The affordability crisis, fascism, Artificial Intelligence, America’s 250th birthday: As 2026 begins, the theater is not immune to the large questions about what is happening in the country and the city at large, even as the theater community may also be wondering about more short-term matters (which shows in the Broadway Spring 2026 season will be hits, which misses?)
The ten questions below are mostly provoked by the issues, trends and events that stuck out in 2025.
I’ve asked a different set of questions about the forthcoming year in theater every New Year’s Day since 2020, using the same illustration each time: “Enclosing The Theatre At Besancon France,” an engraving made in 1847 by Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806.) This year I’ve affixed to it the official logo of America250, the non-profit created in support of the bipartisan commission (the Semiquincentennial Commission) set up to coordinate the celebrations surrounding the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. If some might see the addition of the logo as a form of vandalism, that may feel to some like an apt reflection of what they fear will be happening to theater in 2026.
1. Will the affordability agenda extend to the theater?
Zohran Mamdani has become mayor of New York City largely because he campaigned to address the “affordability crisis,” promising to make the buses free, offer free universal childcare, and freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments while building more affordable housing.
His talk of an affordability crisis has not explicitly extended to the arts. But there is no question that all stakeholders in New York theater are facing a financial squeeze.
“The affordability crisis for artists has reached a breaking point,” declares Creative New York, a recent report by the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank. Since the pandemic, the report found, the high cost of city life has resulted in a four percent decrease in the city’s resident artist population, including an eight percent drop in actors and an 18.8 percent decline in dancers.
Theatergoers are being charged such high ticket prices, and not just on Broadway, according to the report, that “live performance has shifted from a regular part of city life to an occasional luxury.”
Theater companies, as well as other cultural institutions, are struggling to survive: “Nearly 50 theaters, music clubs, museums, and galleries have shuttered since 2020, many pointing to lasting changes in audience behavior, soaring insurance costs, and other unsustainable operating pressures.”
The report includes ten recommendations to address the affordability crisis in the arts head on. The first is already a central part of Mayor Mamdani’s agenda — taking concrete steps to reign in the cost of building housing for everybody (The report details a number of specific actions to achieve this, such as “streamlining permitting and environmental review processes” and “strengthening preservation tools to stabilize the city’s existing affordable housing”) Among the other suggestions: creating 5,000 artist-preference housing units by 2030; launching NYC’s first five-borough cultural festival; establishing a pooled insurance program for venues and cultural nonprofits.
Is Zamdani listening? To ask the larger, longer-term question, which was a headline in the New York Times that wrote about the Creative New York report: With Prices Soaring, Can New York Survive as a Mecca for the Arts?
2. How will Broadway be shaped by the high costs of putting on a show?
The alarm went out in article after article:
The Broadway Musical is in Trouble (NYTimes, September 22, 2025):“Since the coronavirus pandemic, 46 new musicals have opened on Broadway, costing about $800 million to bring to the stage, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Only three have become profitable so far.”
Broadway costs add up for producers. But on stage, the show must go on (CNN, December 20, 2025) “…Broadway musicals are now struggling to make a profit, as affordability concerns impact all aspects of American life. Musical producers can place the blame on rising costs from theater rent, fees, labor and even lumber, which has roughly doubled in price since December 2016. Meanwhile, ticket prices haven’t risen quickly enough to offset these costs.”
Broadway Meltdown: 2026 Set to be Theatre’s Worst Year in Decades? (Instinct Magazine, Dec 29)
“As I’m hearing it, investing in a new Broadway musical is no longer risky — it’s stupid,” a veteran producer said bluntly. “People want returns. Broadway isn’t delivering them.”
As of this writing, there are only six musicals scheduled for the Spring 2026 Broadway season – exactly half the number that opened in the Spring 2025 Broadway season. (Of the dozen musicals that opened from February to April in 2025, only three are still running.)
Will the prominent box office flops of some promising musicals make producers too gun-shy to take the risk? Can Off-Broadway be the source of new, creative musical theater?
3. How will theater be affected by America’s 250th birthday celebrations?
Two agencies were created to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of America: A bipartisan U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission supported by the non-profit America250, was put together back in 2016. But a presidential executive order at the beginning of 2025 created a separate White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday.
President Trump’s grandiose plans for the birthday and beyond — a National Garden of American Heroes, a gilded ballroom in the White House, an arch mimicking the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (an Arc de Triump?) – wouldn’t seem at first glance to have any impact on what theater is produced in New York. But during a seminar just weeks after the 2024 presidential election, Nina Ozlu Tunceli, the executive director of the Americans for the Arts Action Fund, advised theaters and other arts groups who wanted federal grants to tailor their proposals to the new administration’s priorities – nothing that even hints at “diversity, equity and inclusion” and anything that celebrates the 250th anniversary (emphasis on celebrate.)
This leads to a larger question:
4. What are the next battles in the federal war on culture and the arts?
Near the beginning of 2025, President Donald Trump took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, replacing its staff leadership and board with loyalists, installing himself as chairman, and vowing to get rid of “woke” programming, He designated himself both selector-in-chief and host of the televised Kennedy Center Honors. By the end of the year, Trump’s hand-picked board voted to change the name of the institution to the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts
What’s been done to the Kennedy Center is just the most visible example of the coarsening of culture and the direct threats to free expression. Unlike Kennedy, Trump is no real friend to the arts. The Trump administration’s first proposed federal budget eliminated funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides funding for both PBS and NPR.
The NEA rescinded grants to a wide range of arts organizations, such as $60,00 to the Classical Theatre of Harlem and required that applicants for NEA grants agree that they “not promote gender ideology.”
There has been significant backlash and pushback. Artists have canceled performances at the Kennedy Center, attendance has plummeted, the televised Kennedy Center Honors had their lowest-ever ratings. Congress rejected the Trump Administration’s proposed elimination of the quartet of popular cultural agencies. A federal judge ruled the ban on “gender ideology” to be unconstitutional.
The war is not over. It seems likely to escalate.
5. Will theater play a role in the resistance against authoritarian rule?
The Trump administration’s war on culture and the arts is not even mentioned in the end-of-year roundups I read of the Trump Administration’s extensive “changes to policy, politics and society,” — to put it neutrally. (which many articles don’t: “Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful”) “There is so much from which to choose,” Susan B Glasser points out in the New Yorker, adding that “the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen” — the “craven folding to Trump” by big law firms, network television, high-tech companies, and universities, as well as retailers, corporations and financial institutions that scaled back or eliminated efforts at diversity.
There was an organized resistance to the moves toward authoritarian rule, most noticeably the massive No Kings demonstrations.
And one might have seen several theatrical productions as a direct response, such as the Mint production of “Crooked Cross,” a 1935 play about the rise of Nazism. Even Dylan Mulvaney’s solo show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World, along with an all-trans “Drowsy Chaperone” at Carnegie Hall felt like a response to the standard authoritarian playbook of scapegoating a minority: When the government is denying a group’s existence, what better strategy than to become more visible? This is why one might see a sign of resistance in the forthcoming April transfer to Broadway of “CATS: A Jellicle Ball,” which populates Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical with a voguing ballroom full of LGBTQ characters.
In American Theatre Magazine, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho offered a lyrical survey of How to Survive a Dictatorship, the Theater Artist’s Way: Stories of resistance from 20th century theater makers around the world. Will any of them inspire American theater makers in 2026?
6. How will the relationship with Hollywood evolve?
Hollywood presented a palpable presence on New York stages last year. There were the Broadway debuts of A-list actors like George Clooney and Keanu Reeves, and the return of many more. There were the usual stage adaptions of screen properties. But there were also some new developments – the movie studio A24 launching its newly owned Cherry Lane Theater, which it touts as the birthplace of Off-Broadway, and Hugh Jackman started his own Off-Broadway theater company, called Together., along with high-powered producer Sonia Friedman, the point of which seems to be to offer intimate theater at an affordable price, judging from their first two plays at Minetta Lane Theater.
7. Will “Masquerade” survive, and inspire a renaissance in immersive theater in New York?
For a good eight years after Punchdrunk brought “Sleep No More,” a site-specific, immersive version of “Macbeth,” to a six-story converted warehouse in Chelsea in 2011, there was a constant stream of theater pieces in New York that at least called themselves immersive. That dried up, along with all in-person theater, during the pandemic shutdown, and when “Sleep No More” closed at the beginning of 2025, its producers proclaimed ““It’s the end of an era.”
But by then, “Life and Trust,” another massive site-specific immersive theater piece, offering a version of the Faust story, had opened in six floors of a converted bank building near Wall Street. That show closed abruptly in April, after nine months. But a few months later, “Masquerade” opened in a six-story converted art supply story on West 57th Street, offering an immersive, site-specific version of “The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history. There is still an audience for immersive theater. Is it big enough to sustain a single (costly) show over the long haul, and will it inspire other such shows to follow?
8. How much innovation will there be in New York theater?
The question hovers now that the generational transition of artistic directors is just about complete. To take the examples just of the four non-profit theater companies that own Broadway theaters: Nicki Hunter became the new artistic director of Manhattan Theatre Club in 2025, succeeding Lynne Meadow (who had been in charge for 53 years), as did Lear deBessonet from Andre Bishop (33 years) at Lincoln Center Theater, Evan Cabnet took over from Carole Rothman (45 years) at Second Stage in 2024 , Christopher Ashley will take over Roundabout this year.
How open will they be to innovations in technology and in storytelling that are now happening, often under the radar (including at New York’s experimental theater festivals in January like Under the Radar), but all over the world? I learned of a wide range of new approaches in 2025 during an eye-opening trip for theater in Malta and a life-altering attendance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as in newly published books such as “The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World” in which Charles Melcher describes some 50 examples of what he calls “living stories” which he describes as “participatory, multisensory, interactive and highly personal.”
9. Who and what will drive the conversation about theater?
This is a question I ask every year. The answer seems uncertain whenever a long-time professional theater critic leaves their post – Peter Marks from the Washington Post in 2023, Jesse Green as chief theater critic of the New York Times in 2025. Theater lovers then anxiously ask: Will they even be replaced, or will the newspaper go without a critic?
As it turns out, both newspapers hired new critics. But the uncertainty was understandable. It is clear to anybody paying attention that the contempt by too many in the theater community for the role of professional theater criticism is taking its toll. When he retired, Marks wrote: “I feel like a character in an existential play by Tom Stoppard: relinquishing an endangered job in a struggling business that covers a gasping industry…”
Each year, theater producers and publicists work to make opening night more and more meaningless. Given that this is the night that reviews come out, the result is the continuing, deliberate devaluing of professional theater criticism. (What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.) A couple of Broadway productions in 2025 had the audacity to announce they were not open to reviews. Even two former theater critics have weighed in against the value of criticism in novels published in 2025, (“The problem with being a critic ,” one wrote, “is that eventually you realize you aren’t saying anything anymore. You’re just an idiot responsible for filling a space in the paper with words, the only point of which is to be printed next to some advertising. And reviews are often just advertising too. .”)
I responded in my review to that claim with an excerpt from an essay by Richard Brody, In Defense of the Traditional Review. who sees reviews as the opposite of advertising – as “consumer protection,” quoting Pauline Kael that without critics “there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers” Arts criticism, he wrote “is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future.” Without an informed critic’s “confrontation with individual works,” there is only “a nonaesthetic approach that puts art before readers as a curiosity, as a set of talking points rather than as a form of personal experience.”
If I often feel actively discouraged from continuing as a theater critic, there is a new critical generation and new platforms– Substacks and podcasts (and Substack podcasts – one in which Peter Marks is co-host ) and TikTok channels. And there are still even a few old-school theater blogs that regularly run theater reviews, including this one.
10. Will 2026 become The Year of the Theater Kid?
In 2025, “theater kid” became an insult used by right-win politicians and commentators in their attacks those with whom they disagreed politically, such as Zohran Mamdani.
“Mr. Mamdani, a former improv student, actually is a theater fan. But he’s not the only target,” wrote Sopan Deb in an article in the New York Times,. Deb (who identifies himself in a bio as “a former theater kid turned playwright.”) quotes a Republican strategist as explaining the use of“theater kids” pejoratively as a shorthand of tagging opponents as dramatic and performative. But he also quotes several theater artists and scholars in defense of theater kids.
Matt Rodin, the star of “Beau the Musical,” devoted a thoughtful 1,300-word post in his Substack Fourth Wall, aiming “to separate the stereotype from the skillset. The punchline from the practice. “
“Being a theatre kid, at its heart, is an attunement to attention. It’s understanding how rooms work. How energy shifts. How timing changes the way something lands..”
He entitled his post The Year of the “Theatre Kid” and cited one piece of evidence after another for his claim (“Jonathan Bailey being named People’s Sexiest Man Alive.”)
Given all this reaction to the insults – and that there were not one but two recent memoirs using that phrase for their titles, (one spelling it theater, the other theatre) – will theater kids past and present wear the label with pride, and turn 2026 truly into (without questioning or quotation marks) The Year of The Theater Kid
