Upcoming Broadway shows headed to NYC

It's been nearly 20 years since The Light in the Piazza solidified Adam Guettel's status as one of modern musical theater's most important composers. But we haven't gotten a full new show from him since—until now. This original musical drama, adapted from JP Miller's 1958 TV movie and 1962 film about a hard-drinking couple in the 1950s, reunites Guettel with two key Piazza collaborators: book writer Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) and leading lady Kelli O'Hara, who stars opposite fellow Broadway luminary Brian d'Arcy James. Michael Greif (Rent) directs the production, which premiered last year at the Atlantic.

Roundabout Theatre Company's Scott Ellis directs the first Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize–winning 2004 drama. Oscar and Tony nominee Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) gets in the habit as Sister Mary Aloysius, the starchy principal of a Bronx Catholic school in the early 1960s; imposing Liev Schreiber costars as a well-liked priest who may—or may not—have been molesting one of the students. Zoe Kazan and Quincy Tyler Bernstine complete the cast of this ever-timely investigation of power and its abuses. (Ryan replaces the previously announced Tyne Daly, who withdrew from the production in February.)

Nicholas Sparks's bestselling 1996 novel, which inspired a popular 2004 movie, is now also the source of an original musical by indie singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson and playwright Bekah Brunstetter. The show charts a romance that begins in the 1940s, and the central is played—in different chapters of their story—by Maryann Plunkett, Dorian Harewood, Joy Woods, Ryan Vasquez, Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza; the supporting cast includes Andréa Burns. The production, directed by Michael Greif and Schele Williams, arrives on Broadway after a well-received 2022 run at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Grant Gustin (The Flash) plays a young man who runs away to join the circus in an original musical based on Sara Gruen's 2006 bestseller. Adapted by Rick Elice (Peter and the Starcatcher) and featuring a score by the fanciful collective PigPen Theater Co., the show blends musical theater with puppetry and circus performance (overseen by Shana Carroll, of the exceptional Montreal neocirque troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main). Jessica Stone (Kimberly Akimbo) directs a cast that also includes Isabelle McCalla, Paul Alexander Nolan, Stan Brown, Joe De Paul, Sara Gettelfinger, Wade McCollum and Broadway lifer Gregg Edelman.

Jeremy Strong (Succession) plays the central role in this new take on Henrik Ibsen's antimajoritarian 1882 classic, in which a doctor tells the unpopular truth about his town's main tourist attraction. The modern-minded Sam Gold directs an adaptation by Amy Herzog, whose superb Mary Jane will also be on Broadway this spring; the main cast also includes Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) and Victoria Pedretti (The Haunting of Hill House).

Des McAnuff directed the original Broadway production of the Who's 1969 rock opera, which he adapted for the stage with its composer, Pete Townshend. Now, more than 30 years later, he revisits the story in an all-new production that stars Ali Louis Bourzgui in the title role of a traumatized Helen Keller–like boy who becomes a sensation at pinball. The supporting cast comprises John Ambrosino, Bobby Conte, Adam Jacobs, Alison Luff and Christina Sajous.  

Greaser's the word for the young Tulsa toughs in this musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton's seminal 1967 young-adult novel and Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film version of it. Music supervisor Justin Levine (Moulin Rouge!) also cowrote the script with Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter) and the score with the folk duo Jamestown Revival. Like Coppola's movie—which launched the careers of C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez—the stage production, directed by Danya Taymor (Pass Over), features a cast of unfamous actors, mostly in their Broadway debuts.

Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown) directs Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould's original biomusical portrait of the Polish-American Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, whose adventurous life spanned most of the tumultuous 20th century. Powerhouse vocalist Eden Espinosa plays the title role, and Raja Feather Kelly is the choreographer; the cast also includes Amber Iman, Andrew Samonsky, George Abud, Natalie Joy Johnson, Zoe Glick, Nathaniel Stampley and Beth Leavel.

Shaina Taub's original musical chronicles the women who suffered before suffrage in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Leigh Silverman (Well) directs the Broadway transfer of her 2022 premiere production at the Public; casting for this version has not yet been announced.

Alicia Keys salutes the concrete jungle where dreams are made of (sigh) in a coming-of-age musical, loosely inspired by the pop singer-songwriter's personal history, that includes new material as well as hits from the Keys catalog. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon is at the center of a large cast that also includes Shoshana Bean, Brandon Victor Dixon, Kecia Lewis, Chris Lee, Lamont Walker II, Mariand Torres and Crystal Monee Hall. The script is by Kristoffer Diaz (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity); the extremely busy Michael Greif (Rent) is the director, and Camille A. Brown is the choreographer. 

Set your boats against the current and prepare to be borne back into the Jazz Age as F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessentially American novel comes to Broadway. Jeremy Jordan (Newsies) and Eva Noblezada (Hadestown) headline this musical adaptation by Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, directed by Marc Bruni (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical)  and choreographed by Dominique Kelley. The supporting cast for the production, which originated at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse last year, has not yet been announced. 

Start spreading the News! Huey Lewis and his band are the latest pop hitmakers to get a Broadway jukebox musical to call their own. Jonathan A. Abrams weaves such chart toppers as “The Power of Love,” "Stuck with You," and “If This Is It" into a feel-good romcom, directed by Gordon Greenberg; Corey Cott and McKenzie Kurtz play the central roles, joined by gifted actor-singers including F. Michael Haynie, Tamika Lawrence, Orville Mendoza and John Dossett.

Nearly half a century after its original Broadway production, William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls's groovy Black spin on The Wizard of Oz eases down the road once more in a revival directed by Schele Williams (who is also co-directing The Notebook this season). Newcome Nichelle Lewis stars as Dorothy, and Kyle Ramar Freeman, Phillip Johnson Richardson and Avery Wilson are her travel companions; Deborah Cox and Melody A. Betts play the witches, and improv wizard Wayne Brady has the slick title role. JaQuel Knight (of “Single Ladies” fame) is the choreographer, and comedian Amber Ruffin peps up the script with new material.

Eddie Redmayne returns to Broadway as the sinister Emcee of a Weimar Era nightclub in another revival of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff's exhilarating, harrowing 1967 masterpiece. This London import—directed by Rebecca Frecknall and designed by Tom Scutt—emphasizes the material's sordid underbelly in an environmental staging: The August Wilson Theatre will be extensively reconfigured into an in-the-round space, and audience members with money to spare can buy special packages that include preshow dining and drinks. Gayle Rankin, who memorably appeared in the last revival, now costars as the desperate Sally Bowles; Steven Skybell, Ato Blankson-Wood, Natascia Diaz, Henry Gottfried and the delectably tart Bebe Neuwirth.

It's been nearly two decades since Michael Stuhlbarg, one of the great stage actors of his generation, last trod Broadway's boards (in The Pillowman). The vehicle for his overdue return is a modern-modern history play by Peter Morgan (The Crown) that depicts the machinations of Russia's oligarchs in the power vaccuum that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Stuhlbarg plays billionaire Boris Berezovsky in a transfer of Rupert Goold's hit London production; Will Keen (as Vladimir Putin) and Luke Thallon (as Roman Abramovich) reprise their acclaimed performances in that version.  

Rachel McAdams (The Notebook) plays as the single mother of a severely disabled child in Amy Herzog’s exquisitely empathetic portrait of everyday strength, which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play; Herzog shows the strain of the situation, but also succeeds in dramatizing kindness, attentiveness, honesty, connection. Anne Kauffman, who directed the play's flawless 2017 production at New York Theatre Workshop, returns to helm the Broadway premiere for Manhattan Theatre Club; original cast members Susan Pourfar and Brenda Wehle reprise their supporting roles, now joined by April Matthis and Lily Santiago.

Lincoln Center Theater assembles an eye-catching cast for the latest New York staging of Anton Chekhov's 1897 masterpiece, a bitterly comic meditation on the wages of self-sacrifice. Steve Carell makes his Broadway debut in the title role, joined by Anika Noni Rose, Alfred Molina, Alison Pill, William Jackson Harper, Jayne Houdyshell and Mia Katigbak. Lila Neugebauer (Appropriate) directs a new adaptation of the text by Heidi Shreck (What the Constitution Means to Me). 

The supreme Jessica Lange stars as the domineering mother of two teenagers—played by The Big Bang Theory's Jim Persons and that master child portrayer Celia Keenan-Bolger—in a surrealistic memory play by Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), one of the signal dramatists of our era. Tina Landau (SpongeBob SquarePants) directs the world premiere for Second Stage.

The notoriously disharmonious recording process that led to Fleetwood Mac’s smash 1977 LP Rumours is the inspiration for David Adjmi’s long and beautiful group portrait of a rock band riven along artistic, romantic and pharmaceutical fault lines. Every aspect of the show is excellent in isolation, from the ensemble acting to the pitch-perfect original songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler and the heightened-verité design. Mixed together in Daniel Aukin’s meticulously layered production, they cohere into a riveting multitrack train wreck.

Director-choreographer Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet's resident choreographer, turns Sufjan Stevens's 2005 concept album, Illinois, into a dance-theater piece with a narrative throughline he has devised with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. The cast includes 16 dancers—led by Ricky Ubeda, Gaby Diaz, Ben Cook and Ahmad Simmons—as well as three vocalists and an 11-piece band.