strangeness by absorbing it into queerness: The show’s secret ball for cats is now a ballroom runway competition of the kind recently visited by TV’s Pose and Legendary. This concept—let’s call it Paris Is Purring—is ideal for the musical’s revue-like structure, and the show’s wispy plot is clearer than it has ever been; the fur truly flies. After an already-legendary run at PAC in 2024, the production moves to Broadway with most of its original cats, including André De Shields, Chasity Moore, Sydney James Harcourt, Dudney Joseph Jr., Robert “Silk” Mason, Emma Sofia and ballroom elder Junior LaBeija.  

Richard O'Brien's delirious and oddly touch-a-touch-a-touch-a-touching spoof of science-fiction and horror B flicks—a mix of satire, rock & roll and anything-goes queer sensibility— didn't last long in its 1975 Broadway debut, but it spawned a film that became the fairy godmother of all midnight movies and attracted a rabid cult following that continues to this day. Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!) directs the musical's second Broadway revival for Roundabout Theatre Company; British heartthrob Luke Evans (Beauty and the Beast) stars as the show's strutting, lingerie-clad "sweet transvestite" antihero: the alien mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, whose version of Frankenstein's monster is a blond muscle boy. Supporting casting has not yet been revealed.

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. After more than 1,000 performances Off Broafway, the ship sails onto the Main Stem this spring; original stars Mindelle, Rousouli and Frankie Grande are newly flanked by Jim Parsons (!) as meddling mother Ruth Dewitt Bukater and Deborah Cox as the ever-unsinkable Molly Brown. 

Proven stage talents Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett play the roles made famous by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, respectively, in a stage version of Iris Rainer Dart's 1985 novel about unlikely longtime friends, which was adapted into the beloved 1988 film weepie. The musical's book is by Dart and Thom Thomas; the lyrics are also by Dart, and the music is by the seminal 1950s pop songwriter Mike Stoller (who is now is his 90s. After more than a decade in development, Beaches lands on Broadway in a production co-directed by Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill's Lonny Price and Matt Cowart.

The formidable duo of Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) and Kelli O'Hara (Days of Wine and Roses) play married ladies who booze it up as they await the arrival of a shared French paramour from their rather scandalous single days in a rare revival of this early comedy by the paradigmatic Brit wit Noël Coward. Roundabout Theatre Company's interim artistic director, Scott Ellis (Pirates!), oversees the naughty fun.

Vampire musicals don't have a great track record on Broadway—hello and goodbye, Dance of the Vampires and Dracula and Lestat!—but this adaptation of the 1987 coming-of-fangs horror comedy aims to break that curse. Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending) directs a cast that promisingly includes LJ Benet and rising star Benjamin Pajak as teenage brothers in immortal peril, Shoshanna Bean as their mom and Paul Alexander Nolan and Ali Louis Bourzgui as bloodsucking baddies. (No word yet on who will play the key role of the oiled-up sax player in jeans.) 

Debbie Allen directs the second Broadway revival of August Wilson's 1988 masterwork, which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1988. Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, this mythopoeic drama is the second part of Wilson's ten-play, decade-by-decade survey of African-American life in the 20th century. Joshua Boone (The Outsiders) assumes the central role of Harold Loomis, an ex-convict in search of his missing wife; also in the cast are heavy hitters Taraji P. Henson, Cedric the Entertainer and Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

Manhattan Theatre Club continues its long and very fruitful relationship with the excellent playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Kimberly Akimbo) by mounting the world premiere of his latest play: a comedy about a neighborhood association thrown into internecine turmoil when a newcomer suggests adding a stop sign to one of the local corners. The killer emsemble cast—directed by Kenny Leon (Purlie Victorious)—comprises Richard Thomas, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Margaret Colin, Ricardo Chavira, Michael Esper, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Jeena Yi, Kayli Carter and the priceless Marylouise Burke. 

The winsome Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) headlines the first Broadway revival of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize–winning 2000 play, in which the daughter of a mentally ill mathematician wrestles to keep her own mind. Thomas Kail (Hamilton) directs the production, whose cast of four also includes the great Don Cheadle—in his long overdue Broadway debut!—as well as ringers Samira Wiley and Jin Ha. 

Cinco Paul's delightful and tuneful Apple TV series, a loving spoof of Golden Age musicals, makes a bold leap from the small screen to the Broadway stage in a production directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli (Death Becomes Her). Alex Brightman and Sara Chase, reprising roles they originated last year at the late Kennedy Center, star as the show's central couple: a pair of modern normies who stumble upon a land governed by tropes of yesteryear. (The plot only covers Season 1 of the series, but if all goes well…dare we hope for a sequel?) The remaining cast remains unknown.