Below is a day-by-day calendar of selected theater opening* this month in New York, including three starry plays on Broadway: A solo turn by Daniel Radcliffe (opening March 12), a British import led by John Lithgow (March 23), and a gritty movie adaptation featuring The Bear’s Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (March 30.)
All the musicals opening in March are Off-Broadway.
Daniel Radcliffe is not the only solo performer in March. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Wallace Shawn and Anthony Rapp are among those starring in one-person shows, Off and Off-Off Broadway.
The month is full of classics, mostly reimagined — two new versions of “Antigone,” an adaptation of “Hamlet” in Spanish (with English subtitles), and Alexander Molochnikov’s comic account of his fraught attempt to stage Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” — as well as productions of Chekhov’s rarely produced first full-length play, and Patrick Page in Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy.
There are also several exciting new plays, including one for the general theatergoing public performed in American Sign Language (March 13.)
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 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 ⬜️ .
Puppetry: Brown 🟫 Opera: Purple🟪 Concert 🎶 Out of Town 🇺🇸 Free or pay what you can 🆓
March 1
🟦Night Side Songs (Lincoln Center Theater)
In this folk musical drawn from true stories and inspired by Susan Sontag’s insight that “illness is the night side of life,” the musical theater duo The Lazours (“We Live in Cairo“) explore how individuals across the healthcare spectrum—patients, caregivers, and medical professionals—experience the emotional and interpersonal impact of illness. The five-member cast includes Robin de Jesus and Mary Tests.
February 14 – March 29
🟦Big Foot (MTC at New York City Center)
A musical comedy about an eight-foot-tall teen navigating small-town paranoia and politics. Amber Ruffin, Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jason Tam.
February 11 – April 5
🟫⬜️Footnotes (La MaMa)
An immersive multi-media puppetry performance designed and directed by Theodora Skipitares about the history, power and poetry of walking, including famous walkers Aristotle who taught his lessons while walking, Henry Thoreau, Virginia Woolf and Mahatma Gandhi. The audience itself has to walk to several spaces within the theater, each member guided by a small booklet of instructions and interactive stories.
Feb 27 – March 15,
March 3
🟦Blood/Love (Theater 555)
A pop opera about a vampire co-written and starring Carey Sharpe.
February 13 – March 29
Four performers mount treadmills. What begins as a simple wager between performer and audience, becomes a thrilling attempt to complete a series of escalating tasks that challenge the performers’ spirits, bodies, and minds
March 5
🟦Burnout Paradise (Astor Place Theater)
Created by the Australian theater collective Pony Cam, which claims it to be “the longest running show in NYC” — which is false, but I think they’re attempting a pun — four performers mount treadmills to complete a series of escalating tasks.
February 18 – June 28, 2026
🟦What We Did Before Our Moth Days (Greenwich House Theater)
A new play by Wallace Shawn, directed by his “My Dinner with Andre” co-star Andre Gregory, that tells the story of a long-running extramarital affair in a series of monologues from the points of view of mother, father, son, and father’s mistress, portrayed by Josh Hamilton, John Early, Maria Dizzia and Hope Davis. (On Sundays and Mondays through April 26, Shawn himself also performs at the same theater in his 1990 play “The Fever”)
February 4 to May 10
🟧 🟫Special Effects Festival 2026 (The Wild Project)
The three-day annual festival, which began in 2014 but has been on hiatus, begins with “The Object Has a Pulse – A Night of Puppetry Curated by Amanda Card”
March 5 – 7
March 6
🟧Ahoradespués (IATI)
Argentine playwright Guido Zappacosta’s solo show delves into the intimate terrain where love, loss, and imagination collide. In Spanish with English surtitles. Part of Teatro Fest 2026
March 6 -15
🟧Micro Theater 2026 (The Clemente)
The eighteenth annual edition, with five 15-minute plays in Spanish with English subtitles: A mother’s relentless search for her disappeared son in Voy a Volver a Llamar; two young women hiding their love during revolutionary Cuba in Los Ojos de Cuba; two strangers discovering unexpected connection at a cliff’s edge in En el Borde; a luminous migrant’s fable told through magical objects in El Conejo y el Cazador; and a paranoid philosophy professor whose romantic dinner spirals into hilarious chaos in El Profesor de Filosofía. Part of Teatro Fest 2026
March 6 – 8
🟦 Mexodus (Daryl Roth Theater)
A restaging of Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson’s two-man musical about the little-known history of Mexico as a refuge for thousands of escaping American slaves before the Civil War. My review of Mexodus at the MInetta Lane in October.
March 6 – May 17
March 8
🟦Zack (Mint Theater at Theater Row)
In Harold Brighouse’s play written in 1916, Zachariah Munning’s calculating mother and cold-blooded brother mistake his natural sweetness for dimness and plan to sacrifice Zack in a scheme soak a visiting rich relative.
Feb 21 – March 28
🟦Spare Parts (Theater Row)
Rob McClure stars in David J. Glass’s play about a billionaire seeking immortality who funds anti-aging research, destabilizing relationships and eroding ethical boundaries within the research team
February 26 – April 10
🟦About Time (Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater)
A musical revue “about life, love and laughter in your third act” from David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr’ whose 71 years of collaboration have included two previous revues “Starting Here, Starting Now” and “Closer Than Ever“
February 27 to April 5
March 9
🆓Control (Working Theater)
In the public reading of this play by Kallan Dana, a group of understaffed and overworked air traffic controllers push tin and stave off paranoia.
one night only
March 11
🟦 Bughouse (Vineyard)
Performance artist John Kelly stars in the story of outsider artist Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor whose extraordinary body of paintings and writings was only fully discovered after his death. “Bughouse” is directed by Martha Clarke and adapted by Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) based on Darger’s own writings.
February 26 – March 29
🟦Antigone this play I read in high school (Public Theater)
Written by Anna Ziegler and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, the play follows a fiercely independent young woman determined to control her own body in a kingdom ruled by archaic laws that regulate women’s autonomy. The starry cast includes Celia Keenan-Bolger as the chorus and Tony Shalhoub as Creon.
February 26 – March 29
🟩This is Real (Target Margin)
Inspired by the work of Jean Genet, performers enact fantasies of American power while an insurrection rages just outside. “Nudity. Flag Burning. Drones. This is a patriotic play.”
March 1 – April 5, 2026
March 12
🟥 Every Brilliant Thing (Hudson Theater)
Daniel Radcliffe stars in this solo play, co-written and co-directed by Duncan Macmillan and first produced in 2013, about a boy who begins writing a list of ‘everything worth living for’ to cheer up his suicidal mom. In my review of the play Off-Broadway (with a different cast) I found it a funny, fun and moving show
February 21 – May 24
🟫La MaMa Puppet Slam (La MaMa)
A dozen “condensed” works of puppetry
March 12 – 15
March 13
🟦Trash (Out of the Box at PACNYC)
A play written by James Caverly and Andrew Morrill, two Deaf theater artists, which they perfom almost entirely in American Sign Language as two roommates who are polar opposites even when it comes to taking out the trash.
March 7 – 28
March 14
🟩Plan C (Hook and Eye Theater at The Tank)
This devised play looks at rebellion in two different eras: In 1620 Brussels, imperial postmistress Alexandrine Von Taxis moves more than mail through the empire’s hands during The Thirty Years’ War. In present-day West Virginia, Charley Gibson runs her family’s hardware store, where lockers conceal more than tools. As 17th-century espionage collides with a small-town network, PLAN C exposes how rebellion takes shape.
March 12 – April 12
March 17
🟦Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes (Minetta Lane Theater)
An encore presentation of the play starring Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty. My review of the play last May.
March 17-April 30)
March 18
🎶 The Wild Party (Encores at New York City Center)
BOOP star Jasmine Amy Rogers and Tina star Adrienne Warren return to the stage as best friends and rivals in this musical occurring at night in the dark underbelly of the city at the end of the 1920s. Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe bring Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 poem to life in a jazz-infused musical adaptation.
March 18 – 29
March 19
🟩Touch (East Village Basement)
In this solo play by Kenny Finkle, Anthony Rapp stars as Syd Blatter, a gay, middle-aged failed writer and burnt-out 5th grade teacher whose life is upended when a meeting with a former student forces him down a rabbit hole of anxiety, regret and desire
March 14-29
🟦 Monte Cristo (York at Theater at St. Jean)
A starry adaptation of the Alexander Dumas swashbuckler by Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner, with a cast that includes Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis, and Karen Ziemba
🟦Tru (House of the Redeemer)
Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Take Me Out, “Modern Family”) will star as Truman Capote in the first New York revival of the solo play by Jay Presson Allen,drawn entirely from Capote’s own words, and directed by Rob Ashford, Capote is alone in his New York apartment in December 1975, rreeling from a crisis that cost him the elite social circle he adored
March 6 – April 12
🟩 Ivanov (New American Ensemble at West End Theater)
Anton Chekhov’s first full-length play about the unraveling of a once-idealistic young man and its effect on his community.
March 11 – April 5, 2026
🟩Stories from the Brink (SoHo Playhouse)
The seventh solo show by Iris Bahr (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Hacks, Friends) is ‘ journey through her near death adventures”
March 18 – April 3
March 20
🟦Jesa (Ma-Yi at the Public)
In Jeena-Yi’s playwriting debut, four estranged Korean American sisters reunite in Orange County to perform their father’s Jesa—a traditional ritual honoring the dead. Old wounds erupt, secrets surface, and ghosts (literal and emotional) refuse to stay buried.
March 10 – April 5
March 23
🟥Giant (Music Box Theater)
John Lithgow stars in this play by Mark Rosenblatt children’s book author Roald Dahl on a day in 1983 when he is accused of being an antisemite because of his review of a picture book about the Israeli army’s siege of West Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War.
March 11 – June 28
🟩Antigone in Analysis (Peculiar Theater Works at La MaMa ETC)
Bianca Leigh (Oh, Mary) as Jocasta and Alessandra Lopez as Antigone star in Barbara Barclay’s reimagining of Sophocles’ classic as a feminist fever dream.
March 20 – April 5
🟧Petra (ID Studio Theater)
Written by Camilo Vergara, Petra returns to New York for her father’s funeral, expecting a brief visit, but a search for meaning leads her to take a job at a juvenile correctional facility. The play was born out of the theater research into the now-shuttered Spofford Juvenile Detention Centerin Hunts Point. It is in English and part of Teatro Fest 2026
long weekends March 27 – April 19
March 25
🟦Public Charge (Public Theater)
The play, co-written by former United States Ambassador Julissa Reynoso, chronicles her experiences working with scores of other dedicated public servants to deploy humanitarian aid to an earthquake-ravaged Haiti, navigate the roiling politics of immigration, confront the reality of international espionage, and free a wrongly imprisoned American from a Cuban prison.
March 12 – April 5
🟦Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet (TFANA)
Chela De Ferrari wrote and directs this adaptation performed in Spanish with with English supertitles, intertwining the text of Shakespeare’s tragedy with the lived experiences of an ensemble of eight actors with Down syndrome.
March 25 – April 4
March 29
🟦No Singing in the Navy (Playwrights Horizons)
Milo Cramer’s attack on the “golden age” of musicals with a piano and three actors portraying three silly sailors with a hundred bucks in hand and 24 hours on leave live as much life as they possibly can before getting shipped off to war and certain death.
March 18 – April 19
🟦Titus Andronicus (Red Bull at Signature)
Patrick Page plays the title character in Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy about the chaos of a corrupt and crumbling empire.
March 17 – April 19
March 30
🟥Dog Day Afternoon (August Wilson Theater)
Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, best-known now for their roles in the TV show “The Bear,” star in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ adaptation of the 1975 Al Pacino movie, based on a true story, about a bank robbery that results in a hostage situation, and takes an unusual turn.
🟦Seagull: True Story (Public Theater)
A remounting of last year’s production of 33-year-old Russian dissident director Alexander Molochnikov’s biting satiric account of his attempt to stage Chekhov’s The Seagull, and his leaving Russia after opposing the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
March 22 – April 26
*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 shows in 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 in March but don’t officially open until April will be listed in next month’s calendar.)
Check out my article: What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.
