Adam Feldman

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

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

Public spaces come alive with free outdoor theater in New York City in the summer, and especially with the plays of William Shakespeare. The top destination, of course, is usually the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park presents excellent productions that among New York's best things to do in the summer. That series is on hold this year for long-needed Delacorte renovations, but luckily you can still enjoy plays by Shakespeare and other classical masters elsewhere in the city: in Harlem and Brooklyn, at Battery and Riverside Parks, even in a Lower East Side parking lot. You might be surprised by the magic that can come from wonderful words, inventive actors and a mild summer breeze. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to things to do outside in NYC

Broadway has been getting a kick out of gorgeous chorus girls and boys for generations, and the spring season is bookended by two celebrations of show-dancer hotness: The all-male Broadway Beauty Pageant on March 21 and the burlesque extravaganza Broadway Bares on June 19. Keep clicking to see 20 chorus-liners guaranteed to catch audiences' eyes in shows opening on Broadway in the next few months. The girls | The boys

The best Broadway shows attract millions of people to enjoy 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 and you can find cheap tickets for. And the choices are varied: Alongside star-driven dramas and family-oriented blockbusters, you may find the kind of artistically ambitious offerings that are more common to the smaller venues of Off Broadway. Here are our theater critics' top choices among the shows that are currently playing on the Great White Way.  RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z Listings of All Broadway Shows in NYC

Seeing a show on Broadway can require some planning in advance—and sometimes a leap of faith. You can wait until the shows have opened and try to see only the very best Broadway shows, but at that point, it is harder to get tickets and good seats. So it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the shows that will be opening on Broadway down the line, be they original musicals, promising new plays or revivals of time-tested classics. Here, in order of when they start, are the productions that have been confirmed so far to begin their Broadway runs in the early months of 2024. (Other shows may be added if and when they are formally announced.) Recommended: Current and Upcoming Off Broadway Shows

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 week.

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

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

Theater is a big part of what makes New York shine. This city is bursting with talent that even the youngest among us can appreciate, and at the best Broadway shows for kids, everyone in your crew will be captivated. The Lion King, with its dancing wildlife and catchy songs, is a perennial favorite, but Disney aficionados will also get a kick out of the magical tale of Aladdin. At Wicked, you can visit the land of Oz and its conflicted green-skinned protagonist; at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you can enter an entirely different world of witches and strange creatures. These long-running hits are joined by newer offerings like Some Like It Hot, Six and & Juliet, which may appeal to older kids. RECOMMENDED: More theater for kids in NYC If you've already caught these shows or are looking for something a little different, you won't have to go far: Be sure to explore our favorite Off Broadway shows for kids, too, where the stories can be just as memorable as their Broadway counterparts and the talent equally impressive. Make the day more memorable by hitting up one of our favorite fun restaurants for kids before or after the show. And as always, keep abreast of the what is on Broadway with our A-Z list.

At any given moment there's a dizzying array of musicals, plays and experimental works for theater lovers in New York City to choose from. But the sheer volume of choices can make it hard to decide what to see. Let us give you a hand with that! Here is an alphabetical short list of our critics' picks: all the shows that Time Out New York's critics have seen, reviewed and liked, plus a few that we feel confident recommending in advance. For a wider view of what's playing in NYC, check out our complete list of current Broadway shows and our extensive Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway listings. If you’re looking for a deal on tickets, head to our cheap tickets page. RECOMMENDED: Best Broadway shows

If you're looking to find the best Broadway shows, or are curious about what's happening Off Broadway or Off-Off Broadway, we can help. Time Out New York's theater critics are constantly on the lookout to guide you to the most exciting, original and moving shows in the city—and to steer you away from the ones that might not be worth your time. Here is a complete list of our reviews of productions that are currently playing in New York City. RECOMMENDED: Where to find cheap Broadway tickets

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  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 Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a bottle

Sandra Oh plays one of a dozen women charged with determining whether a wild young woman condemned as a murderer is pregnant—which would spare her from the hangman's noose—in Lucy Kirkwood's ensemble drama. Sarah Benson directs a large cast that includes Ann Harada, Dale Soules, Suzannah Perkins, Hannah Cabell, Glenn Fitzgerald and Haley Wong. This very ambitious piece is a bit uneven both in writing and execution, but at its best it suggests a cross between Twelve Angry Men and The Crucible, as written by Caryl Churchill.

City Center's invaluable Encores! series concludes its 2024 season with a concert staging of Maury Yeston and Peter Stone's Tony-winning 1997 musical about hubris, humanity and one very inconvenient iceberg. The always astute Anne Kauffman directs a cast that includes Ramin Karimloo, Bonnie Milligan, Chip Zien, Judy Kuhn, Brandon Uranowtiz, Jose Llana, Andrew Durand, Adam Chanler-Berat, A.J. Shively, Alex Joseph Grayson, Drew Gehling, Samatha Williams and three members of the talented Cooper family: Chuck, Lilli and Eddie. Encores! has been on fire this season, and this first-class show is no exception; it is a return to the series’s core mandate, assembling an impossibly deluxe cast and orchestra to perform a musical that has many interesting features—including its gorgeous choral opening and finale—but which can probably never be revived otherwise.

Theater review by Adam Feldman A revival of Cats, at least in theory, might well give you paws. After a then-record 18-year run on Broadway—with a tagline, “NOW AND FOREVER,” that began to sound a bit like a threat—Andrew Lloyd Webber's synthtastic 1980s musical finally hung up its leotards and yak-hair wigs in 2000. Its comeback efforts since then have been less than overwhelming: a taxidermic 2016 revival, a widely mocked 2019 film. It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat. But now along comes a thrilling reconception at the Perelman Performing Arts Center that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights.  Cats: The Jellicle Ball | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Is Cats good or bad? That’s a question without an answer. Cats is beyond good and bad. Cats is Cats. Cats is about cats competing to be sent into the ionosphere. Cats is about cats who sing light verse from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, an exercise in high silliness that sits at the classy end of an anthropomorphic-cat comedy genre that includes, at lower stations, New Yorker cartoons and I Can Has Cheezburger? memes. Cats is about Andrew Lloyd Webber writing a lot more melodies than he often does—to fit the requirements of Eliot’s meter—and producing many bangers right out of his hat. Cats is about human dancers performing feline

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The revivals that Kenny Leon has directed on Broadway form something like a syllabus of modern African-American drama, from Loraine Hansberry to August Wilson to Suzan-Lori Parks. Last season, that project brought him to Purlie Victorious, in which a Black man travels to his birthplace in the South to reclaim his place there in triumph; now Leon follows it with a play in which a different rural homecoming seems less happy, at least at first. But don’t give up too fast: Home, after all, is where the heart is. Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles) is a broken man at the start of Samm-Art Williams’s play, which is now at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre. After a long exile—first in prison, then in a big city up north—Cephus is back in his not-so-subtly-named hometown of Cross Roads, North Carolina. In a rocking chair on the porch of his childhood home, he seems to have nowhere to go; his right hand has a tremor, and the noisy local kids think he’s a ghost. (Like all of the roles except Cephus, these taunting brats are played by the gifted duo of Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers, who move among dozens of characters with big swings of affect and voice.) But for Home, which debuted downtown in 1979 under the aegis of the Negro Ensemble Company before moving to a successful Broadway run the next year, Cephus’s weary return after many trials is not a defeat. Like Cephus himself, the play has an abiding faith in the eventual goodness of the Lord above—despite a

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Paula Vogel has tapped into veins of autobiography throughout her distinguished career, and in her latest work she hits the big one: the mother lode. As its wryly categorical title suggests, Mother Play is an I-remember-mama drama in a time-honored mode; it carries a hint of resignation—as though it were in some sense an act of obligation, a rite through which every playwright must pass. And to drive home its place in the matrilineal succession, the play’s world premiere at Second Stage stars the supreme Jessica Lange, whose two most recent Broadway appearances were as the preeminent ghost moms of American drama: Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.  Mother Play’s Phyllis combines aspects of both. She’s an impoverished single mother from the South who tries to live up to outmoded standards (and spends a lot of time on the phone); she’s also an addict whose children must ultimately take care of her. A gin-swilling divorcée in thrift-store Chanel who mails dead bugs to her landlord with the rent, Phyllis is a real character—and a character openly based on the real Phyllis Vogel. The play is a slice of life, served raw. It’s a savage but grudgingly loving portrait of two women stuck together with blood: one who never wanted to be a mother, and one who never chose to be her daughter. “It is never over,” as Phyllis says. “It’s a life sentence.” Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions | Photograph:

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, and m

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The fraying country estate where Uncle Vanya unfolds is peopled, in the main, by thwarted souls. Its characters wallow in regret, especially the loveless Vanya (Steve Carell). He has sacrificed his money and time, and what he believes to have been his great potential—”I could have been a Schopenhauer, or a Dostoevsky,” he sputters—to support his pompous brother-in-law, Alexander (Alfred Molina), an academic who once enjoyed a great reputation. But now, in middle age, Vanya feels that his reverence for the professor was misplaced. His dutiful work has taken him nowhere, and now he has nowhere to go.  Uncle Vanya is set in Russia at the end of the 19th century, but it is perhaps the Chekhov play that feels closest to 21st-century sensibilities, and it is sometimes strikingly prescient of today’s concerns: Vanya’s doctor friend Astrov (William Jackson Harper), for example, is an environmentalist who plants trees to replace those mowed down by industrial loggers, and his artwork paints a worrisome picture of impending “total obliteration.” It’s relatable. There is logic, then, to the decision to dispense with fidelity to Chekhov’s period and update the play to a contemporary setting for Lincoln Center Theater's new production, adapted by Heidi Schreck and directed by Lila Neugebauer. To some extent, the gambit succeeds: Many of the production’s most pleasurable moments are connected to this modernization. But it’s also, I think, where the producti

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “Nothing to do except wait,” explains Mary Jane (Rachel McAdams) to Amelia (Lily Santiago), a college student visiting her small Queens apartment. “I’m glad to have your company.” Mary Jane is a single mother with a severely disabled toddler named Alex; he is running a fever, and Amelia’s aunt Sherry (April Mathis), a nurse, is tending to him in the back room. Exactly what they might be waiting for is a question that hangs with gray menace in Amy Herzog’s exquisite and deeply moving Mary Jane: Alex is almost certainly not getting better, and even the best-case scenarios break your heart. Yet the play does not dwell in helplessness; it’s more interested in how people try to help. In addition to Mary Jane, there are eight other characters onstage. Mathis and Santiago reappear as, respectively, a doctor and a music therapist. Brenda Wehle is both Mary Jane’s sturdy superintendent and a Buddhist nun; Susan Pourfar plays two other mothers with disabled children. (The second, a blunt Hasidic woman, adds a welcome dash of comic relief.) There are no villains here, only people doing their best under sometimes crushing circumstances. Mary Jane | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy All are rendered in lovely detail by Herzog and the five women of the cast, directed by Anne Kauffman with characteristic attention to the importance of offhand nuance. Information is revealed in a steady drip of medical jargon, bureaucratic obstacles and personal history; t

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Great expectations can be a problem when you’re seeing a Broadway show: You don’t always get what you hope for. It’s all too easy to expect great things when the show is a masterpiece like Cabaret: an exhilarating and ultimately chilling depiction of Berlin in the early 1930s that has been made into a classic movie and was revived exquisitely less than a decade ago. The risk of disappointment is even larger when the cast includes many actors you admire—led by Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee of the show’s decadent Kit Kat Club—and when the production arrives, as this one has, on a wave of raves from London. To guard against this problem, I made an active effort to lower my expectations before seeing the latest version of Cabaret. But my lowered expectations failed. They weren’t low enough. Cabaret | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner So it is in the spirit of helpfulness that I offer the following thoughts on expectation management to anyone planning to see the much-hyped and very pricey new Cabaret, which is currently selling out with the highest average ticket price on Broadway. There are things to enjoy in this production, to be sure, but they’re not necessarily the usual things. Don’t expect an emotionally compelling account of Joe Masteroff’s script (based on stories by Christopher Isherwood and John Van Druten’s nonmusical adaptation of them, I Am a Camera); this production’s focus is elsewhere. Don’t expect appealing versions of the songs in

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Hell’s Kitchen, whose score is drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys, could easily have gone down in flames. Jukebox musicals often do; songs that sound great on the radio can’t always pull their weight onstage. But playwright Kristoffer Diaz, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have found the right recipe for this show—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients—and they've cooked up a heck of a block party.  Loosely inspired by Keys’s life, Hell’s Kitchen has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon—in a stunningly assured debut—plays Ali, a beautiful but directionless mixed-race teenager growing up in midtown’s artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the 1990s, a period conjured winsomely and wittily by Dede Ayite’s costumes. The issues Ali faces are realistic ones: tensions with her protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean); disappointment with the charming musician father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), who yo-yos in and out of their lives; a crush on a thicc, slightly older street drummer, Knuck (Chris Lee); a desire to impress a stately pianist, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who lives in the building.  Hell’s Kitchen | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin The show’s chain of Keys songs is its most obvious selling point, but it could also have been a limitation. Musically, the tunes are not built for drama—they tend to sit in a leisurely R&B groove

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  David Adjmi’s intimately epic behind-the-music drama Stereophonic has now moved to Broadway after a hit fall run at Playwrights Horizons. At the smaller venue, the audience felt almost immersed in the room where the show takes place: a wood-paneled 1970s recording studio—decked out by set designer David Zinn as a plush vision of brown, orange, mustard, sage and rust—where a rock band is trying to perfect what could be its definitive album. Some fans of the play have wondered if it could work as well on a larger stage, but that question has a happy answer: Daniel Aukin’s superb production navigates the change without missing a beat. The jam has been preserved. With the greater sense of distance provided at the Golden Theatre, Stereophonic feels more than ever like watching a wide-screen film from the heyday of Robert Altman, complete with excellent ensemble cast, overlapping dialogue and a generous running time: Adjmi divides the play into four acts, which take more than three hours to unfold. This length is essential in conveying the sprawl of a recording process that goes on far longer than anyone involved had planned, but the play itself never drags. As the band cracks up along artistic, romantic and pharmaceutical fault lines—fueled by a constant flow of booze, weed and coke, often late into the night—we follow along, riveted by the details and the music that emerges from them. There’s nary a false note.  Stereophonic | Photograph: Courtes

After taking this 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 in 2025 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, 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, whom she closely resembles and whom she falsely believes to be dead. Comedic hijinx ensue, along with lovely verse. 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.  The Public's summer series has offered free stagings of Shakespeare plays since 1962, except for this summer and the pandemic summer of 2020. If you don't want to wait a year to see alfresco accounts of Elizabe

“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. Let me tell you about some terrific shows that didn’t change my life.  We can start with Cole Escola’s riotous comedy Oh, Mary!, the surprise hit of the year, in which Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln as a boozy, raunchy, idiotic egomaniac. After a sold-out run at Greenwich Village’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, the show has moved to Broadway, where it opened this month to rapturous reviews. Last week, Oh, Mary! grossed $1,054,998—an all-time record for the Lyceum Theatre, which has been operating since 1903. The run was originally scheduled to end in September; it has just extended through November. Out of nowhere, it seemed, Escola has suddenly been everywhere, bringing their estimable spark to late-night talk shows, The View and even the Met Gala. Like most overnight successes, this one has been a long time coming: Fans of downtown comedy and alt-cabaret have known for years that Escola is a special talent. (“Blending boyish mischief with dizzy charm and the ruthless twinkle of a starlet bent on fame, Escola's comic persona suggests a street urchin raised by the gang from The Match Game,” we wrote more than a decade ago.) It was just a matter of time until the world caught on, and it finally has.  Photograph: Courtesy Emilio MadridOh, Mary! But why now? Oh, Mary! doesn’t follow

Pop star Adam Lambert and Moana star Auli’i Cravalho will make their Broadway debuts in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on September 16, 2024, the production announced today. Current stars Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin will play their last performances on September 14, as previously scheduled.  Lambert will play the sinister Emcee, who presides over a louche nightclub in Weimar Berlin and whose antics reflect the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany. Cravalho will be Sally Bowles, a fast-living British singer with delusions of stardom. Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell, who touchingly play the musical's older couple, are scheduled to stay on. This revival of Joseph Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb's darkly brilliant 1966 musical, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, received excellent reviews in London but was more coolly received by New York critics, including me. Nonetheless, it received eight Tony Award nominations—winning one, for Tom Scutt's environmental scenic design—and has been a hit at the box office: Last week, it was the fifth-highest-grossing show on Broadway, with the highest average ticket price ($193.57).  Among the complaints that New York critics have had about Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club is that the lead actors do not sing the score attractively. That seemed a deliberate choice on Fracknall's part, in keeping with the production's in-your-face attitude. But in casting Lambert and Cravalho, who are superb vocalists, the production may be signaling a shift in approac

"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

Longtime patrons of the Duplex were gutted two years ago when a roof fire destroyed the venue's upstairs Cabaret Theatre. The Duplex is no ordinary West Village club, after all, but a local institution. From the 1950s through the 1970s, when it was on Grove Street, it was an incubator for such performers as Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Hal Holbrook and Barry Manilow; in its newer incarnation on Christopher Street, it has helped launch alt-cabaret stars like Cole Escola, Justin Elizabeth Sayre, Molly Pope, Ben Rimalower and Amy Jo Jackson. It was at the Duplex that Sean Hayes's Jack McFarland performed his cabaret show, Just Jack, on Will & Grace; Bowen Yang and Cecily Strong spoofed it on Saturday Night Live. When this beloved hole in the wall was forced to close in July 2022, it left a hole in the hearts of local arts fans. But now, the venue is finally getting ready to return. Time Out has learned that the Duplex Cabaret Theatre will reopen in mid-October with an ambitious slate of programming. In a gesture of audacious irony, the venue is fighting fire with Fire Island: The restored second-floor complex will be re-envisioned by designer Shawn Lewis as Ferry’s Landing NYC, a Fire Island–themed immersive space that aims to give queer New Yorkers a place to visit when vacation season is through. (The first-floor piano bar, which stayed open after the fire, will continue as usual.) The centerpiece of Ferry's Landing NYC will be Rob Gould's original musical Littl

The nominations for the 2024 Tony Awards were announced this morning, honoring productions from the 2023–24 Broadway season. The awards are given out annually by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing to salute outstanding achievements in 26 categories of Broadway artistry. Actors Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry revealed the full list of nominees live on YouTube at 9am. Among the 2023-24 Broadway productions earning the most nominations are the new musical Hell's Kitchen (13) and the new play Stereophonic (13); reaping the next most are the new musicals The Outsiders (12), Water for Elephants (7) and Suffs (6) and the revivals Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club (9), Merrily We Roll Along (7), Appropriate (8) and Purlie Victorious (6).    RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the 2024 Tony Awards The Tony Awards ceremony, hosted this year by Ariana DeBose, will be held at Lincoln Center's David H. Koch Theater on Sunday, June 16, 2024, and the main part will be televised on CBS in a three-hour broadcast starting at 8pm ET. (The event can also be watched live throughout the country by premium subscribers to the streaming service Paramount+.)  Here is a complete list of the official nominations for the 2024 Tony Awards (not to be confused with the 2024 TONY* nominations, which we published yesterday!). Best Play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn BiohMary Jane by Amy HerzogMother Play: A Play in Five Evictions by Paula VogelPrayer for the French Republic by Joshu

Broadway's jam-packed 2023–24 season comes to an end on Sunday, June 16, when the 2024 Tony Awards are handed out at Lincoln Center. The nominations have been made, the reactions have been had, the profiles of nominees have been written, the predictions have been lodged. Now there's nothing left but the awarding—and, of course, the singing and dancing. The CBS broadcast on Sunday night will feature musical performances by nine of this year's contenders: Best Musical nominees Hell’s Kitchen, Illinoise, The Outsiders, Suffs and Water for Elephants; Best Musical Revival nominees Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, Merrily We Roll Along and The Who’s Tommy; and Best Play nominee Stereophonic. The show is also sure to include a few original numbers—including at least one for Ariana DeBose, who is returning for her third year as host. Here are five tips for watching the Tony Awards this year. 1. The Tony Awards will air live from coast to coast Theater is all about the thrill of the live moment. But until recently, viewers who weren't in the Eastern Time Zone watched the Tony telecast hours after happened. In the age of social media, that kind of delay is increasingly old-fashioned. So CBS now broadcasts the three-hour main portion of the awards ceremony live and simultaneously from coast to coast, starting at 8pm ET, 7pm CT, 6pm MT and 5pm PT. The Tonys will also stream live and on demand on Paramount+. (Paramount+ Essential subscribers will not have the option to stream it live, but wil

The first time I interviewed David Korins for Time Out, in 2005, he was a rising Off Broadway talent on the verge of his very first Broadway show. In the years since then, he has emerged as perhaps the preeminent theatrical set designer of his generation: He's the man behind the scenes of Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Beetlejuice and the current revival of The Who's Tommy, to name just a few of his two dozen Broadway credits. But none of his past projects have been quite as spectacular as what he created last summer for Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim's musical portrait of the morally compromised Filipina First Lady Imelda Marcos. Working with director Alex Timbers, Korins shaped the production in multiple incarnations over the course of more than a decade before arriving at the massive Broadway Theatre, which Here Lies Love transformed completely from a traditional proscenium space into an immersive nightclub experience. This was set design on an unprecedented scale: groundbreaking, radical and thrilling. Korins has somehow never won a Tony Award for his work, but now he has been nominated again. Here Lies Love closed in November, but if Tony voters have any sense, this should be his year.  For all his success, Korins seems to have remained fundamentally the same as he was 20 years ago: candid, articulate, friendly and passionate about his creative endeavors. In this interview at his apartment, we talked about his astounding work on Here Lies Love as well as his ca

The hit Broadway revival of An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen's 1882 social drama about politics and pollution, was interrupted in March by protesters from the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion. As we reported at the time, the play's performers—including Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli—took the interruption in stride, and some of them even engaged with the protesters. "You should write your own play!" yelled one of the actors. Extinction Rebellion hasn't written its own play. Instead, it is joining forces with Theater of War Productions—a performance group that specializes in combining classical texts with burning contemporary issues, as in its acclaimed production Antigone in Ferguson—to present its own version of An Enemy of the People in a pop-up theater event today in Times Square today. And Theater of War has recruited some impressive names for this free reading of scenes from Ibsen's drama, led by the widely adored Bill Murray. Master thespian Jay O. Sanders (Purlie Victorious) will play the central role of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who discovers dangerous bacteria in his spa town's water. Murray will play his brother, the town's mayor, who tries to silence his findings; Taylor Schilling (Orange Is the New Black) and Kathryn Erbe (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) will play the doctor's daughter and wife, respectively. Veteran stage actors Peter Francis James, Zach Grenier and Enid Graham are also in the company. So is Nate Smith—one of the activists who disrup

Update 6/11/24: According to an official press release, Sleep No More has been extended to September 29, 2024. Although the official reason behind the change has not been disclosed, the renewed interest in the production following its closure announcement might have contributed to the decision. The show was originally scheduled to close for good on January 28, 2024. --- Update: Sleep No More has been extended by four weeks to April 28, 2024. According to The McKittrick Hotel, the extension comes as a way to accommodate “the outpouring of admiration,” it has received since announcing its closure. The McKittrick Hotel will soon accept no new reservations: The remarkable immersive experience Sleep No More, New York City’s premiere live attraction since 2011, announced today that it will shut its doors for good on January 28, 2024. An unsettling and sexy dance-theater piece lodged in an extravagantly detailed mock hotel complex on West 27th Street, the show was created by the British company Punchdrunk and produced in NYC by Emursive. When it closes, it will have played exactly 5,000 performances and entertained some two million spectator-participants. "A multitude of searing sights crowd the spectator's gaze at the bedazzling and uncanny theater installation Sleep No More," wrote David Cote in his Time Out review. "Your sense of space and depth—already compromised by the half mask that audience members must don—is further blurred as you wend through more than 90 discrete spaces,

Michael Greif has had a prodigious Broadway career as the director of landmark musicals including Rent, Next to Normal and Dear Evan Hansen. Even by that standard, however, his 2023–24 Broadway season has been astonishing. Without much fanfare, Greif pulled off a feat that may well be unprecedented, at least in recent decades: He directed or co-directed not one, not two, but three new Broadway musicals in a single season. Each is very different from the others: Hell’s Kitchen is a jukebox musical built around the hits of Alicia Keys; The Notebook is a transhistorical romance adapted from a well-loved novel and film; and Days of Wine and Roses, which closed in March, was a chamber-operatic portrait of an alcoholic couple in the 1950s.  We recently talked with Greif for an hour via Zoom, during which time his eyes welled twice with tears at the memory of pivotal moments in developing his shows. Greif’s greatest strength as a director is perhaps his ability to elicit performances that lift actors to the best they can be onstage: apotheosis performances that make you feel like these exact actors were born to play these exact roles. It’s no accident that he has shepherded so many of the 21st century’s most indelible musical turns, such as Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens, Alice Ripley in Next to Normal, Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hansen and Kelli O’Hara in Days of Wine and Roses. In focusing on making the shows and actors shine, however, his style is fundamentally self-effacing. Per

Dolly Parton will return to Broadway in 2026 as the author of a new musical based on her life, the widely beloved singer announced today. In a full-circle touch, the show will be titled Hello, I'm Dolly, after the title of Parton's first album—which was itself, of course, a nod to a Broadway musical. “I lived my whole life to see this show on stage," said Parton. "I’ve written many original songs for the show and included all your favorites in it as well. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll clap, you’ll stomp, it truly is a Grand Ol’ Opera. Pun and fun intended. Don’t miss it!” Though Broadway fans have long fantasized that Parton would hit the Street as a performer—perhaps in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas or, yes, Hello, Dolly!—she has ventured onto the Great White Way only once before, when she wrote the score for the short-lived 9 to 5 the Musical in 2009. It was in a 2019 London revival of that show that brought her into contact with producer Adam Speers, who is leading the charge for Hello, I'm Dolly.  "I had always heard she wanted to do a musical based on her life, so when she asked if I would be interested in producing it, I was bowled over," said Speers. "As the world knows, Dolly is a magical blend of talent, hard work, intelligence, charm, wit, and a gigantically big heart. I’m thrilled we’re going to bring her inspiring story to Broadway.” In addition to writing the new musical's score, Parton will co-write its book with Maria S