Adam Feldman

Radio City Christmas Spectacular 2023 tickets will get you the full experience of Christmas in New York. This show has it all: a flying Santa, an incredibly ornate nativity scene and a new finale that uses drone technology. And don’t forget about the Rockettes in Wooden Soldier costumes and kick lines! It's one of the can't-miss NYC events in November and December, so here’s everything you need to know about snagging tickets to the most festive show of the season. (And don’t forget to take a photo under the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree afterward.) RECOMMENDED: Full guide to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular When is the Radio City Christmas Spectacular 2023? This year's Radio City Christmas Spectacular, officially known as Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes, runs from November 17, 2023 through January 1, 2024. The show is performed from two to five times a day, with rotating companies of performers. When is the Radio City Christmas Spectacular 2023? The Radio City Christmas Spectacular is at Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center. Take the B, D, F or M to 47th-50th Sts–Rockefeller Center or the 1 to 50th St. How do you get Radio City Christmas Spectacular tickets in 2023? Tickets are available for purchase on the Rockettes website. You can also buy tickets directly at the box office of Radio City Music Hall. How much are Radio City Christmas Spectacular tickets in 2023? Ticket prices vary widely depending on date, time and location. The curren

Christmas shows are on everyone’s mind as New Yorkers prepare for the holidays. How can you make a yuletide gay in New York without a generous array of Nutcrackers and A Christmas Carols? With that in mind, we've found the best holiday-themed theater and dance shows to help you stay in high spirits this year, from shows aimed at kids to a few that are definitely not. Check out our chronological list of holiday shows and find the ones that are right for you. We'll be updating and filling out this page as show dates become available. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to Christmas in NYC

There's more than one way to crack a nut! December in New York abounds with opportunities to see The Nutcracker ballet, which for dance fans is always among the best Christmas shows around. The most famous Nutcracker options are all returning in 2023, including New York City Ballet’s iconic Balanchine production and the the Radio City Christmas Spectacular (which includes a number devoted to the Nutcracker story). Some are aimed predominantly at kids; some others are very much not. Here are this year's ways to get your sugarplum fix. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to Christmas in NYC

Broadway musicals are the beating heart of New York City. These days, your options are more diverse than ever: cultural game-changers like Hamilton and raucous comedies like The Book of Mormon are just down the street from quirky originals like Kimberly Akimbo and family classics like The Lion King. Whether you're looking for classic Broadway songs, spectacular sets and costumes, star turns by Broadway divas or dance numbers performed by the hottest chorus boys and girls, there is always plenty to choose from. Here is our list of all the Broadway musicals that are currently running or on their way, followed by a list of those in smaller Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues. RECOMMENDED: The best Broadway shows

New York theater ranges far beyond the 41 large midtown houses that we call Broadway. Many of the city's most innovative and engaging new plays and musicals can be found Off Broadway, in venues that seat between 100 and 499 people. (Those that seat fewer than 100 people usually fall into the Off-Off Broadway category.) These more intimate spaces present work in a wide range of styles, from new pieces by major artists at the Public Theater or Playwrights Horizons to revivals at the Signature Theatre and crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the best Off Broadway shows usually cost less than their cousins on the Great White Way—even if you score cheap Broadway tickets. Use our listings to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows. RECOMMENDED: Full list of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals in New York

There's no business like show business, and there's no place better for shows than New York City. The sheer range of Off Broadway show for kids proves just that. Each of these theater productions offers something unique, including blue men from another world, wild slapstick comedy, a man-eating plant and—much to kids' delight—more bubbles than you've probably ever seen. (Of course, there are plenty of great Broadway shows for kids as well.)  RECOMMENDED: More theater for kids in NYC Have you already checked out these cool Off Broadway shows for kids? New York has plenty of other fun activities up its sleeve. Visit these family attractions, grab a bite to eat after the show at one of these fun restaurants or try to check the 101 things to do with kids in NYC off your list. 

Human beings have been creating theater for millennia, and for probably just as long they have been looking for ways to pay less for seats. There are many strategies for finding cheap Broadway tickets and Off Broadway tickets, but the easiest involves discount codes, which allow you to buy in advance and choose your seats so you don't have to scramble for last-minute tickets. We here at Time Out have partnered with a number of Off Broadway productions to set up deals to cut your costs.

When it comes to theater, who says you have to just sit and watch? Immersive theater in New York City puts you right in the middle of the action, and often draws you in to participate. Whereas most Broadway shows still follow the traditional proscenium-arch model, some some immersive Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway productions even dispense with the idea of a stage entirely, letting you follow your own paths through unconventional spaces. To help you navigate the maze of options, here is our list of the city's best immersive and interactive shows. RECOMMENDED: Best Broadway shows

The best Broadway shows attract millions of people to enjoy the pinnacle of live entertainment in New York City. Every season brings a fresh crop of Broadway musicals, plays and revivals, some of which go on to glory at the Tony Awards. Some are for only limited runs, but others stick around for years. Along with star-driven dramas and family-oriented blockbusters, you can still find the kind of artistically ambitious offerings that are more common to the smaller venues of Off Broadway. Here are our theater critics' top choices among the shows that are currently playing on the Great White Way.  RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z Listings of All Broadway Shows in NYC

Theater is a big part of what makes New York shine. This city is bursting with talent that even the youngest among us can appreciate, and at the best Broadway shows for kids, everyone in your crew will be captivated. The Lion King, with its dancing wildlife and catchy songs, is a perennial favorite, but Disney aficionados will also get a kick out of the magical tale of Aladdin. At Wicked, you can visit the land of Oz and its conflicted green-skinned protagonist; at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you can enter an entirely different world of witches and strange creatures. These long-running hits are joined by newer offerings like Some Like It Hot, Six and & Juliet, which may appeal to older kids. RECOMMENDED: More theater for kids in NYC If you've already caught these shows or are looking for something a little different, you won't have to go far: Be sure to explore our favorite Off Broadway shows for kids, too, where the stories can be just as memorable as their Broadway counterparts and the talent equally impressive. Make the day more memorable by hitting up one of our favorite fun restaurants for kids before or after the show.

Picture this: your cat-eye contacts are turning you half blind, you’re trying not to accidentally spit out your fake fangs, and you’re on your third double vodka and coke of the night. It’s Halloween, baby, and that means it’s time for a serious party. A spooky party. A Halloween party to remember.  And d'you know what you’ll need for that (other than the fake fangs, the witch hats and the vodka, that is)? It’s a properly banging Halloween playlist. And fear not, friends, we’ve got the playlist for you. From The Cramps (of ‘Wednesday’ fame) to Olivia Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend bleeding her dry, we’ve got the ultimate Halloween soundtrack right here. Time to get freaky, people.  Written by Brent DiCrescenzo, Christopher Tarantino, Andy Kryza, Adam Feldman, Kate Wertheimer, Andrew Frisicano, Sophie Harris, Carla Sosenko, Nick Leftly, Ella Doyle, India Lawrence, Chiara Wilkinson and Georgia Evans. RECOMMENDED:🎉 The best party songs ever made🎸 The best classic rock songs🎤 The best karaoke songs🎶 The best ’80s songs

Halloween is always the most theatrical of American holidays. Every year, people of all ages put on costumes and makeup and bring the world of make-believe to the streets, and the theater world is happy to join the fun with a range of Halloween shows to celebrate the season. We’ve scared up this list of horror-themed theater events—including plays, musicals, concerts, festivals and even a couple of Broadway shows—to help you get in the spooky spirit. Here they are, in alphabetical order. RECOMMENDED: The Scariest Haunted Houses in NYC

Broadway review by Adam Feldman In the extremely funny 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the British comedy troupe’s lampoon of Arthurian legend, there is only one fully fledged musical number: a cutaway to the roundly ludicrous knights of Camelot, who dance in armored kicklines and describe themselves in such ridiculous rhymes as “We sing from the diaphragm a lot” and “We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot.” The very thought of it prompts the questing King Arthur to question his plans. “On second thought, let's not go to Camelot,” he decides. “It is a silly place.” Cut to the 2005 musical Spamalot, which expands the spirit of that 65-second sequence into a two-act Broadway show. It is a silly piece. Adapted by Eric Idle from the Holy Grail screenplay—with help from composer John Du Prez, and a handful of loaners from other Python sources (notably the Life of Brian song “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life”)—this tongue-in-cheeky pageant still tells the episodic story of King Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart) and his entourage in search of a vaunted relic. But jokes about medieval legend now take a back seat to metatheatrical tomfoolery about musical theater as a genre. Winking at Broadway conventions in a succession of zanily oversold numbers, it is essentially an ongoing parody of itself—so much so that when Gerard Allesandrini spoofed Spamalot for his Forbidden Broadway series, he simply had his actors perform an actual song from the show, “The Song That Goes Like Th

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “When you’re in harmony, you’re in a trance,” sing the members of a 1930s German vocal group in the opening number of Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s heartfelt and often stirring Harmony. “Others went marching, / Not us, we’d dance!” At first pass, this attitude is presented as an insouciant strategy for dealing with poverty during the Weimar Era; later, when the Nazis rise to power and escapism turns into an actual need to escape, it comes to seem more like an indictment.  That idea is already the basis of a classic musical: the trenchant Cabaret, which will return to Broadway this spring. But here, it is almost beside the point. Harmony is based on the real-life history of the Comedian Harmonists, a singing sextet—half Jewish, half Gentile—that rose to fame in the late 1920s. The shadow of Nazi atrocities falls backward over the plot, but only one person onstage knows what is coming: Rabbi (Chip Zien), an older version of one of the group’s members—his nickname comes from having worked as a cantor—who narrates the story in retrospect, dressed in an argyle sweater vest. Although this Rabbi wrestles with questions of implicit complicity, Harmony serves mainly to honor the group’s memory. It tries to find joy amid the mourning, like a funeral framed as a celebration of life.  Accordingly, the musical is strongest as a platform for its talented performers. Director-choreographer Warren Carlyle captures the spirit of the Comedian Harmonists thr

This hour-long original musical adaptation of Dickens's yuletide fable, created by composer Michael Sgouros and librettist-director Brenda Bell, returns for its 15th year at the West Village's Players Theatre. The updated set is inspired by traditional British panto.

As part of its Once Upon a Ballet series, which is aimed at young children, NYTB presents its annual hour-long Art Nouveau version of the holiday ballet, complete with clockwork elves and an owl that flies over the audience. The set design is by Gillian Bradshaw-Smith and the costumes by Sylvia Taalsohn Nolan.  

Dances Patrelle offers its annual performance of Francis Patrelle's The Yorkville Nutcracker, set in 1895 New York and featuring adorable child dancers alongside the professionals. This year's edition stars New York City Ballet soloist Miriam Miller as the Sugar Plum Fairy, joined again by NYCB principal Jared Angle as her Cavalier.

This production interprets the classic with hip-hop choreography and an updated version of the holiday story; directed and choreographed by Jennifer Weber and adapted by Mike Fitelson, the production features onstage DJs, an amped-up version of the Tchaikovsky score and a short opening act by rap pioneer Kurtis Blow. 

Brooklyn Ballet's take on The Nutcracker, choreographed by artistic director Lynn Parkerson, emphasizes cultural and artistic diversity. Alongside sequences that hew to the classic 19th-century tradition are interludes featuring street dance, flamenco, belly dancing, Chinese dance, hoop dance, hip-hop and the Hopak, a traditional Ukrainian dance. The 2023 edition features Ingrid Silva and Dylan Santos in the pas de deux and krump specialist Brian "HallowDreamz" Henry as the Rat King, along with Aliesha Bryan, the Eva Dance Studio, Sira Melikian, ShanDien LaRance and Michael “Big Mike” Fields. Live music is proviced by beatboxer Baba Israel, violinist Zafir Tawil, accordionist Mikhail Smirnoff and dizi floutist Yimin Miao.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Words fail everywhere in Brian Friel’s exquisite Translations, and never is this failure more beautiful than in the moonlit courtship scene that ends the play’s first half. The setting is rural Ireland, in 1833, and a delegation of British soldiers has arrived in the town of Baile Beag. Among them is the sweet-natured Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian), infatuate with all things Irish; having hazarded upon a land he takes for Eden, he is charged with the Adamic task of officially renaming the towns there. Yolland speaks no Gaelic, and the headstrong local woman he loves at first sight, Maire (an excellent Mary Wiseman), speaks almost no English. But when they find themselves in the woods after a dance one night, their stumbling cross-talk has an eloquence beyond expression.  As the cultural aggression implicit in the soldiers’ presence turns literal, Friel’s rich, reflective masterwork offers both a critique of colonialism and a Chekhovian portrait of linguistic erosion. Translations mostly takes place at a makeshift school in a drafty barn, where the tippling pedant Hugh O'Donnell (Seán McGinley) teaches local adults Latin and Homeric Greek: dead languages whose cultures live on through them, potentially like the Irish Gaelic they all speak. It is an organizing irony of the play that their dialogue is rendered throughout in English, a tongue they mostly lack; it is up to the audience to understand which language is being spoken when.  The p

Theater review by Adam Feldman  “Here we are,” says a maîtresse d'hôtel as she seats a table of wealthy people at the fancy Café Everything. “I hope this is acceptable. Your enabler will be here momentarily.” But the plenitude promised by the restaurant’s name is soon revealed to be a grave exaggeration, and the hungry patrons are no luckier finding food at their next destination, a “post-deconstructive” French bistro where tragedy has recently struck. “It is what it is,” sings their waitress, who alternates between wailing and Gallic resignation. “Things are what they are. La vie est la vie.”   The aggrieved would-be diners wind up spending the entire first act of Here We Are in a literally fruitless quest to be fed, and some audiences at this collaboration between the playwright David Ives and the composer Stephen Sondheim may feel similarly confused and undernourished. Yet I should say up front that I enjoyed it very much. Sondheim’s final musical is not quite a full meal—not, at least, as a Sondheim musical per se—but how could it be? After working on the show sporadically for a decade or so, the irreplaceable Broadway auteur died in 2021, having written a fair amount for the first half but not very much for the second.  But if Here We Are amounts to a plate of hors d’oeuvres in the Sondheim oeuvre, it is exquisitely well served in its world premiere at the Shed; Ives, director Joe Mantello and the superb ensemble cast deliver a deluxe production. In the first act, adapte

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Doug Simon and Bud Davenport wear many hats in their enthusiastic presentation of Gutenberg! The Musical! Not only are these overeager friends from New Jersey the authors of a highly unpromising new tuner about the 15th-century inventor of the printing press, but they also narrate this show, explain their writing choices and play every part; their roles are differentiated via dozens of yellow baseball caps with the characters’ names spelled out on them, like the shirts in the doomed original production of Merrily We Roll Along. Having spent their life savings to rent Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre for a one-night backers’ audition, hoping to corral producers for their project, they throw everything they’ve got—and, alas, more—into songs that are very bad at the very best. “Gutenberg! Darn tootin’-berg,” they sing in their show’s big opener. “He’s the best chap around / At least in this town / Sure as shootin’-berg!” If they seem nervous, that’s because they’re taking a mighty big risk up there; after all, as Doug’s late mother once told him, “You gotta put food on the table and you can’t eat dreams!” So the open laughter that their amateurish presentation evokes from the audience might seem a bit cruel—that is, if Doug and Bud were real wanna-be writers and not the fictional heroes of Scott Brown and Anthony King’s silly-smart, sweet-natured and very funny meta-musical, and if they weren’t being played by the hilarious Andrew Rannells and

New Zealand's Catherine Waller plays multiple denizens of a sinister medical-entertainment complex—including a reptilian emcee, a strung-out stripper, a guilt-ridden blind laborer and, most oddly, a child amputee with a penchant for stand-up comedy—in this interactive solo show, which has earned her acclaim in fringe festivals around the world. Quilted together from macabre tropes, it all plays out rather like an interactive haunted house experience, with audience members regularly corraled into conversation with Waller's lineup of lost souls.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Merrily We Roll Along is the femme fatale of Stephen Sondheim musicals, beautiful and troubled; people keep thinking they can fix it, rescue it, save it from itself and make it their own. In the decades since its disastrous 1981 premiere on Broadway, where it lasted just two weeks, the show has been revised and revived many times (including by the York in 1994, Encores! in 2012 and Fiasco in 2019). The challenges of Merrily are built into its core in a way that no production can fully overcome. But director Maria Friedman’s revival does a superb job—the best I’ve ever seen—of overlooking them, the way one might forgive the foibles of an old friend.   As a showbiz-steeped investigation of the disillusionment that may accompany adulthood, Merrily is a companion piece to Sondheim’s Follies, with which it shares a key line: “Never look back,” an imperative this show pointedly ignores. Adapted by George Furth from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the musical is structured in reverse. We first meet Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff) in 1976, when he is a former composer now leading a hollow life as a producer of Hollywood schlock; successive scenes move backward through the twisting paths on which he has lost both his ideals and his erstwhile best pals, playwright Charley (Daniel Radcliffe) and writer Mary (Lindsay Mendez). The final scene—chronologically, the first—finds them together on a rooftop in 1957, as yet regardless of their doom,

In the biggest news for theatrical-makeup producers since the closing of the last revival of Cats, it was announced today that Tammy Faye—a musical biography of the star televangelist and hardcore mascara enthusiast Tammy Faye Bakker—will arrive Broadway in the 2024–25 season. The show, which premiered in London last year, features music by Elton John, lyrics by the Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears and a book by the prolific British playwright James Graham (Ink), who specializes in dramatic retellings of modern cultural and political history. Bakker has long been a popular subject for dramatic biographers, thanks to her emotional appeal, outlandish personal style and complicated legacy as a compassionate public face of the emerging Evangelical movement of the 1970s and 1980s, at the side of her scandal-plagued husband Jim Bakker. Bernadette Peters played her in the 1990 TV movie Fall From Grace (opposite Kevin Spacey), and Jessica Chastain won an Oscar for the 2021 biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye (opposite Andrew Garfield). Not surprisingly, given her own propensity for musical performance—and her ongoing popularity in the LGBTQ community—she has already inspired several musicals about her life, including 2006's The Gospel According to Tammy Faye, 2007's Big Tent and a 2011 show developed for Kristen Chenoweth. None of those musicals got full productions in New York City, but Tammy Faye, directed by Rupert Goold (King Charles III), is riding to Broadway on a wave of good buzz. In

In theater, history has always been important. Live performance leaves little behind it but memory and lore. So Broadway, in a sense, is always a ghost town; at night, when theaters are dark, electric bulbs set on stands—known as ghost lights—are placed center stage to placate the spirits that are said to haunt its houses. These lights are the conceptual flip side of the ones more often associated with Broadway: The flashing lights of theater marquees, which shine out the message of the new and the now. The ambitious Museum of Broadway, which opened this week, celebrates both kinds of light. Fittingly, it is situated right between Broadway’s oldest venue, the Lyceum Theatre, and one of the district’s newest hotels, the Hyatt Centric Times Square. Its three floors of displays, which take about 90 minutes to navigate, include beautiful costumes, illuminating documents and photographs, and tasty bursts of detail; other parts of it seem aimed at Broadway newcomers and tourists, including tributes to well-known shows and immersive spaces that call out for selfies. (It also includes a space for temporary exhibits, where sketches from decades of work by the peerless Broadway illustrator Al Hirshfeld are currently on view.) If you’re a theater fan, it’s a must-attend: You will love some of it, get annoyed by some of it and argue about some of it with your friends—and that, after all, is a Broadway tradition, too. Here are five things to do when you visit the Broadway Museum. 1. Marve

The McKittrick Hotel will soon accept no new reservations: The remarkable immersive experience Sleep No More, New York City's premiere live attraction since 2011, announced today that it will shut its doors for good on January 28, 2024. An unsettling and sexy dance-theater piece lodged in an extravagantly detailed mock-hotel complex on West 27th Street, the show was created by the British company Punchdrunk and produced in NYC by Emursive. When it closes, it will have played exactly 5,000 performances, and entertained some two million spectator-participants. "A multitude of searing sights crowd the spectator's gaze at the bedazzling and uncanny theater installation Sleep No More," wrote David Cote in his Time Out review. "Your sense of space and depth—already compromised by the half mask that audience members must don—is further blurred as you wend through more than 90 discrete spaces, ranging from a cloistral chapel to a vast ballroom floor. Directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, of the U.K. troupe Punchdrunk, have orchestrated a true astonishment, turning six warehouse floors and approximately 100,000 square feet into a purgatorial maze that blends images from the Scottish play with ones derived from Hitchcock movies—all liberally doused in a distinctly Stanley Kubrick eau de dislocated menace." Sleep No More has deserved its long run: It is one of the most unforgettable immersive experiences I have ever attended. Every corner of the vast space holds a secret, and every

"Let Me Tell You" is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They are published every week. I’ve never been a huge fan of true crime as a literary genre; the real world is scary enough already. What I do enjoy is fake crime: puzzle mysteries in which clues are available but carefully obscured, so that readers can match wits with a detective who, in the final chapters, makes everything click into place. Naturally, then, I have always been drawn to the Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie, whose mastery of the form has made her the best-selling fiction writer of all time; her novels and collections of short stories have sold more than two billion copies and have inspired countless film and TV adaptations. (She also wrote the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which was slated to finally reach Broadway this year and may still make it.) Christie's best books are quick, enormously entertaining reads that are perfectly suited to vacations or lazy days. The trouble is, she wrote so many that it's hard to know where to start. For the uninitiated, the sheer volume of Christie's output in her 55-year career is daunting, and not all of her work is equally worthwhile. How can readers find their way amid the vast Christie corpus? That's where I come in. Like many other Christiephiles, I got hooked in my childhood—Dame Agatha's straightforward writing makes her accessib

Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin will headline the latest Broadway revival of the classic musical Cabaret this spring, the show's producers announced today. Redmayne will play the sinister Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, a decadent Berlin nightclub in 1930s Germany as Naziism begins its rise; Rankin will be Sally Bowles, a chanteuse at the club who is bent on stardom at any cost. Adapted by Joe Masteroff from stories by Christopher Isherwood and a play by John Van Druten, and built around songs by the Chicago team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret is one of the great Broadway musicals of all time: an exhilarating, harrowing masterpiece. This new revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, originated in the West End in 2021—with Redmayne as the Emceee—and went on to win seven Olivier Awards, London's equivalent of the Tonys. (It is still playing there.) In its New York incarnation, titled Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, the production will be staged in the round at the August Wilson Theatre, which will be remodeled to allow for an immersive pre-show experience that includes dining and entertainment.  Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall's superb 1998 revival of Cabaret ran for six years and made a star of Alan Cumming, who reprised his role as the Emcee when the production returned in 2014. Frecknall's version aims to stake its own claim to the material, with help from designer Tom Scutt. "The costumes are angular, vivid, somewhat grotesque; the performers’ faces are sardonic, or sinister, not

Musicals by the master songsmith Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021, have been in steady supply in New York City in recent years: Excellent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along are both on Broadway right now, the all-new Here We Are is in previews at the Shed, and the Twenty-Twenties have already given us major new productions of Company, Into the Woods, West Side Story and Assassins. But a few Sondheim shows still qualify as bona fide rarities. One of them is The Frogs, which will get a rare hearing, courtesy of the concert series MasterVoices, in three performances this November. RECOMMENDED: Let me tell you—Off Broadway is the place to find the most exciting theater this fall Loosely adapted (and updated) from an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, The Frogs was written in 1974 with Burt Shevelove, with whom Sondheim had previously written A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The show was performed by the Yale Repertory Theatre in a swimming pool on campus, for just eight performances. (Among the students in the chorus: Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang.) The plot follows the journey of the Greek god Dionysus and his slave Xanthius to the Underworld, in search of a great playwright who could rescue the world from the horrors into which it has fallen—culminating in a dramatic face-off between William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In 2004, Nathan Lane worked with Sondheim to adapt and expand this curio into a full-length

“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Wednesday so you’re hearing from us each week. Don't get me wrong: I love Broadway shows. If I have any complaint about the upcoming fall season, it's that there aren't enough of them. Last year, 20 new Broadway productions cropped up between September and the end of the year; in 2023, as our Broadway fall preview shows, there are only 11. And that batch includes just three shows that haven't been seen in New York before: the new plays Jaja's African Hair Braiding and I Need That and the autism-themed musical How to Dance in Ohio. Of the remaining shows, four are moving up from Off Broadway runs last season—Merrily We Roll Along, Harmony, Prayer for the French Republic and Melissa Etheridge: My Window—and the other four are revivals: the plays Purlie Victorious and Appropriate and the musicals Gutenberg! and Spamalot.   I'm happy to see all of these shows, or in some cases to see them again. Still, there's no denying that this year, most than ever, theater lovers like me will have to look elsewhere to satisfy our cravings—specifically, to the varied offerings of Off Broadway theater, where new shows (and revivals of classics) thrive in more intimate venues. Here are the shows I'm most excited to catch in the months ahead. RECOMMENDED: The 25 best Off Broadway shows to see this fall New mu

Late summer and early winter are tough times for the box offices of even the best Broadway shows. To confront this challenge, the theater industry has come up with Broadway Week, a twice-annual half-price sale for tickets to pretty much every Broadway production. The name is not quite accurate: The second 2023 edition of Broadway Week actually lasts two weeks, from September 4 through September 17—and the twofer tickets go on sale today.  This edition's list of participating shows is the most extensive yet; it includes every single Broadway production except the very first performances of the new productions Melissa Etheridge: My Window and Gutenberg! The Musical! If you act fast, you might even be able to snag seats for this year's Tony winner for Best Musical, Kimberly Akimbo, and such perpetual hot tickets as Hamilton, Sweeney Todd, Wicked and The Lion King. Head to to the Broadway Week website to peruse the list of participating shows and grab the ones you want most.   RECOMMENDED: A full guide to Broadway Week in NYC One thing to bear in mind is that the tickets sold through Broadway Week tend to be ones that producers are keenest to sell: in balconies, mezzanines and side areas. But as of this year, the Broadway Week program has been offering a new option: If you can afford to shell out more for some of the best seats in the house, you can "upgrade" your ticket order to pay $125 for tickets that would otherwise be much more expensive. Here is a full list of all 24 shows

"Let Me Tell You" is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Tuesday so you’re hearing from us each week.  What if I were to tell you that there’s a free app that allows you, every day, to buy some of your city’s most delicious food for a third of the price, or even less?  This is not a hypothetical scenario: If you have met me at some point in the past year and a half, there’s a strong chance that I have told you about this app. I use it all the time, and I have been proselytizing it to more or less everyone I know. But I have been reluctant to tell you, dear reader, about it—until now—for selfish reasons: I didn’t want too many people to find out about it, for fear that they would poach the deals that have become so dear to me. But I am ready to come clean. The app is called Too Good to Go, and it is too good to go on hiding from you.  RECOMMENDED: The 21 best cheap eats in NYC Too Good to Go was launched in Europe in 2015, and arrived in North America in late 2020. Its official raison d’être is the reduction of food waste, which has major detrimental effects on the environment. To that end, the app has devised a system to connect sellers that might otherwise throw away perfectly good products—such as bakeries, pizza places, specialty shops and grocery stores—with customers who will take them for a fraction of the normal cost. A surprise bag of fo

The nominations for the 2023 Tony Awards were announced this morning, honoring productions from the 2022–23 Broadway season. The awards are given out annually by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing to salute outstanding achievements in 26 categories of Broadway artistry. Actors Lea Michele and Myles Frost revealed the full list of nominees live on YouTube at 9am. Among the 2022-23 Broadway productions earning the most nominations were the new musicals Some Like It Hot (13), Shucked (9), & Juliet (9), New York, New York (9) and Kimberly Akimbo (8); the new plays Leopoldstadt (6), Ain't No Mo' (6), Fat Ham (5) and Cost of Living (5); and the revivals Sweeney Todd (8), Parade (6), Into the Woods (6) and A Doll's House (6).   RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the 2023 Tony Awards The Tony Awards ceremony, hosted this year by Ariana DeBose, will be held at the historic United Palace in Washington Heights on Sunday, June 11, 2023, and the main part will be televised on CBS in a three-hour broadcast starting at 8pm ET. (The event can also be watched live throughout the country by premium subscribers to the streaming service Paramount+.) Some awards will be given out during in an earlier portion of the ceremony that can be viewed on the free streaming service Pluto TV starting at 6:30pm ET.  A Special Tony will be awarded to Broadway Bares creator Jerry Mitchell. As previously announced, the Tonys will also award three Honors for Excellence in the Theatre (to production stag

The Broadway show The Phantom of the Opera will soon close after 35 years, but the curtain will stay open a bit longer than expected. The closure date was originally set for Valentine's Week 2023, but now the theater plans to delay the closing until April 16, 2023 because ticket sales are booming, the New York Times reported today. As Broadway’s longest-running show, Phantom has delighted audiences with more than 13,500 performances since it opened on January 26, 1988. Before it closes, it’ll celebrate its 35th anniversary. The show has played at the resplendent Majestic Theater since the beginning of its run. 'As much a part of the city landscape as the Empire State Building' "As much a part of the city landscape as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, the blockbuster phenomenon has long been a New York City landmark," the show wrote in its closure news release. "Widely considered one of the most beautiful and spectacular productions in history, the musical set the bar with its lavish sets and costumes, large cast and Broadway’s largest orchestra—a perfect match for its sumptuous score and classic love story." The closure announcement says that leaders decided the right time to close Phantom would be after its 35th birthday; the New York Post, which broke news of the closing on Friday, said the show has struggled since the pandemic and is losing "some $1 million a month." But now, as the Times reported, Phantom's ticket sales are once again thriving: Last wee

After a record-smashing 35 years on Broadway, The Phantom of the Opera will give up the ghost for good on April 16. Until now, tickets to its final performance have only been available by invitation. But this week, the production is offering a chance to the show's many Phans to see the final curtain—and the final chandelier—come down.  If you want to attend this historic performance, you'll have to act fast. From today through noon on Friday, March 31, fans of the show can enter a digital lottery to buy seats for the Phantom finale. A lucky few winners will get a chance to buy one or two tickets each in the rear mezzanine of the Majestic Theatre at 5pm on April 16.  To enter the lottery, visit Telecharge's lottery and rush tickets page this week. If you’ve never used the page before, you’ll need to register with a social media account. Then scroll down to the bottom for the box that says “The Phantom of the Opera Final Performance.” You only need to click it to enter the lottery, but you’ll have to stay alert next week: Four rounds of winners will be chosen each day from April 3 through April 6, and winners must buy their tickets within 24 hours of the drawing. The seats cost $99 apiece, including fees. Phantom, of course, is composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's greatest hit of them all: a timeless tale of candlelit romance between a pretty young singer and the masked serial killer who has been stalking her from his subterranean lair beneath a 19th-century Parisian opera house. The