Below is a selection of theater opening* in New York in November, including six shows on Broadway, all of them musicals — two of them about the well-known real-life Americans Tammy Faye Bakker/Messner and Louis Armstrong, a third about little-known shipwrecked Americans, and the other three about fictitious immortal or non-human creatures. There is a similar mix beyond Broadway between the factual and the fantastical, with two Off-Broadway plays about future dystopias, and two autobiographical Off-Off Broadway shows about getting fired (one for being gay.) There is a play about the woman who in 17th century Japan created Kabuki drama, and the teacher in 2018 who was there during the mass shooting at the Parkland, Florida high school. Several true stories are told through puppetry.
I include a movie debuting on Netflix because it’s a filmed version of an August Wilson play that was recently on Broadway, featuring some of the same performers; as well as a free streaming of a play from the National Theater starring Michael Sheen.
The calendar below is organized chronologically by opening date*, or (if no official opening) first performance, but we must consider the dates subject to change, because, yes, COVID-19 is still around, and both it and theater are unpredictable.
Each title below is linked to a relevant website.
Color key: Broadway: Red 🟥.
Off Broadway: Blue 🟦.
Off Off Broadway: Green 🟩.
Digital or Hybrid Theater: Yellow 🟨
Theater festival: Orange 🟧.
Immersive and/or Site Specific: Silver ⬜️ .
Puppetry: Brown 🟫
Opera: Purple🟪
Concert: 🎶
Free of charge (or “pay what you can”) 🆓
For a look at the season as a whole, check out my Broadway 2024-2025 Season Preview Guide
November 1
🟫That Paradise Place (Abrons Arts Center)
An erotic puppet musical about the love, sex, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities, created by the Pussypaws puppet troupe.
Nov 1-2
🟫🟧The Scarecrow (La MaMa)
Anthony Michael Stokes traces the origins of the character from Oz to the lynching of an African-American man in the 1900s
Nov 1-3
🟫🟧Secrets History Remembers (La MaMa)
Evolve Puppets explores the culture of fear with a seven-foot-tall doll serving as the stage for a vaudeville act.
Nov 1-3
🟫🟧Kindred Widows (La MaMa)
A wordless portrait of a family at a dining room table, telling the story of a woman mute during the last 18 years of her life.
Nov 1-3
November 5
Election Day
November 7
🟦Walden (Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater)
In Amy Berryman’s play, Emmy Rossum and Zoë Winters portray twin sisters in the near future, who must choose between staying on Earth or pursuing a future in space, as humanity’s fate hangs in the balance.
Through November 24
🟫🟧The People Vs Nature (La MaMa)
Kevin Augustine tells the story of a death-row inmate in solitary confinement who reenacts a court trial based on true events, fighting to free a chimpanzee from medical captivity.
Nov 7 – 17
🟨Nye (National Theatre at Home)
Michael Sheen stars as Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan in this play by Tim Price about the British politician to lead the battle to create the National Health Service. This FREE streaming is presented by one of the leading theater companies in the world, and a pioneer of digital theater.
Nov 7 – 11
November 8
🟦Gatz
Elevator Repair Service’s eight-hour verbatim reading/dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby returns to The Public Theater. It’s the show that put this experimental company on the map.
Nov 1 – Dec 1
🟩Oud Player at the Tel (HERE)
In this play by Tom Block set in the foothills of Jerusalem in 1947, Amir, the unofficial leader of the small Palestinian village of Bayt Jiz, welcomes Melke, the patriarch of the arriving Jewish family, and they become fast friends. But their families do not withstand the winds of history.
November 8 – 24
November 10
🟦Strategic Love Play (Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater)
In this play by Miriam Battye, Heléne Yorke and Michael Zegen portray two strangers who meet after matching online, and, although the vibe is off, something is keeps them in their seats
November 1 – December 7
🟦Orson’s Shadow (Theater for the New City)
Austin Pendleton’s play, set in 1960s London, explores the complex dynamics between legendary figures Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Vivien Leigh as they clash during a theater production.
November 8 – December 1
🟩Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (SoHo Rep)
In this final production at the company’s longtime home in SoHo, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate) 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.”
October 23-December 1
November 11
🟥A WONDERFUL WORLD (Studio 54)
James Monroe Iglehart portrays jazz musician Louis Armstrong.
November 12
🟥MAYBE HAPPY ENDING (Belasco)
A new science-fiction musical about the developing relationship between two robots, portrayed by Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen
November 13
🟦Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists (BAM)
Set in a dystopic Portugal in 2028, this play by Tiago Rodrigues, Artistic Director of the Festival d’Avignon, centers around a Portuguese family that upholds a macabre tradition of killing fascists, challenging audiences to reflect on the complexities of democracy and violence.
November 13-17
🟩Communion (Cell Theater)
Matthew LaBanca’s solo show being fired as a teacher at a Catholic school when the church discovers that he married a man.
November 7 – 24
🟫The Harlem Doll Palace (Dixon Place)
In this play written by Alva Rogers inspired by a true story, an entire world exists behind the pink door of a three story Harlem brownstone, one created by Lenon Holder Hoyte, affectionately known as Aunt Len, the founder of a doll museum, whose dolls seek to keep her alive before the outside world can invoke its realities of life, ashes and dust.
November 13 – 17
November 14
🟥TAMMY FAYE (The Palace)
Elton John’s latest musical tells the life and career of televangelist Tammy Faye
🟦 King Lear (The Shed)
Kenneth Branagh plays the title role in a two-hour production of William Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the barbarous landscape of Ancient Britain.
Through December 15
🟦 Burnout Paradise (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
A hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe from the Australian company Pony Cam, four performers on moving treadmills perform an escalating series of tasks.
Nov 12 – Dec 1
🟦Okuni (Theater Row)
The story of the woman who, in 1603, defied societal norms and gender roles to create Kabuki theater. In Japanese with subtitles. Conceived and starring Ako, who recently performed in the TV series Shogun.
November 2 – 23
November 15
🟦Woman on a Ledge (Theater for the New City)
Harpist Rita Costanzi stars in her life story, based on her memoir and adapted by Hershey Felder, about her struggle to overcome the conflicts between her life and her art.
November 7 – 24, 2024
November 17
🟥ELF ( Marquis)
Grey Henson stars in this second Broadway revival of the musical adapted from the 2003 movie, this time with Grey Henson (Mean Girls, Shucked) starring as Buddy, a human raised by Santa’s elves, who learns about his origins and heads to New York City to meet his biological father.
November 9 – January 4
🟩Music City: A New Musical (Bedlam at West End Theater)
Two young singer songwriters try to catch a break in a rundown East Nashville neighborhood stricken with drug addiction and poverty.
Through December 1
November 19
🟥SWEPT AWAY (Longacre)
The musical by the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers tells the story of the crew of a whaling ship doing all they can to survive a shipwreck, much of it derived from the album “Mignonette.
November 21
🟥DEATH BECOMES HER (Lunt-Fontanne)
Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, Christopher Sieber, Michelle Williams star in a musical based on the 1992 darkly comic movie that starred Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, Goldie Hawn.and Isabella Rossellini. in which two long-time frenemies fight for the affections of the same man and drink a magic potion that promises eternal youth.
🟦We Are Your Robots (TFANA and Rattlestick at Polonsky Shakespeare Center)
Ethan Lipton’s musical is described as a “playfully analog journey through artificial intelligence and the human condition.” Lipton and his bandmates of 20 years play robots who’ve come to the theatre to answer the question, “What do humans want from their machines?
November 7 – December 8
🟦300 Paintings (Vineyard)
Is art a joke? In 2021, over the course of five intense and unpredictable months, Sydney, Australian comedian Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings, unknowingly documenting his mental states through an extended manic bipolar episode.
🟦The Blood Quilt (Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse)
Gathering at their childhood home off the coast of Georgia, four sisters meet to create a family quilt to honor their recently deceased mother, in this play by Katori Hall.
Through December 29
🟩Room 1214 (New Light Theater Project at 59e59)
A play by Michelle Kholos Brooks, Inspired by real interviews with a history teacher who experienced first-hand the mass shooting in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
November 15 – December 8
🟩Robert Will Show You The Door: Tales of Being Fired (La MaMa)
Susan Jeremy plays 15 characters in this solo show about her employment history.
November 21 – December 1
November 22
🟨The Piano Lesson (Netflix)
The August Wilson play about a family of storytellers haunted by ghosts of their enslaved ancestors, is directed by Malcolm Washington (Denzel Washington’s son) featuring several of the stars of the 2022 Broadway revival, including Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington (Malcolm’s brother.)
November 25
🟦The Merchant of Venice (Arlekin Players at CSC)
Shakespeare’s play adapted by Igor Golyak (who last brought us the Holocaust play Our Class), starring Richard Topol, TR Knight and Alexandra Silber
November 22 – December 22
November 26
🟦Welcome to the Big Dipper (York)
A musical based on the true story of the blizzard that saved The Big Dipper Inn in Niagara Falls, and brought two unlikely groups of lodgers together – a community of Amish folks and a busload of men in dresses.
Nov 21 – Dec 29
November 28
The 98th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
The Broadway contingent: Musical and dance performances from the casts of Broadway Death Becomes Her, Hell’s Kitchen and The Outsiders. Also appearing: Lea Salonga, Idina Menzel, Chicago’s Ariana Madix and Sebastián Yatra, & Juliet’s Charli D’Amelio, Drag: The Musical’s Joey McIntyre, playwright-actress Liza Colón-Zayas, The Temptations, New York City Ballet’s Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia, the North American tour company of Riverdance and — of course — the Radio City Rockettes.
*Opening Night
This selection of plays is organized chronologically by opening night, but includes the dates when a show’s run starts and ends (when available.)
Opening night is usually not the same as the first performance on Broadway and Off-Broadway (although it is the same for festivals and most Off-Off Broadway shows ) For Broadway and Off-Broadway, there is usually a “preview period” that can last days or weeks, sometimes months. But professional reviews are forbidden from being published until opening night, which is why I organize this calendar by opening night (when it exists and when I can find it) rather than first performance, as a way to support the continuing relevance of theater reviewing. (Shows that begin previews in November but don’t officially open until December will be featured in next month’s calendar.) Check out my essay: Broadway Opening Night. What It Means. How It’s Changed. 7 Facts to Clear Urp The Confusion and Crystallize the Outrage.
What Is Broadway 🟥, Off Broadway 🟦 and Off-Off Broadway🟩?
Off-Broadway theaters, by definition, have anywhere from 100 to 499 seats. If a theater has more seats than that, it’s a Broadway house. If it has fewer, it’s Off-Off Broadway. (There is a more sophisticated definition, having to do with contracts, and more elaborate distinctions, having to do with ticket prices, number and location of theaters, length of runs, willingness to take artistic risks, etc.)
(Several performing arts venues in New York City, such as The Shed, Little Island, Park Avenue Armory, NYU Skirball and the Perelman Performing Arts Center, technically exist outside these classifications; I list them as Off-Broadway, even though, for most shows, they have more than 500 seats.)
