18 Plays and Musicals We Can’t Wait to See in 2025
The first few months of the year in New York theater zig and then zag. First, there are the January theater festivals, your place to dig into experimental work scattered across smaller venues throughout the city. Then, as things ramp up on Broadway before the Tony Awards, the juggernauts arrive: the movie stars, and, of course, the British. This year, we seem to be seeing more of both than ever, with work in Hollywood hard to come by and a bevy of acclaimed West End shows arrayed like 747s waiting to touch down on this side of the Atlantic. In other quirks of the moment, we’re getting classics condensed into solo performances, chamber pieces finally making their Broadway debuts, and a suite of new-but-thank-God-not-jukebox musicals.
January
Todd Haimes Theatre, in previews January 3
In Sanaz Toossi’s play, a group of Iranian women studies English together, switching between accented English (to signify their second language) to un-accented (standing in for Farsi). In the process, they discover new sides of each other and confront how language changes thought. The play won a Pulitzer after its Off Broadway run in 2023. Knud Adams, who directed, returns. —Jackson McHenry
Nederlander Theatre, in previews January 24
It can be fun (and safe) to sign up to lead a buzzy revival, but few of the leading ladies of Broadway remain as committed to getting original work produced as Idina Menzel. From Rent to Wicked to What/If and the work of Lippa and LaChiusa, she tends to keep it contemporary and put her name behind a high concept. In the case of Redwood, which she created with director and book writer Tina Landau (see also Floyd Collins, below), she plays a businesswoman who starts a new life in the forests of Northern California. —J.M.
February
Signature Theatre, in previews February 4
The playwright Samuel D. Hunter has found endless inspiration in his home state of Idaho, whether in depicting two men forming a bond of paperwork in The Case for the Existence of God or the biting strangeness of life as a big-box store employee in A Bright New Boise. In Grangeville, he’s written a story about two half-brothers who are reconnecting over their sick mother, here played by Paul Sparks (replacing The Whale’s Brendan Fraser, who has dropped out) and Brian J. Smith; Jack Serio directs. —J.M.
New York City Center, February 5–16
City Center’s Encores! series of musical revivals has moved well into the 2000s. Among its selections this spring is this 2001 satire that, considering climate change and our incoming administration, will probably still hit pretty hard. In a dystopian future with a limited water supply, citizens have to pay for the “privilege to pee,” up to the point where a young hero leads a revolution. Both potty humor and clever lyrics abound. —J.M.
La Mama, February 14–March 2
The playwright Jerry Lieblich specializes in tantalizing, terrifying word salad, and now their play The Barbarians — originally written in response to George W. Bush’s war on terror, but only increasing in nauseating resonance by the day — is getting its full premiere at La Mama. Echoing Dr. Strangelove and Mac Wellman’s The Offending Gesture, Lieblich spins an upside-down and inside-out tale about a team of scientists analyzing real speeches by real U.S. presidents in an attempt to jam the gears of language and political power in a world where “Madam President Fake President” is bent on turning elliptical speech acts into weapons of mass destruction. —Sara Holdren
Golden Theatre, in previews February 15
If you need a primer on the historical event affectionately sent up by this Olivier-winning transfer, there’s a thoroughly decent movie on Netflix with Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen. Then strap in for something much zanier, as the comedy group SpitLip sets one of the weirdest true stories of World War II to song and dance. The real Operation Micemeat involved the British military dropping a corpse dressed as an airman behind enemy lines, hoping to feed Hitler’s forces bogus information through the papers planted on the body. The scrappy theatrical love letter to this wild caper has been getting raves on the West End for two years. Can it make as big a splash Stateside? —S.H.
Helen Hayes Theatre, in previews February 25
Last year, a crackling family melodrama by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins had audiences sucking the air out of the Hayes Theatre in collective gasps. Now, another one is on its way, this one — bonus of all bonuses — featuring the marvelous Kara Young. Phylicia Rashad directs Jacobs-Jenkins’s chronicle of the Jasper family, at the center of Black American politics for generations, now facing an explosive reckoning after the return home of youngest son Nazareth, who’s brought an unexpected guest. —S.H.
Public Theater, February 25-March 29
Clubbed Thumb brought the superb Grief Hotel to the Public last spring, and now they’re coming back with a revival of Abe Koogler’s Obie-winning Deep Blue Sound. Directed by Arin Arbus and featuring a top-notch cast including Maryann Plunkett and Crystal Finn, Koogler’s play takes place on an island in the Puget Sound, where the community has gathered in the wake of the local orca pod’s disappearance. Lives unfold and unravel as the uncertain human beings wonder whether the whales will ever return. —S.H.
BAM Harvey Theater, in previews February 28
Prepare for jogging sightings: Paul Mescal is coming to Fort Greene. The Irish sad-boy hunk of Gladiator II and Normal People starred in Streetcar in London in 2023 and is bringing the production to Brooklyn this spring. Rebecca Frecknall (of that divisive Cabaret) directs, while London castmembers Patsy Ferran and Anjana Vasan will also return. —J.M.
March
Music Box Theatre, in previews March 10
London keeps calling, this time with Sarah Snook on the line. After her Emmy win for Succession, Snook took home an Olivier for playing all 26 roles in this new adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s witty, haunting novel of vanity, aristocratic cruelty, and greed. Kip Williams adapts and directs a live-feed-video-heavy production that began its life at Sydney Theatre Company, and Snook wears one hell of a blonde pompadour as, among other characters, the superfox whose horrible aging portrait is locked away in an attic. —S.H.
Imperial Theatre, in previews March 11
Fade in on a beloved(-ish) TV show, with a hunger for fame, and a dream of making it back onto the stage. More than a decade after its run on NBC, the very messy TV series about the shenanigans backstage at a musical about Marilyn Monroe itself has become a Broadway show with a plot that, according to those who attended its workshops, is at least as bonkers as anything you saw on TV. Those incredible Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman tunes like “Let Me Be Your Star” are back, alongside an arsenal of musical-comedy specialists playing reformatted versions of Karen, Ivy, et al. —J.M.
Lucille Lortel Theatre, in previews March 11
It’s Snook uptown and Scott downtown in a season of high-concept, one-actor classics. Directed by Sam Yates in a new version by Simon Stephens, Andrew Scott (the Roy Kent of actors; he’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where) — takes on all ten characters in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, from the existentially embittered title role to the enigmatic, unhappily married woman he obsesses over. It may be a new year, but the Vanya wave rolls on. —S.H.
Hudson Theatre, in previews March 18
Jason Robert Brown’s he-sang-she-sang tale of a break-up told in reverse premiered Off Broadway in 2002 and has defined the sensibilities and audition books of a generation of musical-theater performers. It’s never actually been done on Broadway until now — although there was a movie in 2014, and we don’t need to talk about it. This version features the star casting of Nick Jonas as the novelist Jamie, with Adrienne Warren (of Tina) as the shiksa goddess Cathy. Whitney White, a young Off Broadway regular who made her debut last year with Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, directs. —J.M.
Booth Theatre, in previews March 20
The Stranger Things musical is due to hit Broadway in March, but Sadie Sink won’t be in the Upside Down — instead, she’ll be just down the street starring in Kimberly Belflower’s play about an English class in rural Georgia, where the students are grappling with crushes, sex, scandal, and The Crucible. As her characters start to question Arthur Miller’s historical interpretations, Belflower constructs a sharp-toothed comedy about a generation wrestling with rage, hope, and the vicious tenacity of old ideas. —S.H.
St. Ann’s Warehouse, in previews March 26
We’ve seen many Vanyas in the last few years, but fewer Cherry Orchards. St. Ann’s Warehouse is changing that by importing Benedict Andrews’s acclaimed, intimately staged production from London’s Donmar Warehouse, featuring Tár’s Nina Hoss. —J.M.
Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center Theater, in previews March 27
Based on the true story of a man trapped in a network of Kentucky caves in the 1920s, as a media circus raged overhead, Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s Obie-winning 1996 musical is finally getting its Broadway debut. Landau directs a revised version starring Jeremy Jordan in the title role. —S.H.
April
St. Ann’s Warehouse/BAM, April 3-6
Maddeningly, you’ll have only four days to catch the Berliner Ensemble in Brecht and Weill’s gaudy, eerie, pitch-dark and fiercely funny satirical operetta — but who better to stage the timeless tale of Mack the Knife, Victorian London’s ladies’ man and murderer-about-town? The ensemble’s artistic director, Barrie Kosky, directs the gleaming, sordid circus of capitalist sociopathy in what is, I hope, a beacon of more Brecht to come. We need Bert right about now. —S.H.
Spring TBD
Playwrights Horizons, spring 2025
As the Soho Rep moves in uptown with Playwrights Horizons, the two theater companies are collaborating on a project surely designed to get people talking: Jordan Tannahill’s play about a future monarch who happens to be a … well, the word’s in the title. (We’re getting far more explicit than Red, White & Royal Blue here.) Shayok Misha Chowdhury, of last year’s intimate Public Obscenities, directs. —J.M.