We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.
With the cutoff date for Tony Award eligibility typically falling in late April, what autumn is for films, the spring traditionally is for theatre. At this particular moment, however, things are a little bit different: The 2020 Tonys took place some 15 months late, shows that should have been up for over a year by now are only just beginning previews…you get the idea.
In any case, between the plays and musicals delayed by the pandemic and brand-new productions, a rich Broadway season this way comes—and you’d do well to start booking your tickets now. Below, find a list of the musicals and plays on our must-see list this winter and spring.
Company: previews begin November 15, opens December 9
More than 50 years after its Broadway premiere, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s genre-defying musical Company opens at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, in a production directed by Marianne Elliott (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; 2018’s Angels in America). It arrives from London, where audiences first encountered Bobby, the 35-year-old confirmed bachelor originated by Dean Jones, transformed into Rosalie Craig’s commitment-shy Bobbie. (In New York, Katrina Lenk—who won a Tony in 2018 for her performance in The Band’s Visit—takes over from Craig, while the great Patti LuPone reprises her role as Joanne.)
If the gender-swap creates compelling new stakes—the dance number “Tick-Tock,” for instance, once a dreamy, sexy romp, now alludes to Bobbie’s biological clock—the deeply witty score that made Company a hit in 1970 remains as incisive as ever. Among the musical’s best-loved songs: “Another Hundred People,” “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and the rousing “Being Alive.”
Buy tickets here.
The Music Man: previews begin December 20, opens February 10
Hugh Jackman makes his long-awaited return to the Broadway stage in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, co-starring two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster and directed by Jerry Zaks (Six Degrees of Separation, the 2017 revival of Hello Dolly!). The musical, which first premiered in 1957, follows a con man named Harold Hill who poses as a band leader in a small Midwestern town and eventually falls in love with Marian Paroo, the local librarian and piano teacher who sees right through his schemes.
Buy tickets here.
Plaza Suite: previews begin February 25, opens March 28
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
When Neil Simon’s suite of one-act comedic “playlets”—each set in room 719 at the Plaza Hotel—premiered at the Plymouth (now the Gerald Schoenfeld) Theatre in 1968, Maureen Stapleton and George C. Scott played its three central couples: the first, celebrating their wedding anniversary; the next, a film producer and his former high-school sweetheart; and finally, a husband and wife trying to coax their soon-to-be-married daughter out of the bathroom. (In his review for Vogue, Anthony West called the work, directed by Mike Nichols, “genuinely and refreshingly funny.”) Now, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick assume those roles, marking the starry real-life couple’s first time performing together since a late-’90s production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. John Benjamin Hickey, who could be seen last season as Henry Wilcox in Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, directs.
Buy tickets here.
The Minutes: previews begin in March, opens April 7
A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018, Tracy Letts’s twisty political satire The Minutes follows the real-time proceedings of a contentious City Council meeting in the fictional town of Big Cherry. Anna D. Shapiro, who won a Tony in 2008 for her direction of August: Osage County (also penned by Letts), helms an ensemble that, before the pandemic, was set to include Jessie Mueller (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical; Waitress), Armie Hammer (last seen onstage in Straight White Men, also directed by Shapiro) and Letts himself; the cast of its 2022 run has yet to be announced.
While Variety critic Steven Oxman once deemed The Minutes “nearly certain to be the single work of art that best represents, but will also survive, the Trump era,” the play, Letts told Vulture in 2020, ultimately takes a much wider view, considering “how we conduct our politics, and why we do it, especially in America.”
Tickets will soon be available here.
Take Me Out: previews begin March 9, opens on April 4
In 2002, when Take Me Out arrived at The Public Theater, the play starred Daniel Sunjata as Darren Lemming, a mixed-race professional baseball player who comes out to the public as gay. (Difficult conversations with his teammates—some receptive, some rancorous—ensue, most taking place in the locker room.)
“When [Richard] Greenberg first wrote the play, he intended it to presage an event that he had long anticipated as both a gay man himself and as a fanatical fan of the sport,” the Times’s Kurt Soller has written. (The piece would win Greenberg the 2003 Tony for best play when it moved to the Walter Kerr.) “Some two decades later, that still hasn’t happened, which makes “Take Me Out” less of a period piece than might be presumed — and thus, more urgent now than when it was conceived.” In its revival, which will be at the Helen Hayes, Jesse Williams (Grey’s Anatomy) is Lemming, while Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family) plays Mason Marzac, Lemming’s investment counselor. Scott Ellis (Tootsie, Kiss Me, Kate) directs.
Buy tickets here.
Funny Girl: previews begin March 26, opens April 24
In its first-ever Broadway revival, Funny Girl will star Booksmart and American Crime Story: Impeachment’s Beanie Feldstein as Fanny Brice, a brassy Ziegfeld girl who begins a turbulent romance with the gambler Nicky Arnstein in early 20th-century New York. Reclaiming a role made famous by Barbra Streisand in 1964 (and then again in 1968, when she starred in the Oscar-winning movie adaptation), Feldstein has called the casting her “lifelong dream come true”: “The first time I played Fanny Brice was at my third birthday party, in a head-to-toe leopard print outfit my mom made for me,” she recalled in a statement. (Ramin Karimloo and Jane Lynch will co-star as Nicky and Mrs. Brice, respectively.) Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening) directs, with Harvey Fierstein revising Isobel Lennart’s original book.
Buy tickets here.
How I Learned to Drive: previews begin March 29, opens April 19
Both Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse reprise the roles that they played over 20 years ago in How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memory play. It sees a woman called Li’l Bit (Parker) reflecting on years of sexual abuse suffered at the hands of her charming Uncle Peck (Morse); when the affecting drama opened at the Vineyard Theatre in 1997, Ben Brantley called it “angry and compassionate; light-handed and devastating.”
“I don’t know if I will ever again write a play that connects with such a wide demographic of audience members,” Vogel remarked in 2018. “This is the gift of theatre and of writing: a transubstantiation of pain and secrecy into light, into community, into understanding if not acceptance.” Once deemed “not universal enough” for uptown, the play finally has its turn on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
Tickets will soon be available here.
Macbeth: previews begin March 29, opens April 28
This recently announced production of the so-called Scottish Play stars Daniel Craig—fresh from his final turn as James Bond in No Time to Die—and Ruth Negga, making her Broadway debut. (She previously appeared on the New York stage in Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse.) Additional casting information is yet to be announced.
In a statement, director Sam Gold (Fun Home, A Doll's House, Part 2) expressed his enthusiasm for the new staging. “I am beyond thrilled to be participating in this historic season as theatre re-emerges, and to be working with two such masterful actors on one of dramatic literature’s most challenging and epic dramas,” he said.
Buy tickets here.