Below is a calendar of New York theater opening* in July, featuring some familiar crowdpleasers, such as two one-night only concerts, of “Waitress” and “A Chorus Line,” and a starry “Heathers,” with Back to the Future’s Casey Likes and &Juliet’s Lorna Courtney. Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner are portrayed in a play Off-Broadway, and Broadway favorite Betsy Wolfe stars in a new musical about a woman who invented a mop.
There is also a brand new theater festival previewing a dozen shows that will preview at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this summer, and a new epic called Memnon. Many of the offerings this month (including Waitress and Memnon) are outdoors, and free. (The Delacorte Theater in Central Park is reopening this summer — but in August.)
The calendar below is organized chronologically by opening date*, or first performance, but we must consider the dates subject to change, thanks to the continuing vagaries of COVID-19, and the normal challenges and serendipity of live theater.
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/site-specific: Silver ⬜️ . Concert 🎶 Puppetry: Brown 🟫 Opera: Purple🟪 Outdoors:🌲Free (or “choose what you pay”) 🆓
July 2
🆓🌲All’s Well That Ends Well (New York Classical Theatre at Battery Park)
“One of Shakespeare’s boldest romantic comedies revolves around Helena, whom the king grants the right to choose her own husband. But love isn’t so simple, and she must use wit, courage, and a daring plan to win the life she desires.
July 2 – 6
July 3
🟩🟫Vape Kids Cool Zone (The Brick)
A fascist brainwashing program disguised as a public access children’s TV show. When this was at the Exponential festival in January, I called it “largely an entertaining, homemade homage to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”
July 3 – 12
July 5
🆓🌲Memnon (Classical Theatre of Harlem at Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, Marcus Garvey Park)
Will Powers’ play with music resurrects the story of tthe Ethiopian king and demigod who rides to Troy’s defense.
July 5 – 27
July 7
🟧Hot Festival (Dixon Place)
NYC’s oldest all-inclusive LGBTQIA+ festival
July 7 – 25
July 8
🌲Gospel At Colonus (Little Island)
Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Public Obscenities) directs this revival of Lee Breuer’s African-American musical version of Sophocles’s tragedy about Oedipus. My review of a previous production.
July 8 – 26
July 10
🟦Heathers the Musical (New World Stages)
Based on the 1989 film, the musical stars Lorna Courtney(who originated the title role in &Juliet) as Veronica Sawyer, just another nobody at Westerberg High, where popularity is a matter of life and death, until she’s taken under the wings of The Heathers, three beautiful and impossibly cruel classmates all named Heather. Casey Likes (Almost Famous, Back to the Future) co-stars as Jason Dean, with Kerry Butler (Beetlejuice, Mean Girls) as both Veronica’s mom and the guidance counselor Ms. Fleming.
June 22 – January 25
July 12
🟦Open (WP Theater)
In Crystal Skillman’s play, Megan Hill portrays a woman called The Magician, who appears to pantomime a myriad of tricks, but there’s no illusion. Her act reveals she is attempting the impossible—to save the life of her lover, Jenny. The clock is ticking, the show must go on, and, as impossible as it may seem, this Magician’s act may be our last hope against a world filled with intolerance and hate.
July 8 – 22
🆓🌲Richard II (Boomerang Theater Company in Central Park)
Aimee Todoroff directs the production of Shakespeare’s play about a monarch whose impulsiveness and whim threaten to divide the great houses of England into a civil war that will last 100 years.
July 12,13,19,20
July 14
🟧EdFest (The Tank)
The first annual festival of a dozen shows (two a night) that will have runs at the Edinburgh Fringe festival this summer
July 14 – 20
July 17
🆓🌲A Midsummers Night Dream (The Drilling Company’s Shakespeare in the Parking Lot)
For the Drilling Company’s thirtieth season, Shakespeare’s tale of love and enchantment takes place in a parking lot on the Lower East Side that is transformed into both woodland and Fairyland.
July 17 – August 2
July 18
🟦Transgression (HERE)
In this play by Terry Curtis Fox directed by her daughter Avra Fox-Lerner, a widow reconsiders her marriage after she discovers a portfolio of photographs by her late husband that she considers of great artistic worth and emotional intensity — nudes of a woman who was then underage. Now grown, the subject of the photographs demands they be destroyed.
July 10 – August 2
July 20
🟦Joy: A New True Musical ( Laura Pels)
Betsy Wolfe portrays trailblazing businesswoman and inventor Joy Mangano, who brought into the world the self-wringing Miracle Mop and other cleaning products
June 21 – August 17
July 23
🆓🌲Waitress (Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park)
Deaf Broadway, a five-year-old company made up of Deaf performers, gives a live staging in American Sigh Language of the musical Waitress by Sara Bareilles and Jessie Nelson, with direction by Sandra Mae Frank (a performer in the Broadway revival of Spring Awakening.) Unlike past practices, the cast will not be performing in front of a film version of the musical, but rather just accompanied by a recording of the music
🟦Girls Will Be Girls (Signature)
In this play by Claire Mack, three college girls violently reclaim their virginity over one unhinged night, fueled by pink liquor and a boy in just a Speedo. The cast features Charlie Foster (Jodie’s kid) and Luna Sofía Miranda, who is making her stage debut following her breakout role as Lulu in this year’s Oscar-winning Best Picture, Anora.
July 17 – September 7
🟦Ginger Twinsies (Orpheum)
A parody of the 1998 Lindsay Lohan film, The Parent Trap, in which a pair of long lost, red-headed twin girls unexpectedly meet at sleep-away camp and hatch a plan to reunite their estranged parents.
July 10 – October 26
🟦🎶Rolling Thunder (New World Stages)
This “concert-theater hybrid” revisits the era of the Vietnam War, integrating live performance with more than 20 tracks from the 1960s and 70s, including “Gimme Shelter,” “Born to Be Wild,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
July 10 – September 7
July 24
🆓🌲The Lady from the Sea ((Hudson Classical Theater Company at Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Riverside Park),
This adaptation by Susan Lee of the play by Henrik Ibsen tells the story of a woman torn between her marriage and a past love connected to the sea.
July 24 – August 17
July 27
🎶A Chorus Line (Shubert Theater)
The 50th anniversary concert, benefitting Entertainment Community Fund programs serving dancers, will star original 1975 Broadway cast members Kelly Bishop, Wayne Cilento, Baayork Lee (who’s directing the concert), Priscilla Lopez and Donna McKechnie, with special performances by Charlotte d’Amboise (Chicago), Jessica Lee Goldyn (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), Robyn Hurder (SMASH), Francis Jue (Yellowface), Krysta Rodriguez (SMASH), Jessica Vosk (Hell’s Kitchen), Anthony Wayne (Tina: The Tina Turner Musical), Tony Yazbeck (Flying Over Sunset) and Leigh Zimmerman (Olivier Award Winner.
🟦Gene & Gilda (Penguin Rep at 59e59)
A play by Cary Gitter and Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner, comic actors who fell in love
July 23 – September 7
July 29
🟦Well, I’ll Let You Go (The Space at Irondale)
This new play by Bubba Weiler stars Quincy Tyler Bernstine in a portrait of a woman and a community in crisis
July 29 – August 29
July 30
🌲The Tune Up (Little Island’s Amph)
Suzan-Lori Parks and her nine-piece band blends short plays and music in a piece, directed by The Flea’s Niegel Smith, and described as “a Punk-Couture Medicine Show for the People,” which doesn’t help much, but if it’s anything like her Plays for the Plague Year, I’m in.
July 30 – August 3
🆓🌲Eugene Onegin (Little Island’s Glade)
Rachel Chavkin directs Sarah Gancher’s new bluegrass take on Tchaikovsky’s classic opera, based on the novel by Pushkin about a selfish dandy who lives to regret his rejection of a young woman’s love.
July 30 – 31
*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.
Check out my article: What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.
