Audra McDonald as Madame Rose; Robert Downey Jr’s Broadway debut; Elton John’s first new Broadway musical in a dozen years. It’s hard to resist the lure of the big musicals and starry debuts that have come more and more to define Broadway. But the Fall New York theater season also offers an abundance of shows that are more offbeat…and off off beat. These can be challenging, but they’re challenges I consider worth taking.
Below, I pick ten shows opening between now and the end of the year that excite me enough, or at least make me curious enough, that I don’t want to miss them, for reasons I enumerate below. (As you’ll see, I don’t really keep to ten; I also mention shows that seem related in subject or tone to the ones I highlight.)
I recommend checking out the complete Broadway 2024-2025 season; there are 16 shows opening on Broadway from September to December.
I might not wind up liking everything on the list below (I was disappointed by three of the ten I listed in a similar post last Spring.) I won’t know if I’ll consider these “must see” shows until I see them.
The list is organized chronologically according to opening date, with the title linked to the show’s website.
Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song
Where: Theater 555
What: The latest edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s long-running parody revue, targeting past and present Broadway shows (Hell’s Kitchen, Stereophonic, The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby, Back to the Future, The Wiz and, yes, Merrily We Roll Along) using their songs with new lyrics.
When: August 30 – December 1. Opening September 19
Why: Alessandrini has been doing this for more than forty years. Not every song parody lands, but there is always enough cleverness and hilarity, which even engenders a sense of camaraderie among the in-the-know in the audience.
Related: Many of the Broadway shows being spoofed are still running.
KS6: Small Forward
Where: La MaMa ETC
What: The life story of Katya Snytsina, an Olympic basketball player from Belarus, “the first and only popular sports figure in the history of Belarus to have openly come out as gay” who now lives in exile as an activist against the dictatorship.
When: Sep 21, 2024 – Oct 13, 2024. Opening September 24.
Why: The main reason to see “KS6: Small Forward” is that it’s a production of Belarus Free Theater. Since 2005, the company has used theater as a form of resistance against the ruthless dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. But its moral clarity and sense of justice is only one reason to welcome a new show by this avant-garde company. Everything I’ve seen by Belarus Free Theater — “Trash Cuisine, Time of Women, Burning Doors – has been theatrically inventive and often physically dazzling.
Related: This is a season brimming with shows by well-regarded avant-garde companies, among others a revival of Gatz by Elevator Repair Service, and new works by Nature Theater of Oklahoma (“No President” at NYU Skirball) and Richard Foreman (“Suppose Beautiful Madeleine Harvey,” also at La MaMa)
Fatherland
Where: New York City Center Stage II
What: The true story of a teenage son who became an informant against his father, a January 6 insurrectionist.
When: September 18 – November 23. Opening September 26
Why: This documentary play by Stephen Sachs, co-founder of L.A.’s Fountain Theater, was well-received when it debuted earlier this year in L.A., praised as akin to “a modern-day Sophoclean tragedy.” The dramatization of true stories seems especially effective when the play explores how the political affects the personal in times of public turmoil.
Related: Other such explorations: An encore presentation of Arlekin Players’ Our Class (antisemitism); Counting and Cracking (the refugee crisis) at NYU Skirball; “Good Bones” (gentrification) by James Ijames (“Fat Ham”) at the Public. A musical that shares the same political moment as Fatherland, but not the same tone: Ghost of John McCain at SoHo Playhouse.
THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA
Where: Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater
What: In the sweltering heat of a 1970s summer, the Webb sisters return to their childhood home in Blackpool, an English seaside town, where their mother Veronica is dying upstairs. Back in the 1950s ( as we see in flashbacks) there were four sisters, who, pushed by their mother, rehearsed their Andrews Sister-like singing act and had a shot of fame, which cost them all dearly.
When: September 11 – December 8. Opening September 29
Why: This is a new play by Jez Butterworth, whose three previous plays on Broadway were various degrees of riveting: Jerusalem, The River, and The Ferryman, which won the Tony Award for best play. If it’s like the others, it will be long, crowded with humanity or at least human feeling, and climax in something shocking.
Related: The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall at Lincoln Center: “Gathering at their childhood island home off the coast of Georgia, four sisters meet to create a family quilt to honor their recently deceased mother.”
MCNEAL
Where: Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont
What: Jacob McNeal (portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.) is a greatly respected writer, but beneath the acclaim are unresolved grievances, family estrangement, and an unsettling fascination with Artificial Intelligence.
When: September 5 – November 24. Opening September 30.
Why: Yes, Robert Downey Jr. is making his Broadway debut, and for his fans, I’m sure that’s the draw. For me, it’s playwright Ayad Akhtar, whose past plays (the Pulitzer-winning “Disgraced”, “Junk”, The Invisible Hand), as well as his novel “Homeland Elegies”, have taken on big societal questions with intellectual rigor and dramatic intensity.
Related: Artificial Intelligence is in the mix as well in the Builders Association’s “Atlas Drugged” at NYU Skirball, which they describe as: “The benzedrine rants of Ayn Rand meet Artificial Intelligence meet electoral politics.” And somewhat related, two plays about robots: We Are Your Robots at Polonsky Shakespeare Center and MAYBE HAPPY ENDING on Broadway about a relationship between two robots (Darren Criss being one of the robots.)
A Woman Among Women
Where: Bushwick Starr
What: A riff off of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” – “challenging the audience to participate in the making of a tragic hero, experience her Aristotelian fall from grace, and interrogate the meaning of collective catharsis.”
When: October 15 – November 3. Opening October 19.
Why: The first show to open in the Bushwick Starr’s new permanent home, this is one of writer Julia May Jonas’s five plays that reimagine male-dominated classic dramas largely from a female perspective (The plays are Long Day’s Journey into Night, True West, American Buffalo, Zoo Story – and now All My Sons.). This is a high concept that I’m frankly skeptical the playwright can pull off as theater that works on its own, but intrigued to see her attempt.
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot
Where: Playwrights Horizons
What: As the oceans rise, a band of queer warehouse workers travel from job to job, running from the encroaching coastline. Written by Sarah Mantell. Directed by Sivan Battat
When: October 10 – November 17. Opening October 29.
Why: Winner of the 2023 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (“oldest and largest playwriting prize honoring women+”) it manages to take on queer aging, capitalism, climate change, the apocalypse – and falling in love.
Related: Working Theater, the only professional theater in New York that’s by, for and about the working class, is celebrating its 40th season under a new artistic director (who I just interviewed to discuss plays about workers and working life, and who recommended Mantell’s play.)
Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!
What: Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins tries to buy Carmelita Tropicana from the performer who created this persona, Alina Troyano, in a piece that’s described as “part intergenerational debate about the legacy of “downtown” New York, part theatrical interrogation of the uses/abuses of nostalgia, real estate, “representation”, and the “avant-garde.” It’s co-written by Alina Troyano and stars Carmelita Tropicana.
When: October 23-December 1. Opening November 6.
Where: SoHo Rep
Why: I don’t entirely understand the description; I suspect I’ll be exasperated by this production, as I have been in the past by some of Jacobs-Jenkins’ most experimental work. But this is a playwright with a wide-ranging imagination and sophisticated understanding of American culture. When his plays work – as “Appropriate” did so astonishingly on Broadway last season – it drives home just how necessary it is for any serious theatergoer to catch whatever he’s working on. (Another one of his plays, “Purpose,” is set to open on Broadway in the Spring.)
Speaking of nostalgia: “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” is the last show at SoHo Rep’s 65-seat theater; they’re packing up after thirty-three years, and moving in temporarily with Playwrights Horizons.
TAMMY FAYE
Where: The Palace
What: A musical about the life and career of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker
When: First Preview: October 19, 2024. Opening: November 14, 2024
Why: The first Broadway musical by Elton John since “Billy Elliott” was hailed when it debuted in London two years ago as campy fun that also makes an effort to place the strange story in the context of the rise in influence and ugliness of the Christian Right. The much-praised Katie Brayben in the title role is making her Broadway debut.
GYPSY
Where: Broadway’s Majestic Theater
What:The sixth Broadway production of the 1959 musical by Jule Styne (music), Arthur Laurents (book) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) based on the biography of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, but focused on her stage mother Rose, which in this production is portrayed by Audra McDonald, the most celebrated stage actress of her generation.
When: First preview November 21. Opening December 19
Why: It’s Audra.
Related: Divas dominate the Fall season, former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in the second Broadway revival of SUNSET BOULEVARD; Patti LuPone vs. Mia Farrow in THE ROOMMATE; Megan Hilty vs.Jennifer Simard in the musical adaptation of the movie DEATH BECOMES HER
