Below is a list of theater opening* in October, including four on Broadway – starry revivals of plays by Aaron Sorkin, Jon Robin Baitz, and Moliere; and a new monologue by Billy Crystal — while the new musicals are opening Off-Broadway, including a posthumous world premiere by Duncan Sheik, as well as adaptations of a Dickens novel, an F Scott Fitzgerald short story, and Maylis de Kerangal ‘s novel about a heart transplant.
The Broadway debuts this month of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, Rachel Bloom and Hunger Games’ Tom Blyth are surely delighting their many fans. But it is striking how many exciting shows there are in October that don’t necessarily offer familiar faces Both La MaMa ETC and NYU Skirball Center are replete with cutting-edge and political fare in brief runs, and there are some spectacular-sounding special events that are even briefer: Rent’s 30th anniversary concert and En Garde Arts’ 40th anniversary free, outdoor theatrical happening; a fundraising oratorio about the Epstein Files to get them released, and a free “creative act of resistance” led by Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau to protest what’s happening to Black women.
The day-by-day calendar is organized chronologically by opening date*, or (if no official opening) first performance, but we must consider the dates subject to change, given the serendipity of theater, and the vagaries of various pathogens.
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: 🇺🇸. Outdoors🌲Free or pay what you can: 🆓
October 1
🟩Epstein Oratorio, or a Modern Hymn to Demeter (La MaMa)
Hades presides over both modern and mythic worlds, and a male chorus speaks in language that has been lifted directly from the Epstein files and the news. Kathleen Chalfant leads a cast that includes Titus Welliver in this benefit reading on behalf of The Public Integrity Project lawsuit for the release of the Epstein files.
October 1-2
🟦creation stories and all the important importants (Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater)
In this new play by Mfoniso Udofia, a Black woman –pulled between her many selve (child, future daughter, artist, possible mother) – moves across time and space, from ancestor to AI.
September 15 to November 1
🟩Unveiling (Tom Page)
In this play Vaclav Havel on what would have been his 90th birthday, his signature character Ferdinand Vaněk visits the home of old friends who try to seduce him into making the same moral compromises they have made in exchange for small privileges. A darkly comic critique, Vaclav wrote this in 1975, when he was still officially banned in Czechoslovakia (it was performed in people’s living rooms) before he led the Velvet Revolution and became president of the Czech Republic
October 1 – 17
🟧Queer New York Festival (La MaMa)
Performances, exhibitions and talks that explore sex work, migration, Indigenous rights, political prosecution, and the new conservatism. The programming includes “All My Bodies,” Argentine Maiamar Abrodos’s story of life as a trans person in an unforgiving country.
October 1 – 11
October 2
🆓Undersiege (National Black Theater at Studio Museum in Harlem)
A staged reading of a text developed as a “creative act of resistance” by Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau following the resignation of Hana Sharif from Arena Stage, addressing the dismissal of Black women working in the federal government and the silencing of university presidents, politicians, civil servants, educators, and artistic directors. The same play is being read in thirteen locations nationwide.
🟩Echoes of Arrival: Becoming (Museum of Chinese in America)
Through a collection of personal stories, the ensemble explores the many ways immigrants remake themselves while making a life in a new country
October 2,8, 16, 22 and November 6′
October 4
🟦Kramer/Fauci (St Ann’s Warehouse)
Director Daniel Fish (Oklahoma!) turns his eye to one of the most combustible conversations of the AIDS crisis: the 1993 televised clash between Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading AIDS researcher, and playwright-activist Larry Kramer. Will Brill as Anthony Fauci and Thomas Jay Ryan as Larry Kramer.
September 27–October 24
🟦Slam Frank (Orpheum)
The musical imagines what happens when a progressive theater company asks themselves: “Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege,” transforming Anne Frank’s tragic true story into an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.
September 17 – November 30
October 5
🟩Soon (OOTB at The Loft at St. Luke’s Theater)
In this new musical by Nick Blaemire,a young woman confronts the end of the world and the life she has been avoiding.
September 30 – November 8
October 7
🟦Hewa Rwanda–Letter to the absent (BAM Fisher)
Rwandan artist Dorcy Rugamba draws from his memoir and the loss of his family on the first day of the Rwandan Genocide. Accompanied onstage by guitarist Majnun, Rugamba weaves theater, poetry, song, and storytelling into a deeply personal meditation on memory, absence, love, and survival.
October 7 – 11
October 8
🟦Tom at the Farm (Skirball)
Tom travels to his late partner’s family farm following his death, discovering that the mother never knew about their relationship and is unaware that her son was gay. His brother intends to keep it that way. One of the most decorated Brazilian productions of the past decade, it is performed in Portuguese with English subtitles
October 8-10
October 9
🟦Good Time Charlie (The Public)
The newest play by Ryan J. Haddad ( “Dark, Disabled Stories.” and Hold Me In The Water ) tells a story that spans over three decades: As a young man, Charlie dreamt of a life on the stage, but his parents thought dentistry sounded better, so he channeled his passion for culture into his nephew Ryan, a fellow theater-loving gay kid with Broadway ambitions
September 24, 2026 – October 18, 2026,
October 10
🟩I’m Not Even Half (Bushwick Starr)
Glued to her phone, watching a violent uprising unfold in Iran, S gets hit by a car while crossing the street in Brooklyn. She may have a concussion but the driver is cute. Created and performed by Layla Khoshnoudi
October 6 – 31
🟩LBJ The Play (Paradise Factory)
A fifth grade teacher hires local performer Sunny Zimmerman to give a simple historical presentation as LBJ. The only problem? Sunny’s gone method. They’ve
October 9 – 30
October 11
🟦Fish (WP Theater)
In this play by Melis Aker, seventeen-year-old Karya, in search of her missing brother, devises a twisted online experiment that spirals into something more sinister.
September 26 – October 25
🟦Night of January 16th (Ruth Stage at Theatre Row)
On the night of January 16th, financier Bjorn Faulkner falls from the penthouse of his own skyscraper, and Karen Andre, his former secretary, lover and closest confidante, is accused of his murder. A reimagining of Ayn Rand’s 1934 courtroom drama
October 7 – 18
October 13
🌲🆓Prelude (The plaza outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music)
Fleeting encounters and moments of connection that illuminate what it means to be alive together and in love in New York City. A celebration of 40 years of En Garde Artsk with an all-star creative team: director Anne Bogart, playwright Charles L. Mee,composers the Lazours, and costume designer Machine Dazzle.
October 13 – 15
October 15
🟦Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen (The Night Egg at the Culture Club)
Based on a manga graphic novel, this new musical by composer Duncan Sheik, who died last month, and librettist Leah Nanako Winkle tells the story of Colette (Sophia Anne Caruso), who, while working at a Parisian brothel, begins chronicling the fantasies, confessions, and private sorrows of her eccentric clients, slowly transforming herself from object to observer
September 25 – January 3, 2027
🟫Manual Cinema: The 4th Witch (Skirball)
In a table full of overhead projectors, paper puppets, and tiny sets, the artists of Manual Cinema build Macbeth shot by shot in front of you, and a finished film assembles itself on the screen above
October 15 – 17
🟩Doll Day Afternoon (La MaMa)
Elizabeth Eden, the real-life trans woman who was at the center of the story that became “Dog Day Afternoon,” wrote a memoir. Dmitri Barcomi dramatizes it to tell the story from her perspective.
October 15 – 25
🟩Unconditional, a musical memoir (La MaMa)
Writer-performer Margot Rose offers a story in song of one dysfunctional fantastic family that learns how to go on living, from a miraculous ultrasound to an impossible critical care unit
October 15 – 25
🟩The Bald Soprano (Resident Acting Company at Sheen)
Among Ionesco’s best-known contributions to Theater of the Absurd, the play depicts an ordinary evening among seemingly ordinary people that turns into an increasingly hilarious collision of clichés, contradictions, non sequiturs, and linguistic mayhem.
October 11 – November 1
October 16
🟦What Are You Going to Do (NY City Center)
Alex Edelman’s touring follow-up stand-up to his Tony-winning “just For Us” seems largely an effort to break free from his recent success, which has had its downsides. “I’ve become to some people a representative Jew, which would have horrified the rabbis that educated me growing up.” (My review of this show when it was in Edinburgh.)
Oct 16 – 18
October 17
🟩Show Trial (The Tank)
Drawn from the real transcripts of the 1950 trial of Milada Horáková, the Czechoslovak dissident accused of treason by a regime that had already written the verdict, the play by Laura Zlatos directed by Tom Costello is a political satire about the choices we make when history belongs to the victors.
October 15 – November 8
October 18
🟥Other Desert Cities (Hudson Theater)
A starry revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s play about a politically polarized family, whose secrets are about to be exposed in a tell-all memoir. Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes her Broadway debut in a cast that includes Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery, Lily Rabe
September 29 – January 17, 2027
🟦The Dog Show (Triad Theater)
In this comedy written by David Javerbaum (playwright of An Act of God) actors perform a series of monologues from the dogs’ perspective. How do dogs really feel about taking baths?
October 13 – November 29
October 19
🟦King of the Yees (Signature)
When Larry Yee suddenly disappears from San Francisco’s Chinatown, his daughter playwright Lauren Yee sets off on a wild quest to find him, embarking on a surreal, magical journey through the history and myths of her own lineage. Starring Francis Jue.
October 6—November 15
🟦Copperfield The New Musical (The Duke on 42nd Street)
A new musical adaptation by Jeffrey Scharf of Charles Dickens’ most autobiographical novel, the resilient protagonist David enduring the sadism of his stepfather, the depredations of the villainous schoolmaster, and the mind-numbing routine of a London sweatshop before reaching adulthood visited by happiness and success as well as tragedy and loss.
September 29 – December 6
October 20
🟩Machine Learning (Little Engine Theater at Manhattan Neighborhood Network)
In this darkly comic play by Kate Vozella, two couples enter a research program at a remote facility, believing their interactions will help train humanoid companions in human intimacy
October 6 – 30
October 21
🟥860 (Imperial Theater)
Billy Crystal returns to Broadway in an autobiographical solo show centered around the house his family lost in the Palisades fire
October 1 – January 3, 2027
🟦The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Public)
A musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of a man who ages in reverse, transposed to a Cornish fishing village. Andrew Durand ( Dead Outlaw, Shucked, Rocky Horror Show) stars in Jethro Compton and Darren Clark’s feel-good folk musical with a company of 15 actor-musicians
October 8 – November 21
October 22
🟥The Imaginary Invalid (Roundabout’s Todd Haines Theater)
Bill Irwin’s adaptation of Molière’s classic comedy about a rich hypochondriac and the scheming people around him. Rachel Bloom makes her Broadway debut in a cast that includes Brooks Ashmankas, Dylan Baker and Crystal A Dickinson.
September 25 – November 22
🟦Four Walls and a Roof (Skirball)
In 1947, Bertolt Brecht sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee and ran rings around it: playing dumb, parsing translations, denying he had written what he had written, until the chairman thanked him for his cooperation. Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie take that hearing, already a theatrical encounter, and turn it into a piece of theater.
October 22 – 24
🟦PHYL (Mint Theater at Theater Row)
In this 1913 play by pioneering British playwright and suffragist Cecily Hamilton, Phyllis Chester is a governess trapped in a solitary existence and walled off from the life she craves—until a moment of lost temper leads her to risk everything.
October 3 – November 7
🟩Untold Wajda: Blokowisko The Estate) (La MaMa)
Blanka Barbara Stahl creates a dance-theatre spectacle reviving Andrzej Wajda’s lost film about an actor who shares a magical single day with a woman, only to find himself unable to navigate the labyrinth of anonymous housing blocks to find her again the next morning
October 22 – 24
October 24
🟦Aftermath (A.R.T./NY)
In this play by David Zax, young freelance journalist Josh Goldman has just survived a Taliban kidnapping in Afghanistan and is recovering in his childhood home with his parents. The cast features Danny Kornfeld, Steven Skybell, Jill Stern and Awesta Zarif
October 19 – November 8
October 26
🎶🟨Rent, the 30th Anniversary Concert (Richard Rodgers Theater and online)
A one-night-only event with original cast members and guests. In-person tickets are now sold out – only livestream tickets remain..
🟦Hospital Hour (The Culture Club)
A solo show by Rachel Kaly, who got her first period the same day Saddam Hussein was hanged. Since then, she’s been to the hospital over 300 times for various psychological treatments. Are these two facts related? Probably
October 16 – November 23
October 27
🟦 I Became We (Atlantic)
In this play by Mona Pirnot with music by Jack D. Coen, a first-person monologue is performed by a sixteen-person choir about a woman in her mid-thirties wrestling with one of life’s most important decisions
October 16 – November 15
October 29
🟥A Few Good Men (Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater)
Bradley Whitford and Tom Blyth lead a large cast in this revival of Aaron Sorkin’s drama about corruption within the U.S. military. Directed by Michael Arden
October 8 – January 10
🟦The Heart: The Musical (Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater)
A heart transplant links two families during a life-changing 24 hours. Playwright Kait Kerrigan (The Great Gatsby), composers Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath (of KPop Demon Hunters) join forces with director Christopher Ashley (Roundabout’s new artistic director) and choreographer Mandy Moore in adapting Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel Réparer les vivants
October 8 – December 6
🟦Love Me (SoHo Playhouse)
Drew Michaels, who incorporates his hearing loss into his shows, brings the audience inside his mind through headphones and sound design as he retraces his lifelong search for love, in five chapters and five relationships.
October 24 – November 22
🟦Anthracite Fields (Skirball)
Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer-winning oratorio gives voice to the lives, labor, and endurance of Pennsylvania coal miners and their families, drawing on oral histories, speeches, work songs, and local lore. It is performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trinity Choir
October 29 only
October 30
🟧Global Indigenous Theater Festival (La MaMa)
Spiderwoman Theater celebrates its 50 years with a series of performances and community events.
October 30 – November 7
*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 October but don’t officially open until November will be listed in next month’s calendar.)
Check out my article: What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.
