Over this past week Broadway has been awash in friends and fiends, boarders and board members, Golden Age hoofers and 80s vampires, as the final six shows of the Broadway 2025-2026 season had their official opening nights; my reviews of five of them below, plus one Off-Broadway.
The theater awards season has begun in earnest, with two major awards announcing their nominees last week, and a couple more planning to do so this week.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
(chronologically by opening night:)
With its spot-on, affectionate parodies of the most beloved Broadway musicals from the Golden Age, “Schmigadoon” felt like just the right TV series for theatergoers who had to go without live theater; the first season premiered on Apple TV+ in July, 2021, while Broadway was still shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic….Did this need to be brought to the stage? Maybe not, but it was probably inevitable, and I’m glad for it.
Full review
The squabbling over whether to put a stop sign on the neighborhood’s prettiest street might not sound substantial enough to build a play around. But David Lindsay-Abaire’s fresh and funny comedy uses the pettiness, blind spots and outright biases of the diverse characters who are involved to comment with sharp insight on The Way We Live Now
Full review.
“Beaches, A New Musical” opened…at Broadway’s Majestic Theater thirty-eight years after the movie “Beaches” left critics largely unimpressed (“a movie completely constructed… out of cliches,” Roger Ebert wrote), but won over the public, with its story of a lifelong, loving friendship between two women, Cee Cee and her polar opposite Hillary (portrayed by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey.) It’s possible that the stage version (starring Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett) will also find its audience. But it’s hard to see why we needed it. …There is little here that feels an improvement on the movie, and several aspects that feel like a downgrade.
Full review
The Rocky Horror Show,” opening tonight at Studio 54, is the latest in a quartet of campy Broadway musicals this month that seem as much acts of resistance against a retrogressively anti-queer world as an escape from it.* It is also an act of nostalgia for the many of us who, sometime over the past half century, experienced this playfully transgressive mashup of B-movie pastiche, glam rock concert and punk/porn party. It’s that very nostalgia that (perhaps unavoidably) undermines this second Broadway revival. The cast is stellar and the staging is inventive, but the production just doesn’t measure up to the original…The original for me is the movie.
Full review
In director Debbie Allen’s sturdy production of August Wilson’s intense and lyrical play, Cedric The Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson portray the stable long-time married couple Seth and Bertha Holly who run a boarding house where everybody else are transients; some brutalized, some haunted, some simply searching…The play gets its title from a century-old blues song by WC Handy, which is inspired by the true story of a man named Joe Turney. At the turn of the twentieth century, he would snatch Black men to work on a plantation, in effect turning them back into slaves. Joe Turney was the brother of the governor of Tennessee, a state that currently allows local officers to assist ICE in arresting people during routine traffic patrols. This second Broadway production of August Wilson’s 1988 play, in other words, is well-timed. It’s also well-cast.
Full review
In this award-winning English export, Jack Holden portrays thirty-five characters to dramatize the 1981 murder of a violent, petty criminal in the small rural town of Skidmore, Missouri…Almost everything about the production none-too-subtly resembles a rock concert and turns Holden into a rock star…which does tend to put the spotlight more on him than the people of Skidmore.
Full review
The Week in New York Theater News
Outer Critics Circle Award 2026 Nominations
2026 Drama League Award Nominations
The Dramatists Guild of America has announced Bess Wohl, Kimber Lee, Lisa Kron, Victor I. Cazares, Joy Huerta, Benjamin Velez, as recipients of the Guild’s 2026 Awards. Migdalia Cruz will be receiving the Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
New Yorkers in Edinburgh (and NYC): Xhloe and Natasha + 9
“And Then the Rodeo Burned Down” is opening Off-Broadway at Ars Nova for a month-long run starting in May. All it took was four years… and thousands of miles. Xhloe and Natasha are among the hundreds of New York theater artists each year who seek to break into the competitive Off-Broadway theater scene in New York by producing a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world.
