Below is a day-by-day calendar of selected theater opening* this month in New York, including thirteen shows on Broadway, six musicals and seven plays, bursting with stars, many making their Broadway debuts. Sample:Adrien Brody, Don Cheadle, Taraji P. Henson, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez.
Eight of the thirteen Broadway shows opening in April are revivals; the five “original” shows include three adapted from a movie or TV series.
Beyond Broadway, there are some scorchers (at least three about crime), a couple of annual festivals, a new play by John Patrick Shanley, Hiran Abeysekera as a happy Hamlet, the latest political puppet show, and the revival of a play about an awkward first date — which mirrors a first date on Broadway that goes horribly wrong, and is the first to open on Broadway in April.
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 🆓
April 1
🟧🟨 New York City Fringe Festival (five venues: UNDER St Marks and Wild Project in the East Village; the Chain Mainstage and Studio in Midtown and The Rat NYC in DUMBO)
There are seventy-five shows scheduled, with up to five performances apiece, in this festival that began in 2007 as FRIGID, but changed its name in 2023 to capitalize on the appeal of the fringe label. (The original, separate New York International Fringe Festival ran from 1997 to 2019.) The shows are not juried but chosen by lottery; quality varies, to put it mildly. On the other hand, most have running times of 60 minutes or less and tickets priced as low as $7. Many are also available as a live stream online. My preview of this year’s festival.
April 1 – April 19
April 6
🟥Becky Shaw (Second Stage’s Hayes Theater)
Written by Gina Gionfriddo and directed by Trip Cullman, the Broadway debut of the 2008 comedy, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is about the ramifications of a blind date spiraling spectacularly off the rails. Patrick Ball (from The Pitt), Madeline Brewer and Alden Ehrenreich are making their Broadway debuts in the production, which also stars Lauren Patten and Linda Emon.
March 18 – June 14
🟦The Pushover (Chain Theater)
Rebecca De Mornay stars in John Patrick Shanley’s play about three bad-ass women who collide and collude at a spa in New Mexico, and a bare-bones Asian restaurant in Queens.
April 3 – 26
April 7
🟥Cats: The Jellicle Ball (Broadhurst)
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats reimagined for queer Ballroom Culture . It made a splash in 2024 at PACNYC . My review of that production. The cast, featuring Andre De Shields and some of them veterans of the Ballroom scene, is largely intact in its transfer to Broadway
🟦Scorched Earth (St Ann’s Warehouse)
Irish-born Luke Murphy’s dance-theater piece inspired by John B. Keane’s play The Field imagines a detective reopening a cold case of an unsolved crime twelve years after the fact.
April 3 – 19
April 9
🟥Death of a Salesman (Winter Garden Theater)
Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf star in the seventh Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s 1949 Tony- and Pulitzer-winning modern tragedy, directed by Joe Mantello.
March 6 – June 1.
🟦Off the Record: Acts of Restorative Justice (HERE)
When the American Criminal Justice System holds all the cards, one woman decides to question the game itself. Along the way, she enlists the audience in helping her fight against the forces of capital. A “theatrical intervention” created by James Scruggs in collaboration with national criminal justice advocate Thomas Giovanni
April 5 – 19
April 12
🟥Titanique (St. James Theater)
Marla Mindelle stars in and co-wrote this Broadway transfer of the jukebox musical using the music of Celine Dion to spoof “Titanic,” which was a popular show Off-Broadway.
March 26-July 12
April 14
🟦The Adding Machine (The New Group at Theater at St. Clements)
Daphne Rubin-Vega stars in Elmer L. Rice’s 1923 satire as Mr. Zero, who is replaced by a machine, prompting him to lash out violently and go on a wild existential journey
March 24 – May 10
🟦What Happened Was (Audible at Minetta Lane)
Corey Stoll and Cecily Strong star in this revival of the late Tom Noonan’s 1992 play (made into a 1994 movie) about two co-workers who meet in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment for an awkward first date
April 14 – June 14
🟦Rheology (Playwrights Horizons)
Shayok Misha Chowdhury collaborates with his mother, physicist Bulbul Chakraborty for an unconventional work of theater that combines a lecture on the mysteries of sand with Chowdhury’s evocative stagecraft about mortality and his relationship with his mother and with theater. I saw this last year at the Bushwick Starr. My review.
April 14 – May 16
🟧Brits Off Broadway (59e59)
The annual festival that begin in 2004 this year presents eight productions. The two opening in April are Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak, Victory Melody’s stand-up and narrative about her search for modern-day equivalents of the 17th-century radicals called The Diggers, and Elena Mazzon’s Clara: Sex, Love and Classical Music, classical composer Clara Schumann.
April 14 – June 18
🟫The End of the World Never Minding Show (Bread and Puppet at Judson Memorial Church)
The political puppet troupe, now in its 63rd year, brings its touring new puppet show to New York, “featuring our upside-down situation, a revolt orchestra, screaming choirs, and a reckoning with the catastrophe of logic.
April 14-16
April 15
🟥The Fear of 13 (James Earl Jones Theater)
Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson make their Broadway debuts in this play written by Lindsey Ferrenino and directed by David Cromer based on the documentary about Nick Yarris, who spends more than two decades on death row for a murder he insists he did not commit, and the series of prison visits with a volunteer named Jackie.
March 19 – July 1
April 16
🟥Proof (Booth Theater)
Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle, both making their Broadway debuts, star alongside Kara Young and Jin Ha in a revival of David Auburn’s 2000 Tony and Pulitzer-winning play, directed by Thomas Kail. Catherine grapples with the death of her father, a brilliant mathematics professor, and the discovery of a notebook containing a major, revelatory mathematical proof. She sets out to prove that she’s the one who wrote it.
March 31 – July 19
April 19
🟥Fallen Angels (Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre)
Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne star in a revival of Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy of bad manners. Two upper-class wives, their husbands away for the day, share a few toasts to their pre-marital dalliances with the same man, who just may be en route from France to visit.
March 27 – June 7
🟦Hamlet (BAM’s Harvey Theater)
Hiran Abeysekera, who was terrifically athletic and adorable in “Life of Pi,” is taking on the title role of Shakespeare’s tragedy in a production directed by Robert Hastie, who directed Operation Mincemea, and promises a witty take.
April 19 – May 17
April 20
🟥Schmigadoon (Nederlander)
Alex Brightman and Sara Chase star in Cinco Paul’s stage musical based on the six episodes in the first season of the Apple TV+ series , in which a couple stumble onto a magical town where everybody breaks into pastiche songs of the Golden Age of Broadway musicals. The large Broadway cast includes Ann Harada, who portrays Florence Menlove, her same character in the original series .The stage version was produced earlier in 2025 at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, with series choreographer Christopher Gattelli directing and choreographing.My review of the TV series’ first season.
April 4 – September 6
April 21
🟥The Balusters (MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater)
David Lindsay-Abaire’s original play, directed by Kenny Leon, focuses on the Vernon Point Neighborhood Association, a passionate bunch, whether squabbling over historically inaccurate porch railings or debating trash can protocol. Still, no one is prepared for the neighbor-versus-neighbor battle royale that ensues when a newcomer to the board (Anika Noni Rose) suggests the unthinkable: installing a stop sign on the corner of the enclave’s prettiest block. The ten-member case also features such familiar faces as Marylouise Burke, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, and Richard Thomas
March 31 – May 24
April 22
🟥Beaches, a New Musical (Majestic)
Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett star in a musical adaptation based on Iris Rainer Dart’s novel that became a 1988 film starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, about the lifelong friendship of struggling actress Cee Cee Bloom and elegant wealthy lawyer Bertie White.
March 27 – September 6
April 23
🟥Rocky Horror Show (Roundabout’s Studio 54)
Rachel Dratch, Andrew Durand, Amber Gray and several Broadway newcomers — including Luke Evans, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Juliette Lewis — star in the third Broadway production of the 1973 rock-‘n’-roll horror house musical, directed by Sam Pinkleton
March 26 – June 21
April 25
🟥Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Barrymore Theater)
Taraji P. Henson, making her Broadway debut, stars with Cedric the Entertainer in this third Broadway production of August Wilson’s 1984 play, part of his 10-part American Century Cycle. It is set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth and Bertha Holly, a refuge for Black travelers navigating the upheaval of the Great Migration, when a mysterious stranger arrives with his young daughter.
April 26
🟥The Lost Boys (Palace Theater)
The musical is based on the 1987 film, a supernatural horror-comedy directed by Joel Schumacher, which follows two teenage brothers who move with their divorced mother to the fictional town of Santa Carla, California, only to discover that the town is a haven for vampires. Music & lyrics by The Rescues (Kyler England, AG, Gabriel Mann), Cast features Shoshana Bean, LJ Benet, Ali Louis Bourzgui, and Benjamin Pajak
🟦Kenrex (Lucille Lorel)
Jack Holden portray thirty-five characters in this true story about a violent crime and its aftermath.
April 15 – June 27
April 27
🟩Beauty Freak (the cell theater)
A play by James Clements about filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, first as she prepares to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics and thenduring her U.S. publicity tour in 1938, during which the events of Kristallnacht unfolded
April 24 – May 17
April 29
🟩The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles (La MaMa ETC)
In this play by the long-time experimental theater troupe Talking Band, inspired by Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, diners gather at a Swiss Alpine sanatorium. As time stretches and overlaps past, present, and imagined moments, a fatal accident pulls everyone into the present.
April 24 – May 10
*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 April but don’t officially open until May will be listed in next month’s calendar.)
Check out my article: What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.
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. Off-Off Broadway tends to have shorter runs and much lower ticket prices
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.
