Adam Feldman

New York theater ranges far beyond the 41 large midtown houses that we call Broadway. Many of the city's most innovative and engaging new plays and musicals can be found Off Broadway, in venues that seat between 100 and 499 people. These more intimate spaces present work in a wide range of styles, from new pieces by major artists at the Public Theater or Playwrights Horizons to crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the top Off Broadway shows usually cost less than the best Broadway shows (even if you score cheap tickets to them). Use our comprehensive listings to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows. RECOMMENDED: Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

Broadway musicals are the beating heart of New York City. These days, your options are more diverse than ever: cultural game-changers like Hamilton and raucous comedies like The Book of Mormon are just down the street scrappy originals like Suffs and family classics like The Lion King. Whether you're looking for classic Broadway songs, spectacular sets and costumes, star turns by Broadway divas or dance numbers performed by the hottest chorus boys and girls, there is always plenty to choose from. Here is our list of all the Broadway musicals that are currently running or on their way, followed by a list of those in smaller Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues. RECOMMENDED: The best Broadway shows

Human beings have been creating theater for millennia, and for probably just as long they have been looking for ways to pay less for seats. There are many strategies for finding cheap Broadway tickets and Off Broadway tickets, but the easiest involves discount codes, which allow you to buy in advance and choose your seats so you don't have to scramble for last-minute tickets. We here at Time Out have partnered with a number of Off Broadway productions to set up deals to cut your costs.

Looking for the best things to do in NYC this weekend? Whether you’re the group planner searching for more things to do in NYC today or you have no plans yet, here are some ideas to add to your list for this weekend: Dragon Fest, Rough Trade's iNDIEPLAZA, a new K-pop exhibit, Ukrainian Easter Egg Workshops, the Big Umbrella Festival, and free events around town. All you have to do is scroll down to plan your weekend! Start planning a great month now with our round-up of the best things to do in April.  RECOMMENDED: Full list of the best things to do in NYCRECOMMENDED: The best New York attractions Stay in the Loop: Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest in New York City news, culture and dining. 

In an age of globalism, cabaret is a fundamentally local art: a private concert in an intimate nightclub, where music and storytelling merge at close range. And no city offers as wide a range of thrilling cabaret artists as New York City, from Broadway and pop legends like Patti LuPone and Debbie Harry to outrageous downtown provocateurs like Bridget Everett and Taylor Mac, drag stars like Alaska and Dina Martina and world-class interpreters like Alan Cumming and Meow Meow. Here's where to find the best of them this month.

We all need magic in our lives, and New York offers an awful lot of it—and we don't just mean Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Some of the city's best magic shows are proudly in the old presentational tradition of men in tuxedos with tricks up their sleeves; others are more like Off Broadway shows or immersive theater experiences. Performed by some of the world's top magic artists, they welcome you to suspend disbelief in a special zone where astonishing skill meets showmanship and wonder. Sure, it's all a bunch of tricks. But why not allow yourself a few illusions?

When it comes to theater, who says you have to just sit and watch? Immersive theater in New York City puts you right in the middle of the action, and often draws you in to participate. Whereas most Broadway shows still follow the traditional proscenium-arch model, some some immersive Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway productions even dispense with the idea of a stage entirely, letting you follow your own paths through unconventional spaces. To help you navigate the maze of options, here is our list of the city's best immersive and interactive shows. RECOMMENDED: Best Broadway shows

Broadway and Off Broadway productions get most of the attention, but to get a true sense of the range and diversity of New York theater, you need to look to the smaller productions collectively known as Off-Off Broadway. There are more than dozens of Off-Off Broadway spaces in New York, mostly with fewer than 99 seats. Experimental plays thrive in New York's best Off-Off Broadway venues; that's where you'll find many of the city's most challenging and original works. But Off-Off is more than just the weird stuff: It also includes everything from original dramas to revivals of rarely seen classics, and it's a good place to get early looks at rising talents. What's more, it tends to be affordable; while cheap Broadway tickets can be hard to find, most Off-Off Broadway shows are in the $15–$35 range. Here are some of the current shows that hold the most promise. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to Off Broadway shows in NYC 

Seeing a Broadway show can require quite a lot of planning—and sometimes a leap of faith. You can wait try to see only the very best Broadway shows by waiting until everything opens and gets reviewed, but by then it is harder to get tickets and good seats. So it's smart to keep an eye on upcoming productions—whether they're original musicals and plays or revivals of time-tested classics—and pick out some promising options in advance. Here, in order of their first performances, are the productions that are set to begin their Broadway runs in 2025. (Other shows will be added when tickets to them go on sale.) Recommended: Current and Upcoming Off Broadway Shows

There's no business like show business, and there's no place better for shows than New York City. The sheer range of Off Broadway show for kids proves just that. Each of these theater productions offers something unique, including blue men from another world, wild slapstick comedy, a man-eating plant and—much to kids' delight—more bubbles than you've probably ever seen. (Of course, there are plenty of great Broadway shows for kids as well.)  RECOMMENDED: More theater for kids in NYC Have you already checked out these cool Off Broadway shows for kids? New York has plenty of other fun activities up its sleeve. Visit these family attractions, grab a bite to eat after the show at one of these fun restaurants or try to check the 101 things to do with kids in NYC off your list. 

Broadway shows are central to the experience of New York City. The word Broadway is sometimes used as shorthand for theater itself, but it officially refers to the set of 41 large theaters near Times Square, nearly all of which were built before 1930 and most of which seat more than 1,000 people. The most popular Broadway shows tend to be musicals, from long-running favorites like The Lion King and Hamilton to more recent hits like Hadestown and Moulin Rouge!—but new plays and revivals also represent an important part of the Broadway experience. There’s a wide variety of Broadway shows out there, as our complete A–Z listing attests. (For a full list of shows that are coming soon, check out our list of upcoming Broadway shows.) RECOMMENDED: Find the best Broadway showsRECOMMENDED: Current and upcoming Off Broadway shows

As always, it's going to be a busy March and April on Broadway—but also as always, much of the season's most exciting work will be found Off Broadway. The 2025 Off Broadway season offers an encouragingly wide range of options. You can see big stars (Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott, Isabelle Huppert, Calista Flockhart, Christian Slater) or the children of big stars (Cooper Hoffman, Olivia Washington, Levon Hawke, the Ellas Beatty and Stiller). There are new works by established American playwrights—like Samuel D. Hunter, Joshua Harmon, Rajiv Joseph and Bess Wohl—and productions imported from the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany and French Canada. There are old songs by Jonathan Larson and new ones by Whitney White; there's a marionette made of melting ice. What more could you want? We've sorted through the dozens of upcoming Off Broadway shows to choose 30 that seem especially promising. Here, in chronological order, are the Off Broadway shows we're most looking forward to seeing in the next three months. (Not included, but worth remembering: City Center's Encores! series, whose 2025 season includes Urinetown, Love Life and Wonderful Town.) RECOMMENDED: Complete current and upcoming Off Broadway shows  

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Smash, adapted from the non-hit TV series of the same name, begins with a canny feint. Its opening number is a fully staged song, “Let Me Be Your Star,” from Smash’s show-within-a-show, Bombshell, a Broadway biomusical about Marilyn Monroe. Robyn Hurder—as Ivy Lynn, the actress cast as Marilyn—sounds great singing it, and she hits all her marks as she rushes through the motions of the screen star’s best-known imagery: laying handprints at Grauman's, holding a white dress as it billows up around her, cooing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Yet something is off; the number feels corny and busy. Doubts about Smash creep in: Is this supposed to be…good? But then the show’s focus pulls back, and we are in a fluorescent-lit studio where Bombshell is being rehearsed, and Bombshell’s director, Nigel—played, in full comic bloom, by Brooks Ashmanskas—has notes. “Is the tempo too bright?” (Yes.) “Are there too many bits?” (Yes.) Does our star have time to breathe?” (Not enough.) For a moment, you feel relief: Phew! They know. But knowingness, it turns out, is not the same as knowledge, and it certainly isn't power.  Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The TV version of Smash, which ran on NBC in 2012 and 2013, was a series that many theater fans loved to hate-watch. The same people who were grateful to see backstage-Broadway representation in mass culture at all were also highly sensitive to its potential for embarrassment, of which there was plenty. By

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “Old friends do tend to become old habit,” sings a character in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, and when it comes to work by Sondheim—one of the best friends American musical theater ever had—it’s a habit that Broadway is happy to indulge. Not a year goes by lately, not a blessed year, without at least one Sondheim show on the big boards, all of them worth seeing: West Side Story in 2020, Company in 2021, Into the Woods in 2022, Sweeney Todd and Merrily in 2023, Gypsy in 2024. Artists keep returning to this well because the well is so deep; they can still throw down a bucket and come up with something new. That’s less true of Old Friends, a revue of Sondheim songs that includes selections from all of the musicals listed above and several others besides. Devised by the British überproducer Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Matthew Bourne (Swan Lake), the show began as a 2022 gala concert, which was then reworked into a 2023 London production that featured some of the concert’s performers, most notably the great leading lady Bernadette Peters in what was somehow her West End debut. Now Manhattan Theatre Club has brought a copy of that copy to Broadway, with seven members of the 2023 cast—Peters, Lea Salonga, Bonnie Langford, Joanna Riding, Jeremy Secomb, Gavin Lee and Jason Pennycooke—performing alongside eight new additions, including The Prom's Beth Leavel.  Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy To those unfamiliar wit

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Try to imagine this: a family-friendly Broadway musical based on a beloved cartoon character from the Great Depression. Maybe she has distinctive hair and a signature red dress. Maybe she’s looking to find out who she is, so she runs away and gets dazzled by the bright lights and bustle of NYC. Her best friends could be, I don’t know, a dog and an orphan girl. And this may sound crazy, but: What if her sunniness and can-do optimism had the power to inspire progressive political change?  It’d never work. Just kidding, just kidding! It worked like the dickens in the 1977 moppet musical Annie, and it works again—minus Annie’s more Dickensian elements—in Boop! The Musical. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, this is an old-fashioned candy shop of a show, where tasty confections are sold in bulk. When Boop! is corny, it’s candy corn. Gorge on the multicolor gumdrops of its high-energy production numbers; chew the jelly beans of its gentle social-mindedness; let the caramel creams of its love story melt slightly oversweetly in your mouth. And above all, savor this show’s red-hot cinnamon heart: Jasmine Amy Rogers, making a sensational Broadway debut as the 1930s animated-short icon Betty Boop.   Boop! The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In our world, Betty is the quintessential cartoon jazz baby, a Fleischer Studios flapper inspired by singer Helen Kane (famous for her "boop-oop-a-doop" tag in songs like “I Wanna Be Loved by

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  When viewed in retrospect, at least, some matches are doomed from the start. That’s half the story in Jason Robert Brown’s he-sang, she-sang musical The Last Five Years, which looks at a failed relationship—between Jamie, a rising novelist, and Cathy, a plateaued actress—from both sides and in two temporal directions. It is also half the story in the show’s woefully uneven new revival with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren, directed by Whitney White. The balance is broken: She has all the weight.  As its Playbill insert helpfully illustrates, The Last Five Years lays out the narratives of its two exes in the form of an X: His side of the story moves forward, starting at the end of their first date; hers unfolds in reverse, starting at the end of their marriage. They’re at cross-purposes, and aside from a wedding song at the intersection of their timelines—the lovely “The Next Ten Minutes,” which cleverly incorporates the words “I do”—their stories are never on the same page. Until the counterpoint finale, there’s only one duet in this whole two-person show; the rest of the score is apportioned into alternating solos.  The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Brown’s structural choice suggests an insurmountable problem in Jamie and Cathy’s romance. If they can’t connect, maybe it’s because each of them puts the other on a pedestal. They love each other’s types. Jamie, who sees himself as a little Jewish nebbish, is excited by the

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Good Night, and Good Luck is a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow and his contretemps with the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who have now adapted it—albeit barely—for the stage. The Broadway version, starring Clooney as Murrow and directed by the expert David Cromer, is in many ways unobjectionable. It is well designed and full of fine actors doing their jobs. Its subject is timely and its message is on point, and there’s no good reason to see it. Nevertheless: Because it stars Clooney, in his Broadway debut and his first professional stage appearance in 40 years, the production is now the highest-grossing show on Broadway, with a weekly take exceeding $3 million. The best third of the seats in the Winter Garden Theatre start at $799 a pop; the worst seats, with partial views on the far sides of the mezzanine, are a mere $176. Good night, nurse! Such is the nature of the marketplace, but consumers should be warned that nothing in this production is better than what you can get at home by renting the movie for $3.99.  Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid That’s because, in nearly every regard, Clooney and Heslov have just plopped their screenplay onstage and called it a play. Presented live on Broadway, Good Night, and Good Luck is still a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow. One central character has been cut for econ

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scene most closely associated with David Mamet’s electric 1983 drama Glengarry Glen Ross is probably the “Always Be Closing” tirade delivered by Alec Baldwin in the 1992 film adaptation: a brutal dressing-down of the salesmen in his scammy real-estate operation, including some veteran sellers who may have forgotten their ABCs. The ongoing resonance of that movie, especially for straight guys, is surely one reason that Mamet’s play keeps returning to the stage in major productions. Glengarry is now being mounted on Broadway for the third time in 20 years; only Macbeth, another brief play about cutthroat ambition, has been revived on Broadway more often in this century. (The most revived musical, Gypsy, is also about strivers.) And it will keep coming back as long as there’s money to be made on it. Glengarry Glen Ross: Always be opening.  Funnily enough, Baldwin’s corporate-taskmaster character and his famous speech do not appear in the stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross; Mamet added them for his screenplay. If that’s a bit of a bait-and-switch for fans of the movie, well, that’s what Glengarry is about: Everyone in the real-estate office is peddling the unreal—trying to pull a fast one, sometimes more than one at once. I’ve occasionally wondered why Mamet hasn’t added the lecture scene to the play, which is not exactly too long as it stands; even including an intermission after the 35-minute first act, it’s still not much more than an hou

The Brick welcomes dozens of "experiment(al)(ing)" artists from a variety of disciplines—if that's the right word—to test new work under the aegis of its 15-night Interrobang festival. Each evening includes four or five short pieces, and each piece is staged twice in the course of the festival. Among the many offerings are Anton Dudley's Coochie Coochie Coup d’Etat, Hannah Mitchell's Trad, Brian Bock and Derek Smith's Do you like me?, Meaghan Robichaud's Bushwick Is My Moscow, Yehuda L. Hyman's The Rose Project, Joy-Marie Thompson's Farewell My Fool, Seth Bockley's The Ambiguities and Billy McEntee's Amo’s Aunts Keep PopPop Alive (Jusoffa Exit 155). Check out the Brick's April listings for more details. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s fantastical 1891 novel—a gothic meditation on the blurry lines that separate art from life, appearances from reality, body from soul—there's a curious moment when the barrier between Wilde himself and the novel he is writing briefly disappears. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not,” he says, departing from third-person narration for the first and only time in the book. “It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” This revealing blink of an “I” does not make the cut in writer-director Kip Williams’s dynamic stage adaptation of the book, a solo performed with astonishing stamina and skill by Sarah Snook. But it everywhere informs the production’s clever embrace of artifice and self-reproduction as theatrical devices.  One can see the appeal of this show for Snook at this time in her career. It's dangerous for an actor to be too closely associated with a single role, as she is at risk of being for her cracking portrayal of Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession. What better way to avoid being pigeonholed than to spread her wings across 25 parts at once? In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Snook incarnates the narcissistic title character, the ultimate demon twink, who models for a worshipful portrait by the idealistic painter Basil Hallward. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young,” he laments. “If it were only the ot

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Yes, I have seen the new Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, the one that is raking in almost $3 million a week by selling out Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre with tickets priced at up to $900. And no, you probably won’t see it. Jealous? Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not just that jealousy itself—famously described in Othello as "the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on”—is deleterious to the soul. It’s that this production, though perfectly good in most regards and better than that in several, isn’t worth voiding your purse. At any rate, but ideally a lower one, you’ll have many opportunities to see Othello in the future, even if it is the least frequently produced of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies; the last Broadway production was in 1982, with James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer. There are reasons for this relative rarity, which stem from some of the very things that make the play appealing: its swiftness and sweeping passion. The respected general Othello (Washington), a Moor in cosmopolitan Venice, marries a beautiful young Venetian woman, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), to the fury of her wealthy father, Brabantio (Daniel Pearce). But he is soon deceived by his trusted aide Iago (Gyllenhaal) into believing that she is cheating on him with his handsome right-hand man, Cassio (Andrew Burnap). Stirred to rage, he suffocates the faithful Desdemona in their wedding bed. Othello | Photograph: Courtesy

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, the comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II, has arrived to storm the shores of Broadway with plenty of backup. Critics in the U.K. have loved it; it has been billed as “the best-reviewed show in West End history”—Time Out London’s own Andrzej Lukowski called it “a glorious spoof”—and it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The show is the debut offering of a young comedy-theater troupe called SpitLip, which has been performing variations of it since 2019, and local critics were clearly rooting for it. (“It’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company,” wrote Lukowski. “This is very much their triumph.”) Perhaps, in riding this wave of praise to Broadway, the production has lost some of what made the operation itself an unlikely success in 1943: the element of surprise.  Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Like Six, the show is an irreverent look at English history, devised by university chums, that worked its way up from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End; like Dead Outlaw, which will also open on Broadway this season, it features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of a h

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway: To attend this show—which premiered last season at the Atlantic Theatre, and has now moved to Broadway—is to enter a world thick with history that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know it already. While you’re there, though, you don’t need to think too hard. Just give yourself over to the sounds that pour out from the stage.  The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. It became a worldwide sensation upon its release, and was the subject of a 1999 documentary film by Wim Wenders. Marco Ramirez’s stage version has a less factual bent. “Some of what follows is true,” says the bandleader Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), who was instrumental in assembling the album’s participants. “Some of it only feels true.”  Buena Vista Social Club | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with fla

Theater review by Adam Feldman Some of the best ensemble acting in town is currently at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, which is remarkable not because of the material—Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya has always been a great piece for ensembles—but because it’s a one-man show. That’s perhaps slightly less surprising if you know that the man in question is the extraordinary Andrew Scott, who has played roles as varied as the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock, the titular sociopath on Ripley, the sensitive gay writer in All of Us Strangers and, of course, Fleabag's Hot Priest. But none of these performances, by themselves, can prepare you for the gorgeous finesse with which he shuffles the roles in Vanya. The dexterity of his hand is equaled by the gentleness of his touch.  In adapting Chekhov’s 1897 tragicomedy for solo performance, playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also moved its time and place, Anglicizing the characters’ names and transporting them, if not quite to the present, then to some point in the '80s (to judge by the tech they use). Many modern versions of Uncle Vanya—including last year’s revival at Lincoln Center and Richard Nelson’s in 2018—are set in recent times, but Stephens reimagines the world of the play more thoroughly than most, while retaining its essential qualities. For example: Aleksandr, the pompous and gouty professor of the original, is now Alexander, a pompous and gouty film director; the bitter title character, Iv

Hear ye, hear ye! And gather round! Audible Theater is teaming up with Together, a new accessible-theater initiative led by megastar Hugh Jackman and superproducer Sonia Friedman, for an eight-week series of programming at Off Broadway's Minetta Lane Theatre this spring. The centerpiece of the series will be full productions of two new plays in rep, performed by casts that include Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, Justice Smith and Ella Beatty. Tickets to these engagements will be made affordable in two different ways. A quarter of the total will be free: Audible and Together are working with the cheap tickets experts of TDF—best known for its TKTS discount booths in Times Square and at Lincoln Center—to distribute 25% of the seats at each performance, gratis, to TDF's community partners. (That includes seniors, students, veterans, teachers and more.) An additional quarter of the house will be priced at a mere $35 and set aside for same-day purchase at the box office or through a digital lottery. Tickets for the remaining half of the house go on sale at noon on Monday, April 7; the prices for those ones have not been announced, but it's safe to say they'll be quite a bit higher than $35.  Photograph: Courtesy of the artistLiev Schreiber Starting April 28, Jackman will play a university professor and Beatty (Ghosts) will be his star pupil in the U.S. premiere of Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a prize-winning 2020 two-hander by Canada's Hannah Moscovitch. Starti

In the four years since it opened its gates, Little Island has become one of New York's primo warm-weather destinations: an elevated oasis of trees and knolls and winding paths that rises—as though suspended on a bed of coupe cocktail glasses—above Pier 55 in the Hudson, just west of the Meatpacking District. In the same brief period, it has established itself as one of the city's most vital sources of low-cost high culture in the summer.  Concerts, plays, dance shows, operas: These and more can be found on Little Island all summer long, whether at its 687-seat open-air amphitheater (the Amph), its smaller performance stage (the Glade) or at pop-up locations throughout the space. Performances have been part of Little Island's mission from the start, but the offerings have gotten more and more ambitious. Last year, the park upped its game to present a sold-out season of world premieres. Building on that success, Little Island has just announced its lineup for its 2025 season, which includes many new works by major artists. Many of the shows are free, and those that aren't cost just $25; to buy tickets to them, visit Little Island's ticketing page on TodayTix.   Photograph: Courtesy Julieta CervantesTwyla Tharp's How Long Blues (2024) Curated by artistic director Zack Winokur, The 2025 season includes three long multiweek runs at the Amph. The first is The Counterfeit Opera, Kate Tarker and Dan Schlosberg's new adaptation of The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's 1728 satirical music

Is the Cats in the fabulous hats coming back? Last year's Ballroom-culture revival of Andrew Llloyd Webber's fanciful musical Cats, adapted from lightly comic poems by T.S. Eliot, was one of the happiest theater surprises in recent memory. The original Broadway production ran for a then-record 18 years, but a taxidermic 2016 revival and a widely derided 2019 film dampened whatever enthusiasm was left for the property—until directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch found a way to make the old engine purr again. "It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat," I wrote in my review of the 2024 production. "But now along comes a thrilling reconception at the Perelman Performing Arts Center that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights."   Photograph: Courtesy Evan ZimmermanCats: The Jellicle Ball Reader, I bought merch. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, as the fur-and-whisker-free revival was titled, became the talk of the town, and when its PAC run came to an end there was much speculation about whether and when it would transfer to Broadway. Since the production is staged in the round, the natural choice for a venue would be Circle in the Square, but it's a small house—which makes profitability hard for a show as big as Cats—and it was already booked for the fall; and completely redesigning the seating of a regular venue, a

Before Tina Fey's movie Mean Girls (2004) there was Daniel Waters's Heathers (1988): a pitch-black comedy about how high-school popularity can be murder. And before the Broadway musical Mean Girls (2018), there was Off Broadway's Heathers: The Musical (2014). And this June, more than a decade after its original run, that Heathers musical—which has acquired, like the film, an enthusiastic cult following—will return to New York City in a revised version that is likely to appeal to newcomers as well as to the show's loyal fans (known as Corn Nuts, after one character's dying words). Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up. Heathers has been adapted for the stage by Kevin Murphy, who also made a 2005 musical out of Reefer Madness, and Laurence O'Keefe, who co-wrote the score for 2007's Legally Blonde with his wife, Mean Girls lyricist. The show had plenty of admirers in its initial five-month run at New World Stages—including Time Out critic David Cote, who graded it "a solid A" and praised it for "a depth of feeling and a lyrical polish that elevate the material above a retro goof." But it has really caught fire in the United Kingdom since then; a 2018 version of Heathers, tweaked by Murphy and O'Keefe, has enjoyed several hit runs on the West End and a trio of tours of the UK and Ireland. We've known since last year that the British production, directed by Andy Fickman, was planning to move to New York. Now it's official: Heathers the Musical will return to New York Stages for a limited

Broadway is about to get Smart.  The cultural dominance of Jean Smart in the past few years has largely taken place on HBO, which she began taking over in 2019 with Watchmen and over which she has ruled since the 2021 debuts of Mare of Easttown and, of course, Hacks, in which she plays the cutthroat comedian Deborah Vance (and for whose three seasons she has won three Emmy Awards). But television has long been Smart's domain, from Designing Women in the 1980s to 24 and Frasier in the 2000s. Today, producers announced that she will shortly move to extend her queendom into relatively uncharted territory: the Broadway stage.  Smart will return to the Street for 12 weeks this summer to star in Call Me Izzy, a darkly comic one-woman play by the writer, actor and erstwhile CBS News correspondent Jamie Wax. Smart's character is described as "one woman in rural Louisiana who has a secret that is both her greatest gift and her only way out" and who "resists being silenced by embracing her tenacity, humor, and fiery imagination." Sarna Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George) will direct the world premiere.  Call Me Izzy will begin previews at Studio 54 on May 24 and run through August 17, with an official opening night on June 12. It is slated to be the first Broadway production of the 2024–25 season, to be followed by Mamma Mia!, which announced its impending return last week, and the new Kristin Chenoweth musical The Queen of Versailles, which premiered in Boston last year and also a

Roundabout Theatre Company, a giant among New York City nonprofit theaters, announced its plans today for the 2025–26 season. On Broadway, the lineup will include a new version of the Ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus, a revival of The Rocky Horror Show and a Noël Coward comedy. The Roundabout also revealed plans to renovate its flagship Broadway venue, the Todd Haimes Theatre. “This season is a testament to transformation—on our stages, in our spaces, and in the stories we tell," says interim artistic director Scott Ellis. "We’re bringing audiences work that spans the iconic to the unexpected and welcoming artists who challenge us, thrill us, and move us forward.” RECOMMENDED: New and upcoming Broadway shows headed to NYC in 2025 The 2025–26 Broadway lineup has a decidedly British bent. In the fall, the Roundabout will import a modernized version of Sophocles's Oedipus, the complex tale of a mother-loving leader whose hubris blinds him to a terrible truth. Created and directed by Robert Icke, who also oversaw 2017's 1984, the play stars Mark Strong (A View from the Bridge) and Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread) as a self-serious politician and his wife. The production debuted in London last year, and Icke, Strong, Manville and the revival itself were all nominated for Olivier Awards just two days ago. In his four-star review, Time Out London's Andrzej Lukowski called the production "really bloody good, with two astonishing leads," and noted that Icke's version of Oedipus "benefits

The smash ABBA jukebox musical Mamma Mia!, one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, will return this summer for a six-month engagement at the Winter Garden Theatre, where it originally ran from 2001 through 2014. Or to paraphrase the old song: ABBA's seeing you in all the old familiar places.  “Last year, Mamma Mia! celebrated 25 successful years in the West End, and it’s truly fantastic to bring the original production back to its Broadway home after 24 years," said the show's creator and producer, Judy Craymer said. "Despite the glowing reception we received [in earlier markets], nothing could have prepared us for the outpouring of love and acclaim (and dancing in the aisles!) that overwhelmed us when we arrived in New York at the magnificent Winter Garden Theatre." Photograph: Courtesy Joan MarcusMamma Mia! Some of that initial reception may have had to do with timing. Mamma Mia! began performances on Broadway on Oct 5, 2001, less than a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. New Yorkers were eager for escape, and Mamma Mia! provided it: a theatrical trip to the Greek islands with two dozen Eurodisco ABBA bops by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus—including “Dancing Queen,” "Waterloo" and “The Winner Takes It All”—neatly arranged by Catherine Johnson into a feel-good plot that combines romance, mother-daughter relationships and female friendship.  But Mamma Mia! has had extraordinary legs. To date, the show has been seen by so

For neurodiverse audiences, the world of performing arts is not always a welcoming place. So in its seventh annual Big Umbrella Festival, Lincoln Center is inviting that world to come to them. From April 4 through April 20, 2025, the arts complex will host companies from the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Mexico and Peru in programs specially designed to entertain and engage with children, teens and adults with autism, sensory and communication disorders or learning disabilities. The festival's events cover a spectrum of theater, music, dance, comedy and visual art. Many of the events feature interactive and participatory elements. In the outdoor installation Los Trompos, audiences can play with giant spinning tops. In The Sticky Dance for Sensory Groovers, they can help create a world of sticky tape. In When the World Turns, they can navigate a landscape of greenery and shadows. And the Big Umbrella Festival also provides opportunities for performers with developmental challenges: Twice on April 19, Peru's Teatro La Plaza will mount a production of Hamlet that is performed in Spanish (with English subtitles) by actors with Down syndrome. Photograph: Courtesy of the artistTeatro La Plaza's Hamlet “Access to the arts for all is core to what drives our work here at Lincoln Center,” says Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center's chief artistic officer. “We are proud to continue expanding the Big Umbrella Festival, meeting neurodiverse audiences where they are and embracing a multitude of way

Stage and screen megastar Hugh Jackman will perform a dozen concerts at Radio City Music Hall in 2025, the venue announced today. His new show, titled "From New York, with Love," will kick off with a weekend in January, then return for one weekend a month in April through August.  Before he was Wolverine, Jackman was Curly, the open-hearted hero of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! The 1998 London revival of that show put Jackman on the map as a leading man, and the strapping Aussie has never abandoned his musical-theater roots. He won a 2004 Tony Award for playing his countryman Peter Allen in the biomusical The Boy from Oz, and hit the Broadway boards again as con man Harold Hill in 2022's The Music Man. I; in between, he starred in the concert show Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway. On screen, he has sung his heart out in Les Misérables and The Greatest Showman; on TV, he has plied his song-and-dance talents as a four-time host of the Tony Awards.   Jackman is an old-school entertainer, and his new show is to be a major event. A retrospective survey of his career to date, "From New York, with Love" will include favorites from The Boy From Oz, The Greatest Showman and The Music Man, as well as other selections from his career. The debut weekend on January 24 and 25 will be followed by shows on April 18–19, May 23–24, June 20–21, July 18–19 and August 15–16.  For a first crack at tickets, register at the From New York, with Love website for a presale that begins on Tuesday,

"Let Me Tell You" is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Tuesday so you’re hearing from us each week.  What if I were to tell you that there’s a free app that allows you, every day, to buy some of your city’s most delicious food for a third of the price, or even less?  This is not a hypothetical scenario: If you have met me at some point in the past year and a half, there’s a strong chance that I have told you about this app. I use it all the time, and I have been proselytizing it to more or less everyone I know. But I have been reluctant to tell you, dear reader, about it—until now—for selfish reasons: I didn’t want too many people to find out about it, for fear that they would poach the deals that have become so dear to me. But I am ready to come clean. The app is called Too Good to Go, and it is too good to go on hiding from you.  RECOMMENDED: The 21 best cheap eats in NYC Too Good to Go was launched in Europe in 2015, and arrived in North America in late 2020. Its official raison d’être is the reduction of food waste, which has major detrimental effects on the environment. To that end, the app has devised a system to connect sellers that might otherwise throw away perfectly good products—such as bakeries, pizza places, specialty shops and grocery stores—with customers who will take them for a fraction of the normal cost. A surprise bag of fo

The Mary-go-round continues! Last month, stage and screen spitfire Betty Gilpin (GLOW) took over the central role of Mary Todd Lincoln in Cole Escola's wildly ahistorical farce, Oh, Mary!—the smash hit of the Broadway season—from Escola themself, who had been playing it for nearly a year. And it was announced today that, after Gilpin departs the production on March 16, a new actor will don Mary's black hoop skirt and bratty curls: the stage and TV star and 2019 Time Out cover boy Tituss Burgess. RECOMMENDED: Find the best Broadway shows  The catch: Burgess will only play the role for three weeks, from March 18 through April 6. His successor in April has not yet been announced, though it is widely assumed on the rialto that Escola will return to the production in time for Tony Awards season.  Burgess is best known for his bravura turn on Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as Kimmy's roommate Titus Andromedon, an irrepressibly self-centered and fame-craving nonworking actor. That role should prepare him perfectly to play Escola's version of Mary Todd Lincoln as a raging termagant. (As we wrote in our five-star review: "Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.")   Photograph: Justin Bettman | Tituss Burgess   Before he played that other Titus, though, Burgess was already much admired for his high-flying vocal turns on Broadway as Sebastian the Cr

After taking last summer off for renovations to the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the Public Theater's cherished annual series Shakespeare in the Park will return from August 7 through September 14 with Twelfth Night, one of the Bard's most popular plays. And no shortage of stars will shine their light on this free outdoor production: The cast will be led by Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. Saheem Ali, who holds the title of Associate Artistic Director/Resident Director at the Public and who directed the 2021 show Merry Wives at Shakespeare in the Park, will helm the production. Nyong'o will play Viola, a shipwrecked maiden who disguises herself as a boy to serve the man she loves, Orsino (Khris Davis), who dispatches her to court the wealthy and beautiful noblewoman Olivia (Oh) on his behalf, only for Olivia to fall for the boy that Viola is pretending to be—who is not to be confused, but inevitably is confused, with Viola's twin brother, Sebastian, whom she closely resembles and falsely believes to be dead. In a neat twist of casting, Sebastian will be played by Nyong'o's real-life brother, Junior Nyong’o.  Photograph: Courtesy of the artistLupita Nyong'o Dinklage will costar as Olivia's pompous major domo, Malvolio, who harbors secret romantic designs on his mistress; Ferguson will be Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a hapless fop who also fancies the well-favored Olivia, and Bill Camp will be Olivia's ne'er-do-well uncle, Sir Toby B