Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Theater review by Raven SnookJacob Ming-Trent has come to preach salvation in his vivacious memoir How Shakespeare Saved My Life. He leads us, his congregation, through a "testimony" based on the life he has led, drawing guidance from a large tome onstage—not the Bible, but the Bard. The morning after his father abandoned his family, 12-year-old Jacob walks into the wrong class and is tasked by the teacher with delivering the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V aloud, an experience that fills him with power and purpose. That world-Shakespearing discovery sets this troubled youth on a new path to become a classical actor, with several dramatic detours along the way: parental estrangement, homelessness, depression, drugs. How Shakespeare Changed My Life | Photograph: Courtesy HanJie Chow Ming-Trent’s project began as a series of personal anecdotes before being synthesized into its more ambitious current form. How Shakespeare Saved My Life explores major issues: the impact of generational trauma, the effects of racism and sizeism in the theatre industry, the liberation that comes with forgiveness. It also interpolates passages from Shakespeare and connects the Elizabethan master to more recent writers such as Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur and James Baldwi; Ming-Trent even spits some original rhymes, inspired by the beats of his life, with a bit of poetic license (which seems only fair, since Shakespeare took plenty of that with his histories).  How Shakespeare Changed My...

Off Broadway review by Tim Teeman The Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to fame in the 1980s for colorful, scribbly, densely symbolic paintings that bridged the gap between street art and the gallery world. But Basquiat’s aesthetic is minimalist in Roger Guenveur Smith’s arresting solo show In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The most striking piece of Raphael Mishler’s stage design is a doorway: an alternately lit and darkened space that suggests a portal to the past, or a boundary between us and the celestial. Other dualities—between distance and intimacy, life and death, art and commerce—pervade Smith’s quietly shattering piece of remembrance and reclamation. Barefoot and dressed in a chic suit, the writer-performer-director recalls his first encounters with Basquiat and the latter’s subsequent flowering as an artist, “writing acrylic poems and philosophy on concrete walls and canvas and refrigerator doors.” And he weaves his memories of Basquiat into broader examinations of race, legacy, culture and history; in Smith’s account, systems of anti-Black oppression and violence thrum alongside Black resistance and artistic excellence.  In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin Smith is an old hand at biographical theater: He won an Obie Award in 1996 for his depiction of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, and his Bessie award-winning Rodney King, directed by Spike Lee, is available on Netflix. But this is not a...

What does A stand for? That question hangs over the protagonist—referred to only as A in the script—of Marin Ireland's deeply personal play Pre-Existing Condition. Her ex-boyfriend hit her so hard that she ended up on the floor, and although she didn't seek medical attention, the incident left her with emotional and psychological scars and split her life into before and after. Everyone wants to know what A wants now: Money? Justice? Revenge on her abuser? The problem is, she’s not sure she knows. If A’s intense, halting, often uncomfortable exchanges with the people in her life—a dismissive lawyer, her no-nonsense therapist, her support-group facilitators, her dates, her friends, her self-involved mother—sound unsettlingly authentic, that's because Ireland, a highly acclaimed stage actor, is writing from firsthand experience. But Pre-Existing Condition isn’t just a memoir à clef. Delicately directed by Maria Dizzia, the play offers a deep dive into the messy aftermath of domestic violence. Unlike many stories about abuse, it’s not about escaping or standing up; it's about navigating an inadequate system while trying to process what happened. (The difficulty of doing so is reflected by the fact that Ireland has been working on this play for 14 years.) Pre-Existing Condition | Photograph: Courtesy Jessica Kourkounis In a poignant illustration of how abuse can happen to anyone—A’s group leader says that one in three women is battered in her lifetime—six different actors are...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Maya Rudolph plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through June 20, joined by Phillip James Brannon, Cheyenne Jackson and original cast members Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. 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.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Masquerade wth director Diane Paulus on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly altered to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex,...

Magic shows have been popping up like mushrooms in New York City. They tend to fall into two categories: close-up magic shows for very small audiences and, more rarely, full Broadway productions like The Illusionists or Darren Brown’s Secret. The British conjurer Jamie Allan stakes out an appealing middle ground between those scales in Amaze, his long-running show at New World Stages (directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond). The venue is big enough to accommodate a few large-scale effects, including levitation and a motorcycle, but sufficiently intimate for Allan’s personal narrative, which centers on his discovery of magic as a child.  Allan has built much of his reputation on incorporating new technology into his acts, as he sometimes does here—a particularly lovely sequence employs animation on multiple iPads—but it’s the show’s many retro 1980s references and props that provide much of its nostalgic charm: a Rubik’s Cube, a Fisher Price magic set, The Neverending Story. As one might expect from a two-act magic show that is more than two hours long, some of the routines are more impressive than others, but the skill level is consistently high and you get a lot of dazzlement for your dollar. And although the story Allan tells is tinged with loss, it is lifted by the obvious joy he takes in expertly plying his craft.

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Off Broadway all-stars Will Brill (Stereophonic) and Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool) portray two major figures from the AIDS crisis— the writer and activist Larry Kramer and the HIV researcher and NIH director Dr. Anthony Fauci—in a theater piece by the always unusual Daniel Fish (Oklahoma!), who delights in making strange things even stranger. The show is based on contentious call-in-show clash between Kramer's rock and Fauci's hard place that was televised on C-SPAN in 1993, as these two frequent sparring partners debated the new Clinton Administration's evolving policies on AIDS research and prevention.  

In this outrageous satirical metamusical by songwriter Andrew Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky, a hyperwoke theater company reimagines the story of Anne Frank as an inspirational Afro-Latin hip-hop tuner that centers postcolonial and genderqueer identities. Following a developmental run at Asylum last season that generated enough buzz to electrocute an elephant, the production now moves to the East Village's Orpheum Theatre for a proper run, still directed by Sam LaFrage. The cast includes Asylum cast members Olivia Bernábe, Alex Lewis, Austen Horne, Rocky Paterra, John Anker Bow, Jaz Zepatos and Walker Stovall, as well as newcomer Amelia Louise Barr. 

As questions of articficial intelligence continue to dominate national discourse, Andrew Stein's thriller offers a dramatic angle on the issue. John David Washington stars as a tech entrepreneur whose latest invention—an algorithm that knows people all too well—unsetlles the lives and relationships of his friends. Hersh Ellis directs a cast that also includes Conrad Ricamora, Joe Tippett, Elizabeth Stanley, Irene Sofia Lucio, Emma Kikue, Jason Ralph and Shaunette Renée Wilson (“The Resident”) as Suzie.

Frank Sinatra is back, baby—sort of. The original creators and performers of Our Sinatra, Eric Comstock, Christopher Gines and Hilary Kole, reunite for a 25th-anniversary revival of the hit Off-Broadway musical celebration. Rather than doing impressions, the trio revisits Sinatra’s greatest songs across the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, from torch songs and standards to swinging classics, with plenty of wit, romance and old-school glamour. The MAC Award-winning show plays the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, 10 W 64th St. Save up to 30% on performances September 11–November 1 (the show is scheduled to end November 29) at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater. Tickets $49–$69 (regular price $69–$99) TO BUY TICKETS:Click here to buy tickets through OvationTix Subject to availability. Discount only applies to select tickets. Other restrictions may apply. Not applicable to previously purchased tickets. Offer may be discontinued at any time.

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...

Broadway diva and five-time Tony loser September L. Davis has been embroiled all year in a one-sided feud with the SNL alumna turned musical-theater star Ana Gasteyer (whom she resembles extremely closely). After a recent near-death experience—she was hit by a giant protractor while starring in a Canadian musical adaptation of Proof—Davis has seen the error of her ways and is determined to make amends to the many, many people she has mistreated in the courrse of her infamous career. Her show, co-written with Steven Cragg, features original songs by Sam Davis and Tom Kitt, and is directed by the gifted comic actor Kevin Cahoon (Schucked). Guest performers on different nights of this limited run include Greg Hildreth, Kate Reinders, Diego Rodriguez, Matthew Wilkas and Betsy Wolfe.

Can you handle the truth? Film and TV auteur Aaron Sorkin launched his writing career with this 1989 courtroom thriller about a murder trial that implicates two Marines in a wider conspiracy plot. Michael Arden, who has quickly become one of Broadway's preeminent directors of musicals, ventures into straight-play terrority to helm the play's revival for Lincoln Center Theater. The cast includes Bradley Whitford—an alum of Sorkin's The West Wing—and the rising English actor Tom Blyth (Billy the Kid). 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

A Gestapo officer interrogates the future philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt in Jenny Lyn Bader’s historical drama, set in 1933 Berlin. Ari Laura Kreith directs the New York premiere production, whose run was extended several times last year and now continues at 59E59; the cast comprises Ella Kaille, Drew Hirshfield, Brett Temple and Daniel Adam Cantor.

By rights, Dylan MarcAurele’s raunchy musical spoof of HBO's skate-away success about gay hockey players should not be nearly as funny as it is. But as directed by Alan Kliffer, this scrappy show is an unexpected delight in the irreverent camp tradition of Silence! The Musical! and the original Asylum production of Titanique. Writer-composer MarcAurele rolls out a seemingly inexhaustible series of double entendres, and the high-spirited cast of five actors—led by grade-A cuties Jimin Moon and Jay Armstrong Johnson as the central couple—score with nearly every shot they take. Most of the show’s comedy stems from the tonal clash between the steamy subject matter and the earnestness of traditional musical theater, and it wouldn’t work if the cast (which also includes Ryann Redmond, Ryan Duncan and Cherry Torres) weren’t experts at the latter. It’s knowingly silly but also, sneakily, just a little sexy, too. It knows how to wink both ways at once. Read the full review. 

Roundabout Theatre Company takes charge of Molière's classic 17th-century farce about a serial hypochondriac at the mercy of opportunistic quacks. Bill Irwin, arguably America's greatest clown, plays the title role—which, ironically enough, Molière himself played when he was actually fatally ill—in his own adaptation of the text. The celebrated actor Brandon J. Dirden (Waiting for Godot) makes his Broadway directorial debut at the helm of a production that also stars Brooks Ashmanskas, Dylan Baker, Hiram Delgado, Daniel Croix Henderson, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's Rachel Bloom. 

The extraordinary life of Howard Hughes—the film producer, aviator and real estate magnate turned recluse, germophobe and urine collector—is the subject of an original biomusical with music by James Scully, lyrics by Frank Evans and Chad Gorn, and a book by Scully, Evans and director-choreographer Jennifer Paulson-Lee. In this York Theatre production, Sean MacLaughlin plays the title role; he is supported by a large cast that includes Brenda Braxton, Jill Paice, David Elder, Eric Michael Gillet and Madison Claire Parks. 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus studied theater in college before shifting into improv comedy, which led her to Saturday Night Live and eventually to sitcom superstardom (earning 11 Emmys along the way). She returns to her stage roots, and makes her Broadway debut, in John Benjamin Hickey's revival of Jon Robin Baitz's personal-political drama, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Louis-Dreyfus stars opposite the redoubtable Ed Harris as a successful pair of Republicans whose daughter, played by Lily Rabe, threatens to expose a long-buried family tragedy. Joe Keery and Allison Janney—whose mantel is also overcrowded with Emmys—complete the cast.

Brooklyn magician Greg Dubin plies his tricks for just 20 people at a time in an cozy evening of close-up magic delivered in a room that is hidden, speakeasy-style, behind a faux vintage-timepiece store. The space was once part of P.J. Hanley’s—billed as Brooklyn's oldest bar before it closed in 2013—so Dubin has christened it the Hanley Close-Up Magic Theater; a full bar and specialty cocktails are available courtesy of the complex's more prominent current occupant, Luana’s Tavern. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Deep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa—the poor, scrappy Greasers and the rich, mean Socs (short for socialites)—has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage, just as it did in the most recent Broadway revival of West Side Story. The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other. This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers. But it may also be significant that the rumble contains no dialogue or songs. Elsewhere, despite some lovely music and several strong performances, The Outsiders tends to attenuate the characters and situations it draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation. Action, in this show, speaks better than words.  The Outsiders | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Like Hinton’s novel, which she wrote when she was a teenager herself, The Outsiders is narrated by the 14-year-old...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses. The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman   The Great Gatsby often sounds great, too. Its lead actors, Jeremy Jordan as the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as his dream girl, Daisy Buchanan, have deluxe voices, and the score gives them plenty to sing. Jason Howland’s music dips into period pastiche for the group numbers—there are lots of them, set to caffeinated choreography by Dominique Kelley—but favors Miss Saigon levels of sweeping pop emotionality for the main lovers; the old-fashioned craft of Nathan Tysen’s lyrics sits comfortably, sometimes even cleverly, on the melodies.  In other regards, this Gatsby is less great. Book writer Kait Kerrigan has taken some admirably ambitious swings in adapting material that has defeated many would-be adapters before her. She cuts much of Gatsby’s backstory,...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Reducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form. As though it had cast a Shrinking Charm on itself, the formerly two-part epic is now a single show, albeit a long one: Almost three and a half hours of stage wizardry, set 20 years after the end of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part book series and tied to a complicated time-travel plot about the sons of Harry Potter and his childhood foe Draco Malfoy. (See below for a full review of the 2018 production.) Audiences who were put off by the previous version’s tricky schedule and double price should catch the magic now.  Despite its shrinking, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has kept most of its charm. The spectacular set pieces of John Tiffany’s production remain—the staircase ballet, the underwater swimming scene, the gorgeous flying wraiths—but about a third of the former text has been excised. Some of the changes are surgical trims, and others are more substantial. The older characters take the brunt of the cuts (Harry’s flashback nightmares, for example, are completely gone); there is less texture to the conflicts between the fathers and sons, and the plotting sometimes feels more rushed than before. But the changes have the salutary effect of focusing the story on its most interesting new creations: the resentful Albus Potter (James Romney) and the unpopular Scorpius Malfoy (Brady Dalton Richards), whose bond has been reconceived in...