Adam Feldman

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: The Gates augmented reality experience, CabaRage, a Star Wars triple feature, an exhibit about "The New Yorker," and free events around town. All you have to do is scroll down to plan your weekend! 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. 

If you’re looking for the best things to do in NYC this week, or even for today, there are tons of fun options, including The Gates augmented reality experience, a tortilla making class at Ánimo, Mondays in the Club with Lance, Legends of Leyenda, and awesome free events in NYC! For more ideas, scroll down to see this week's best things to do in NYC. RECOMMENDED: Full list of the best things to do in New York Stay in the Loop: Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest in New York City news, culture and dining. 

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. (Those that seat fewer than 100 people usually fall into the Off-Off Broadway category.) 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 revivals at the Signature Theatre and crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the best Off Broadway shows usually cost less than their cousins on the Great White Way—even if you score cheap Broadway tickets. Use our listings to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows. RECOMMENDED: Full list of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals in New York

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

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. 

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.

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 

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  

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?

The best Broadway shows attract millions of people annually to the pinnacle of live entertainment in New York City. Every season brings a new crop of Broadway musicals, plays and revivals, some of which go on to glory at the Tony Awards. Some are only limited runs; others stick around for years, making them a little easier to find cheap tickets for. The offerings range from from star-driven dramas and family-oriented blockbusters to the kind of artistically ambitious offerings that are more common Off Broadway these days. Choosing among these productions can be dizzying. But we've seen every show on Broadway, and we're happy to help guide you to the ones that are worthiest of your money and your time. Here are our theater critics' top choices among the shows that are currently on the Great White Way.  RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z Listings of All Broadway Shows in NYC

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

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 review by Adam Feldman  Halfway through Redwood, a new musical conceived by Idina Menzel and director Tina Landau, Menzel—playing Jesse, a woman on the run from her own grief—is suspended on a platform midair, belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. Unavoidably, this recalls her performance of the Act I finale of Wicked, in which Menzel’s original Elphaba was also midair and belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. This time, however, gravity wins. Even as Menzel's Jesse climbs to new physical heights, the lumbering Redwood brings her down.  Jesse is a capable, cosmopolitan Jewish woman paralyzed by sadness about the recent death of her college-age son (Zachary Noah Piser). Her desperation literally drives her up a tree: She leaves New York City—where, of course, she owns an art gallery—and motors to California, where she persuades a pair of environmentalists, Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), to let her join them in scaling an enormous redwood for science. Can “nature’s remedy” help this neurotic city gal find her bearings? Naturally, it can. Redwood | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The arc of Jesse’s healing is long—nearly two hours without intermission—and it bends toward banality. The subject matter cries out for inventive nuance, but Landau’s book charts a familiar route to exactly where you know it’s going, with rest stops for mostly blah songs (music by Kate Diaz, lyrics by

Recovering Broadway actor John Hill, an original Hairspray nice kid and Boy from Oz heel, has matured into a comedian and muscle-daddy Instathot; his résumé includes a long and fruitful collaboration with Bravo macher Andy Cohen, first as a producer of Watch What Happens: Live! and now as Cohen's daily radio cohost on SiriusXM. He also knows how to put an entertaining club act together (as he has often helped do for Natalie Joy Johnson). In his latest visit to the Green Room 42, he shares acid-edged dispatches about gay dating, sober living and reality TV, studded with sometimes naughty original comedic songs.

Talented singers from the Broadway and cabaret worlds sing side by side in this monthly dive into the fathomless depths of the late musical-theater deity Stephen Sondheim. Guests at the February 23 episode include Ramona Mallory and Lucia Spina, who have appeared in Broadway revivals of Sondheim shows, as well as LaDonna Burns, Michael Di Liberto, Michelle Dowdy, Jon-Michael Reese, Lisa Sabin, Eric Ulloa and Jordan Wolfe. The saucy Rob Maitner plays host, and music director John Fischer is at the piano. 

The depths of Stephen Sondheim's musical-theater catalogue have hardly gone unplumbed in recent decades, either onstage or in concert. But in their ever-evolving tribute to St. Steve, Bligh Voth and Joel DeCandio bring freshness to the catalog with a smartly calibrated mix of familiar favorites (such as "Johanna," "The Miller's Son" and "Unworthy of Your Love") and relative obscurities, including several that Sondheim wrote for film and television. The performers' complementary styles—she's a versatile dynamo with an expressive range as wide as her vocal one; he's a smooth crooner with a gentle air—bring out exroverted and introverted sides of the Master's compositional voice. Music director Nolan Bonvoulir provides spirited and inventive accompaniment. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman “Why do we learn language?” asks Marjan (Marjan Neshat) to the English class she teaches in Iran. There are practical reasons, to be sure; several of her students need to pass the standardized international Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) so they can travel abroad. But for Marjan, who once spent nine years living in the U.K., the answer goes deeper than that. We learn language, she says, "to speak our souls": “To speak. And to… [motions to her ear] listen. To the insides of others.” That’s the guiding philosophy of Sanaz Toossi’s ear-opening English, which premiered at the Atlantic in 2022. Now, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it has migrated to Broadway under the sponsorship of the Roundabout, with its identity entirely intact. Director Knud Adams and his original cast of five re-create the magic of the original production without a stammer, stumble or waver.  English | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus If Toossi’s thoughtful and searching play has things to teach us—about character, culture, postcolonial identity—it does so through immersion. We first see Marjan’s classroom from the outside, through a window. But Marsha Ginsberg’s boxed set soon rotates to invite us inside; it keeps turning throughout the play to give us new angles, and Toossi does the same. Like any grammar, English has rules and structures that it carefully maintains, but enough exceptions and variations to provide character and texture. It unfolds fl

Original Jersey Boys cast member Daniel Reichard shares more of his musical gifts in the 16th annual edition of his holiday standards show, backed by a band led by musical director Jesse Vargas. Blending spirited vocals with retro nightclub pizzazz, Reichard's shows are always a Christmas treat.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Romantic comedies, once a Broadway staple, have lately been in short supply. To some extent, All In fills that vacuum. The show is not a comedy per se, but an anthology of comedy writing: short humor pieces by Simon Rich, performed script-in-hand by a rotating cast of actors. And while all of these pieces touch on awkward modern love in some way, that love is not always romantic; it can also be parental or familial or universal. But although the stories tend to resolve on awww-inspiring notes, All In is first and foremost funny—often very, very funny.   All In: Comedy About Love | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Director Alex Timbers gives All In the air of a live reading of The New Yorker, where much of Rich’s text first appeared: Set designer David Korins evokes a high-toned literary-bohemian atmosphere that is offset by Emily Flake’s adorable illustrations, projected on exposed brick. If you read The New Yorker regularly, you may remember some of the works collected here; Rich’s writing is memorably sharp and well-crafted. But their comic surprises are refreshed in performance. Three of the pieces are delivered to wryly emphatic perfection, in the production’s opening cast, by the charming stand-up star John Mulaney: “Guy Walks Into a Bar,” which expands hilariously on a hoary joke about a half-deaf genie; “Learning the Ropes,” a tale of pirates on an unexpected adventure; and “The Big Nap,” in which a toddler affects the hardboiled sty

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How is she? Ever since May, when it was confirmed that Audra McDonald would star in the latest revival of Gypsy, Broadway fans have speculated about how Audra would be as Mama Rose—or, more nervously, whether Audra could be Mama Rose, the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters themselves. The casting seemed inevitable: the pinnacle role for a woman in musical theater, essayed by the most accomplished musical-theater actress of her generation. It’s Audra’s turn. Yet to some, the casting also seemed unlikely: Rose has traditionally been played by big belters, from Ethel Merman in 1959 through Patti LuPone in 2008, not dramatic sopranos like McDonald. So let’s get that question out of the way up front. How is Audra as Rose? She’s a revelation.  So, too, is the rest of George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent and beautifully mounted production, which comes as a happy surprise. Gypsy is a model musical in every regard, from Arthur Laurents’s airtight book, inspired by the memoirs of striptease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, to Jule Styne’s thrilling music, which grabs you at the overture and doesn’t let go, to Stephen Sondheim’s dazzlingly witty and insightful lyrics. But this is the show’s fifth Broadway revival, and its third in the 21st century alone. One might reasonably wonder what is left to reveal in a show as well-known as this one. But like the monster some people believe he

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  A funny thing happens halfway through the sharply double-edged Broadway comedy Eureka Day. Early on, playwright Jonathan Spector’s rapier seems to be pointed at wokeness and its micro-passive-aggressions. The play’s five characters form the Executive Committee of an ultraprogressive private school in the Berkeley Hills, which can only make decisions by consensus; they spend the opening scene earnestly discussing whether a pulldown menu on the school’s webpage should include “Transracial Adoptee” as a category of cultural self-identification. The prevailing attitude seems to be that you can’t make an omelet without walking on eggshells.  But Eureka Day reaches peak hilarity at its midway point, when an outbreak of mumps throws the school into crisis, and the committee—deadlocked about whether to require that students be vaccinated—brings the issue before an online forum of concerned parents. The ensuing debate, projected in scrolling text on the set’s back wall, soon devolves into a flame war between vaxxers and antivaxxers: an inferno of self-righteous invective in which any hope of agreement, or even basic civility, goes up in smoke.  Eureka Day | Photograph: Courtesy Jeremy Daniel The committee members try to make their cases during this online fracas, but good luck trying to follow what they say or even hear them over the laughter. At this point, the play turns a corner; contrasted with the chaos and vitriol of online discourse, the ideal

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Welcome to the Dahl house! The living room is festooned with Christmas lights, a well-trimmed tree abuts the dining table, and stockings are hung with care by the hearth as aging parents and grown-up siblings reunite for the holidays at the family home in Connecticut. This is the scene of Leslye Headland’s stormy, compassionate, cuttingly observant new play Cult of Love—and if it seems too storybook-cozy to be true, that’s because it is.  The Dahl family is close, but less in the sense of intimate than in the sense of stifling. They come together most joyfully when they’re making music, which they do often throughout the play, drawing on a seemingly endless supply of props that are scattered around the space: upright piano, banjo, uke, melodica, harmonica, washboard, bells. But such instruments of distraction can only do so much to keep the family’s shadows at bay: illness, disappointment, anger, fear. Cult of Love | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Family matriarch Ginny (Mare Winningham) uses the rituals of Christmas festivity as a shield for her denial and defensiveness; her husband, Bill (David Rasche, the latest in Broadway’s recent succession of actors from Succession) is showing signs of dementia, which manifests in part as an abundance of affection. (“Okay. I just want to say. That I love everyone here.”) Their eldest child, Mark (Zachary Quinto), who quit divinity school to become a lawyer, now seems stalled once again at a crossroad

Make the yuletide bright at the final iteration of Sleep No More's cast cabaret, the McKittrick Follies, at the atmospheric Manderley Bar of the soon-to-be-shuttered McKittrick Hotel. Kit Flowers—the alter ego of erstwhile Sleep No More cast member Ginger Kearns—hosts an evening of music, games and Christmas surprises. Festive attire is encoutraged for this December 17 show.

This hour-long original musical adaptation of Dickens's yuletide fable, created by composer Michael Sgouros and librettist-director Brenda Bell, returns for its 16th year at the West Village's Players Theatre. The updated set is inspired by traditional British panto.

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

Friday the 13th could be your lucky day. The side-splitting comedy Oh, Mary! is not just the year's top new play—as crowned today in Time Out's 2024 Best of the City Awards—but also a runaway box-office success. Cole Escola's highly irreverent and historically insouciant farce, a theatrical character assassination of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, has been selling out for months and has broken box-office records at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre ten successive times; last week, it grossed more than $1.2 million, and high demand has driven the show's average ticket price to $174. That's terrific for Escola and the show's producers, but less felicitous for non-rich people who want to see the year's buzziest production.  But there's hope yet for the huddled masses yearning to see theater cheap. This Friday, to mark this 206th anniversary of Mary Todd Lincoln's birth, the production is holding a lottery to distribute 206 balcony seats to that night's 7:30pm performance for just $5 a pop. (Real cash fivers, with Honest Abe's likeness on the front, are "strongly preferred.") Here are the deets: Lottery entrants should arrive at the Lyceum between 3:30pm and 4:15pm on Friday, December 13th to submit their names for the lottery. Don't bother lining up very far ahead of time; arriving early won't increase your chance of winning. But you'll need to hand in your entry before 4:30pm, when the drawing will be held, and you'll need to be present at the time of the drawing to claim your seats. On

In May of 2020, Lear deBessonet was supposed to begin her tenure as the artistic director of City Center’s beloved Encores! series, which offers concert stagings of musicals from Broadway’s past. The pandemic changed everyone’s plans, and when Encores! returned two years later with The Tap Dance Kid (1983) and The Life (1997), some perceived a bit of a wobble in its stride. Since then, however, deBessonet has presided over many successes: two Encores! shows that she directed herself, Into the Woods and Once Upon a Mattress, wound up transferring to Broadway, and others (like Jelly’s Last Jam and Titanic) earned rave reviews from critics and audiences alike. But this will be her last season at the Encores! helm; next year, she will take over as the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater.  DeBessonet has come a long way from Baton Rouge, Louisiana—her name is pronounced the French way (de-bess-o-NAY)—and her Lincoln Center appointment is the culmination of a steady rise through the New York theater world. In 2013, deBessonet created the Public Theater’s Public Works program, which partners with organizations around the city to mount enormous productions that redefine community theater; she has also directed memorable revivals of Good Person of Szechwan, Venus and, for Shakespeare in the Park, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has an expansive view of what theater can do, and her final Encores! lineup for 2025 is typically eclectic: Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1948 concep

New Yorkers don’t gate keep good spots. This month, we featured Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis on our October digital cover to celebrate the debut of their concept album, WARRIORS. These New Yorkers know a thing or two about the city—you can hear it in their work! In between the photoshoot and our interview with them about the massive undertaking that features Lauryn Hill, Marc Anthony, Colman Domingo, Billy Porter, Busta Rhymes, Ghostface Killah, Chris Rivers, Cam’ron, Nas and other artists, we asked them about their favorite spots around the five boroughs, including where to eat and drink. RECOMMENDED: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis bring The Warriors to musical life What are your favorite spots in each borough? The Bronx: Miranda: Woodlawn Cemetery during the day. It’s much scarier at night, but during the day it’s incredible. You can see everyone from Celia Cruz to Duke Ellington. When we went to the Bronx we spent most of our day there because we couldn’t just stop seeing all these incredible artists and their final resting places. We were by ourselves—just trolling Woodlawn Cemetery alone. It’s an incredible cultural site.   Photograph: Shutterstock/Daniel M. Silva Manhattan: Miranda: I’m going to stick up for my neighborhood and say the United Palace Theatre, which is just this hidden jewel. The Broadway house in Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building was really the United Palace Theater. It was one of the Wonder Theatres—there was one per borough, and the K

Just two years ago, Under the Radar was about to go under. The annual showcase for experimental theater from across the country and around the world had been a staple at the Public Theater every January since 2006. But budget cuts for the Public’s 2023–24 season brought the axe down on that tradition. Theater fans decried what seemed like the end of an era, and another sign that New York was becoming inhospitable to noncommercial work.  But then something wonderful happened: Instead of going under, the festival went wide. A number of theater spaces—including La MaMa, Lincoln Center, New York Live Arts, NYU's Skirball Center and St. Ann's Warehouse (where the festival started in 2005)—joined forces to present Under the Radar's 2024 programming in venues throughout the city. And the good news continues this year. During a time when downtown theater has been contracting in New York, the 2025 Under the Radar festival, which runs from January 4 through January 19, is actually expanding.  Not only does this year's season, produced by ArkType's Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne, feature more productions and more institutional partners (such as BAM, New York Theatre Workshop and the Apollo), but it is also broadening its leadership and its mandate. Founder and artistic director Mark Russell is now flanked by co–creative directors Meropi Peponides and Kaneza Schaal, and the festival is commissioning and producing new work for the first time. “This festival looks reflects the vitality

“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 are published every week.  This past Sunday, I went to the Broadway Flea Market, as I do every year, in search of cast recordings on CD to add to my already disquietingly large collection. (Yes, on CD. I know. I have a problem.) The ebullient actor Todd Buonopane, who was hosting a charity auction, spied me in the crowd and invited me to join him on the small stage that had been set up in Shubert Alley. Noting my bag of CDs—I know!—he observed that I was a Broadway fan as well as a Broadway critic. And then he asked what seemed like a simple question: What shows was I most looking forward to this fall? It's a question I get pretty often around this time of year, and I should have had an answer at the ready. But I realized, in that moment, that I did not. The best I could do was summon the names of the first three shows that came to my head. (It was an odd assortment; people looked puzzled.) I had spent most of the previous two weeks putting together fall previews: a complete guide to the shows coming to Broadway this fall, and a second assemblage of 30 promising shows in the Off Broadway world. But I'd been so busy getting the information in our system that I hadn't stopped to process my expectations.   RELATED: Full A–Z listings of current Broadway shows As a critic, expectations aren't great. They