The Best New York City Theatre to See This Summer, On Broadway and Beyond
From a ballroom-inspired reinvention of Cats to Megan Stalter’s turn as Mary Todd Lincoln, New York’s stages are offering spectacle, satire and cult-classic thrills.
New York City’s theater scene is rarely quiet, but summer brings a particular sense of possibility. Broadway’s major productions continue to draw crowds to Midtown, while unconventional venues and smaller Off Broadway stages are creating some of the season’s most inventive experiences.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work is having an especially visible moment. Cats: The Jellicle Ball transforms one of his best-known musicals through the language of New York’s queer ballroom culture, while Masquerade places audiences inside the heightened world of The Phantom of the Opera. Elsewhere, acclaimed revivals, irreverent parodies and enduring Broadway favorites offer options for nearly every kind of theatergoer.
Here are some of the standout productions playing across the city.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball
Playing through August 8
This three-time Tony Award-winning reinvention exchanges feline costumes for the glamour and competitive energy of a ballroom runway.
The characters are presented as human competitors, strutting, dancing and vying for recognition in elaborate costumes as house music joins Andrew Lloyd Webber’s familiar score. The production’s choreography and visual design draw directly from New York’s queer ballroom tradition, turning the Jellicle Ball into a celebration of performance, identity and chosen family.
André De Shields delivers one of the show’s defining performances. Each night also features a guest judge, with previous participants including Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Gayle King and costume designer Qween Jean.
The result is energetic, participatory and deliberately extravagant. Audience members should expect a show that occasionally invites them out of their seats.
Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
Playing through November 22
After arriving on Broadway from London in 2025, this eight-time Tony-nominated musical comedy has become an affectionate tribute to chance encounters and the unpredictable rhythms of New York.
The two-person production begins when Robin, a guarded New Yorker, is sent to collect Dougal, an relentlessly cheerful British stranger, from the airport ahead of a wedding. Over the next several days, the mismatched pair becomes entangled in a succession of stressful, funny and unexpectedly tender situations.
The musical’s humor is accessible even to casual theatergoers, while its evolving set gradually reveals a series of clever surprises. Beneath the comedy is a warm story about loneliness, connection and the ways a city can bring two very different people together.
A North American tour is scheduled to begin in fall 2027.
Every Brilliant Thing
Playing through August 9
For audiences seeking something more intimate than a traditional Broadway spectacle, Every Brilliant Thing offers a limited summer engagement built around emotional honesty and direct audience connection.
The production joins a season in which New York theater is stretching well beyond conventional musical formats, making room for personal storytelling alongside elaborate revivals and large-scale commercial shows.
Masquerade
Playing through January 31, 2027
Masquerade takes the grandeur of The Phantom of the Opera and turns it into a multidimensional immersive experience.
Rather than watching Christine and the Phantom’s turbulent relationship from a theater seat, audiences move through a world of opera dressing rooms, masked gatherings and interconnected performance spaces. The production unfolds across several floors and sets, with tightly coordinated stage management creating the illusion of a complete, functioning universe.
The experience embraces the excesses of the original musical, including fog, pyrotechnics, melodrama and elaborate costumes. A masked-ball dress code adds to the atmosphere, while encounters with members of the ensemble give audience members a role in the unfolding story.
The production is likely to appeal most strongly to established Phantom devotees, but its immersive format may also win over skeptics who have never connected with the original show’s maximalism.
Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody
Playing through November 1
For fans awaiting the next season of Heated Rivalry, this unauthorized musical parody offers a gleefully unrestrained diversion.
The 75-minute Off Broadway production retells the romance between hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov through the perspective of three excitable mothers, all named Susan. The show races through the pair’s decade-long affair using catchy songs, puppetry, knowingly explicit jokes and an alarming fictional beverage called the “Ambien margarita.”
Although packed with references for established fans, the musical has been structured so that newcomers can follow the story without having seen the original series. Its intimate setting inside Chelsea’s Culture Club gives the performers room to lean into material that would be difficult to imagine in a conventional Broadway house.
The production is proudly niche, deeply unserious and unusually specific about the physical attributes of its hockey-playing heroes.
Hadestown
Ongoing
Years after its Broadway debut, Hadestown remains one of the city’s essential musicals.
The show intertwines the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice with those of Hades and Persephone, relocating the ancient myths to a harsh, industrial world with the atmosphere of the Great Depression. Its folk, blues and jazz influences distinguish it from more traditional Broadway productions.
A live seven-piece band performs onstage, giving the music a sense of immediacy and making the musicians feel like active participants in the story. That live presence remains one of the production’s greatest strengths, even as a filmed stage recording prepares to reach cinemas.
Recommended for audiences ages 8 and older, Hadestown is the most family-friendly selection among the season’s major offerings. It does not, however, simplify its themes. The musical continues to confront love, exploitation, doubt and the devastating consequences of looking back.
Little Shop of Horrors
Ongoing
Part science-fiction comedy, part Faustian morality tale and part 1960s rock musical, Little Shop of Horrors continues to thrive as one of Off Broadway’s most dependable cult favorites.
The story follows Seymour, a socially awkward florist who discovers a mysterious plant with a taste for human blood. As the plant promises him recognition, romance and financial success, Seymour is drawn into an increasingly gruesome bargain.
The musical features work by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who later created songs for Disney films including The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Here, their melodic instincts are paired with horror, doo-wop and dark comedy.
Its story about ambition and the price of fame remains durable, while the production’s mixture of puppetry, catchy music and escalating chaos makes it a fitting choice during a period of renewed interest in formally adventurous horror.
Oh, Mary!
Playing through January 3, 2027
Few recent comedies have proved as adaptable, or as dependent on the personality of their leading performer, as Oh, Mary!
The deliberately inaccurate historical farce reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic, attention-starved theatrical menace. The comedy is short, filthy and gleefully ridiculous, dismantling the conventions of prestige historical drama in favor of escalating absurdity.
Cole Escola originated the title role, but the production has since developed a reputation for inspired casting. Jinkx Monsoon, Jane Krakowski, Maya Rudolph and Catherine Tate have all been associated with the part, each bringing a different comic sensibility to the unhappy first lady.
Megan Stalter, known for her breakout work on Hacks, is scheduled to play Mary through September 12. Her unpredictable energy makes her a natural fit for a character who treats every political crisis as an obstacle to her own theatrical ambitions.
For theatergoers in search of a respite from reality, Oh, Mary! provides something stronger than a tonic. It serves the gin directly.
