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

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 the first few months of 2025. (Other shows may be added if and when they are announced.) 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 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

The best Broadway shows represent the pinnacle of live entertainment in New York City. Every year, millions of people flock to the Times Square district to see large-scale theater at its finest, and every season brings a crop of new productions, from glitzy musicals to provocative plays. Some Broadway shows are strictly limited runs, which others might stick around for years or even decades. Choosing among them can be dizzying. You can't see them all, and you probably shouldn't anyhow: For every Tony Award–worthy hit, there's a swing and a miss. But we have seen them all, and we're happy to help guide you to the ones we think are more deserving of your money and your time. (Cheap tickets can be hard to find.) Here are our theater critic's top choices of the shows that are currently on Broadway.   RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z listings of all Broadway Shows in NYCRECOMMENDED: Current and upcoming Off Broadway shows

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: JONASCON, a free KISS walking tour, a free fragrance pop-up, the Fun in Moderation sketch comedy show, 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 March.  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.

For dance lovers, New York City always offers good reasons to get moving. If your taste runs to classical ballet, you can get your fill from New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center. For more modern fare, visit the Joyce Theatre, New York Live Arts, New York City Center, BAM or the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Looking for avant-garde work? You'll find it at the Skirball Center, the Chocolate Factory or Abrons Arts Center—and that's not to mention hip hop, international pageants, dance theater, Broadway musicals, experimental performance art and much more. Here are some of the best dance shows to check out in the next few weeks. RECOMMENDED: The top New York attractions

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 

Theater is a live art form, which also means that it dies: Every show that struts and frets upon the stage is eventually heard no more. Every theater town is thus in some sense a ghost town, haunted by the memories and legends of artists and productions gone by, and New York City has more such ghosts than most. One is the lingering spirit of Jonathan Larson, who helped redefine American musical theater with his musical Rent, a group portrait of artists in the East Village. The show ran on Broadway from 1996 through 2008, and won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But in a tragic twist, Larson never got to enjoy its success: on the night before the show's very first performance, at the age of 35, he died suddenly from an aortic dissection.  Larson's life and work became the focus of national attention again in 2021, when Andrew Garfield played him in the excellent film version of Larson's tick, tick …BOOM!, an early work that was expanded and mounted Off Broadway in 2001. But that show and Rent are far from the only things that Larson wrote in his too-brief career. Enter the prolific Broadway historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper, a theatrical ghost catcher par excellence. (Her books include five-volume oral-history series The Untold Stories of Broadway and last year's Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy that the History Books Left Out.) Tepper has spent more than a decade assembling The Jonathan Larson Project, a revue of previously obscure or unknown songs by the late composer. It began

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

They claimed that the movie musical was dead and gone. Turns out it was just resting its blisters, tacl-ing off its jazz hands and preparing for a 2020s renaissance that’s seen Wicked, Emilia Pérez, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake picking up 30 Oscar nominations between them, Wonka making a motza at the box office and the genre seems, if not quite as vital as in its RKO/MGM heydays, definitely still in rude health. And speaking of Wicked, Jon M Chu’s flamboyant reimagining of Stephen Schwartz’s Broadway smash, it’s the most recent addition to our list of the great movie musical that takes in everything from 42nd Street at the dawn of sound era to All That Jazz in the heady, hedonist era of Bob Fosse. Dust off your ruby slippers, grab your boater and take a toe-tapping tour of the greatest musicals in the movie canon. RECOMMENDED: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time✍️ The 100 best animated films of all-time🎶 The 30 best film-to-musical adaptations

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 at least (based on the tech they use) to some point in the '80s. 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 charact

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Jasper family home in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great American play Purpose announces what it is right away: the setting for a classic drawing-room drama. On one side is a dining table, where food is sure to come with a fight; an elegant doorway is on the other, and a giant staircase winds down the middle. Since the Jaspers are modeled closely on the family of Jesse Jackson, Todd Rosenthal’s set also serves as an exquisitely curated museum of Black pride: elegant African statues and textiles, historical photos on clay-orange walls, a painting of Martin Luther King Jr. presiding over all. This is the image the Jaspers present to the world, and to some extent to themselves. Entering their company, it’s hard, as one character observes, to avoid “being all dazzled by all the Symbolic Blackness before you—so blinded by the Black Excellence, Black Power, Black Righteousness.”  In his trenchant Appropriate, which was expertly revived on Broadway last year, Jacobs-Jenkins depicted a white Southern family with an outsider’s eye for the characters’ self-deceptions. This time, his call-outs are coming from inside the house. The Jaspers, like the Jacksons, have issues. The family patriarch, Solomon (Radio Golf’s tall, strapping Harry Lennix), is a major figure in Civil Rights history whose hopes for a dynasty have crumbled, and who now glowers like a lion licking his paws. As in medieval times, his elder son was groomed to inherit his mantle and his se

Theater review by Adam Feldman  “I don’t want realism,” says Blanche DuBois, the cracked libertine belle of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 masterwork, A Streetcar Named Desire. “I'll tell you what I want. Magic!” The Streetcar revival now playing at BAM, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, doesn’t have much truck with magic; it does not invite the audience, even momentarily, to share the nympho- and dipsomaniacal Blanche’s delusions of gentility. But neither does it go for realism: There is barely any set, and nearly all of the action is squeezed onto a central square platform on cinderblocks that suggests a boxing ring minus the ropes; an onstage drummer sometimes bangs loudly on his kit, like a migraine in Blanche’s head, and there are occasional shifts into dancey stylized movement.  What this Streetcar does have is the gifted Irish actor Paul Mescal, whose star has risen swiftly from his breakthrough role in the 2020 Hulu series Normal People to the leading fighter in last year’s Gladiator II. The Mescaline Conquest now finds him playing the most famous sexy brute in dramatic history: Blanche’s brother-in-law and nemesis Stanley Kowalski, the part that made Marlon Brando a star, and he takes off his shirt more than once. The rest of the principal cast from London’s Almeida Theatre—where Frecknall’s Streetcar premiered in 2022—has also made the trip: the birdlike Patsy Ferran as Blanche; Anjana Vasan as her protective younger sister, Stella; and Dwane Walcott as Stanley’s poker budd

Wicked divided critics when it opened in 2003, but it's still transporting audiences today. A revisionist prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the show traces the radicalization of the green-skinned outsider Elphaba in a land where propaganda and repression are on the rise. Winnie Holzman's book, adapted from Gregory Maguire's much darker novel, smartly focuses on our witchy heroine's unlikely friendship with her more socially capable schoolmate, Glinda. Joe Mantello's direction is appropriately wondrous, and when Stephen Schwartz's pop-Broadway score flies, it flies high. The current cast includes Lencia Kebede as Elphaba and Allie Trimm as Glinda.

The pent-up, mixed-up, horned-up 1950s teen culture that was sent up in the 1970s musical Grease gets updated and upended in a modern-day reimagining of the show's characters and themes. The all-star cast of of this one-night benfit concert includes big Broadway talents as the Pink Ladies (Kerry Butler as Sandy, Jackie Hoffman as Rizzo, Ann Harada as Jan, Aisha Jackson as Frenchie and Amy Spanger as Marty) and the T-Birds (James Carpinello as Danny, Joel Perez as Kenickie, Jelani Remy as Sonny), plus SNL's beloved Rachel Dratch as the Teen Angel. The script is by Catie Hogan, with contributions from five other writers as well as lyricists Billy Recce (Singfeld) and Danny Salles; Jack Plotnick (Girls Will Be Girls) directs, and musical-theater savant Seth Rudetsky plays host. Proceeds go to the worthy Entertainment Community Fund, formerly known as the Actors Fund. TIME OUT DISCOUNT TICKET OFFER: Visit Vape!'s sales page at TicketMaster, click the Filters button, and enter the special-offer code DANNY to buy tickets or $39–$102 (fees included) instead of the regular $53–$126.

The deliciously deranged postmodern diva Meow Meow, who has bewitched and bewildered audiences the world over, drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century. From the moment she enters—a vision of frazzled glamour, faintly annoyed—she is on the offensive: badgering the audience into applause, vamping the crowd with her magnetic jadedness. Meow's parody of glitz is part of a package that also includes physical comedy, social commentary and a brilliantly eclectic polyglot repertoire, with a special affinity for the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play Curse of the Starving Class, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm, was revived at the Signature just six years ago, and the New Group's current revival of it in the same theater complex provides no good reason to see it anew. Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart are deeply miscast as the screwy Tate parents—each trying to sell the place out from under the other—as is the gentle-miened Cooper Hoffman as their violent son. (The scenes between Slater and Hoffman should be ticking time bombs; instead, they just tick.) Stella Marcus fares better as the outlaw Lisa Simpson of the factious clan, and Jeb Kreager adds a jolt of real energy in his brief turn as a local barman. But the star of this version is unquestionably a fluffy live sheep named Lois, who provides moments of authenticity that are otherwise rare in Scott Elliott's torpid, disjointed production. When Lois takes a poop onstage, at least she does it literally.

The eminent Shakespearean actor and scholar Dakin Matthews adapts the two parts of Henry IV into one long three-act history play, and also plays the title role with appropriate weariness and pique. Despite some smart dramaturgical rearranging by Matthews, and some starkly effective staging by Eric Tucker for TFANA, this Henry IV falters where many others do: The political and historical developments are hard to track—it doesn't help that most of the actors play multiple roles—and the evolution of the future Henry V, Prince Hal (Elijah Jones), is not convincingly rendered. But these faults are outweighed by Jay O. Sanders's rich, marvelously full performance of the plays' plum role: the expansive and mendacious Sir John Falstaff, whose bad company Hal enjoys until it no longer suits him. The cast of 16 also notably includes James Udom as the valiant Henry "Hotspur" Percy, Cara Ricketts as his wife, John Keating as the fatuous Robert Shallow and Steven Epp as both the intriguing Worcester and the sweetly imbecilic servant Francis. But Sanders's witty and touching Falstaff is, as it should be, the magnetic main attraction. 

Theater review by Adam Feldman  What makes Samuel D. Hunter's work so consistently beautiful is his ability to capture big things in small forms without being reductive. His plays—which have included The Whale, The Harvest and Greater Clements—are like ships in a bottle: exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes (physical and financial limitations, queer identity, crises of family and faith) with endless variety and sympathy. His latest work, Grangeville, is very much in that tradition, and Hunter gatherers won't want to miss it. Hunter's last drama at the Signature Theatre, A Case for the Existence of God, won the 2022 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Like that show, Grangeville—whose world premiere at the Signature is sensitively directed by Jack Serio—has only two actors. Brian J. Smith is Arnold, a gay visual artist who has fled Idaho to live in the Netherlands, and Paul Sparks is Jerry, his older half-brother and former bully, who reaches out when their mother is on her deathbed. For most of the play, their interactions are long-distance, via phone or computer, and their mutual estrangement intially finds them completely in the dark. But as their lines of communication open, the production's lighting (by Stacy Derosier) gradually reveals more of its set (by the design collective dots): brutalist black walls that evoke volcanic rock, the hardened vestige of former heat. Sparks is superb as Jerry, de

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

Where ticket sales are concerned, early winter and early fall are low-tide times for even the best Broadway shows. To help shore up the box office, the theater industry offers Broadway Week, a half-price deal on tickets to nearly every Broadway production. Notwithstanding its name, this twice-annual offer actually lasts longer than a week: The winter 2025 edition of Broadway Week spans from January 21 through February 9. The twofer tickets go on sale on January 7.  This year's list of 27 participating shows is nearly comprehensive: It includes every single Broadway production except The Outsiders and the limited run All In: Comedy of Love. Visit the Broadway Week website as early as you can to peruse the list of participating shows and grab the ones you want most; if you act fast, you might even be able to snag seats for such perpetual hot tickets as Hamilton, The Lion King and Cabaret. You can see a list of every show in this year's Broadway Week line-up right here. RECOMMENDED: A full guide to Broadway Week in NYC Bear in mind that the tickets sold through Broadway Week tend to be ones that producers are most eager to sell: in balconies, mezzanines and side areas. But in recent years, the Broadway Week program has also offered a new option: If you want to splurge on some of the best seats in the house, you can upgrade your order and pay $125 for tickets that would otherwise cost a whole deal more. What is the promo code for Broadway Week? “BWAYWK25” and for upgraded ticket

The performances covered by the first 2025 edition of Broadway Week range from January 21st through February 9, but don't wait until then to take advantage of this biannual two-for-one sale. Tickets for all three weeks of this popular initiative went on sale on January 7, and the earlier you book your Broadway tickets, the better chance you have of finding good seats and dates to go along with the unbeatable savings. You can but tickets through the Broadway Week website. This year's list of participating shows is nearly comprehensive. Of the 28 productions that will be running in the period covered by Broadway Week, 26 are offering twofer deals. A full list of those productions went live this week, and you can find it just below.  Of the recently opened productions you may not yet have seen, we especially recommend the original musicals Maybe Happy Ending and Death Becomes Her. The revivals of Gypsy and Sunset Blvd. are also must-sees—as are the new plays Eureka Day and Cult of Love, both of which are closing on February 2.  Recommended: Guide to Broadway Week in NY Photograph: By Evan Zimmerman / Courtesy of Museum of Broadway Broadway Week Shows for 2025 Aladdin& JulietThe Book of MormonCabaret at the Kit Kat ClubChicagoCult of LoveDeath Becomes HerEnglishEureka DayThe Great GatsbyGypsyHadestownHamiltonHarry Potter and the Cursed ChildHell's KitchenLeft on TenthThe Lion KingMaybe Happy EndingMJMoulin Rouge!Oh, Mary!RedwoodRomeo + JulietSix Sunset Blvd.Wicked Photograp

The world may be in tumult, but at least one thing remains constant: Sandra Bernhard is returning to Joe's Pub for her annual cabaret show at the end of December. The Divine Sandra has been a pop-culture fixture for more than four decades, ever since playing the deranged fan who kidnaps a talk-show host in Martin Scorsese’s prescient 1981 satire The King of Comedy. She's always been one of a kind, with a persona that blends ironic detachment and sincere sentiment. Her latest set, titled Shapes & Forms, begins its 11-show run on the day after Christmas and builds to a pair of special performances on New Year’s Eve; alongside comedic monologues and observations, she will sing hits by artists including Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell and Lana Del Rey. We chatted with her in late November, as the results of the Presidential election were just sinking in.  RECOMMENDED: Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings Hello, Sandra!  Hello. How are you? I'm doing fine. I guess. We all are. Yeah. Oh, Lord have mercy. I know, I know. Well, we'll have a lot of opportunity to sample the Lord's mercy in the next four years. Exactly. Well said.  So you're doing another New Year's show at Joe’s Pub. Yes, I'm doing yet another new show. It's called Shapes & Forms, which was the name of my mother’s art studio. We drove across the country when I was 10 years old, and my mom was an abstract artist, so she was always taking in the terrain. As we drove through New Mexico, and it was all thes