16 Plays and Musicals We Can’t Wait to See in 2026

A theatrical menagerie: Animal Wisdom, a reimagined Seagull, voguing cats, and Moth Days.

This year’s 2026 preview consists of all the entertainment — from movies to video games to classical music — that Vulture writers and editors are excited to consume in the New Year. Below, our theater list:

Jump to: January | February | March | April | May

Petra

January 8 

Venue: Under the Radar Festival at the Park Avenue Armory

Tina Satter’s Obie-winning company, Half Straddle, took its incredible, bone-chilling Is This a Room all the way to Broadway in 2021. Now it’s bringing a work-in-progress adaptation of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to the Under the Radar Festival. Satter’s work is always adventurous and scalpel-sharp, a natural fit for this story of obsession and loneliness, beauty and cruelty and killer wigs. —Sara Holdren

What We Did Before Our Moth Days

February 4 

Venue: Greenwich House Theater

A reunion that’s a massive deal for a brainy subset of the New York populace: Wallace Shawn and André Gregory are working together again. The two famously supped in My Dinner With André and have collaborated plenty before and after, as in Vanya on 42nd Street. Here, Gregory directs a new play by Shawn that’s set — where else? — in an “urban world of intelligent and somewhat-gentle middle-class people” with an ace cast that includes Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, John Early, and Josh Hamilton. —Jackson McHenry

Meat Suit, or the Shitshow of Motherhood

February 11 

Venue: Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center

I do have a 6-month-old, but even if I still had abs and weren’t covered in drool, I’d be excited for Aya Ogawa’s new play, billed as a chaotic carnival by and for moms. Some of those moms include the terrific performers Cindy Cheung and Liz Wisan, and the play itself promises satire, songs, bouffon, bodily fluids, and, underneath it all, a contemplation of overwhelming joy and ineffable heartache. —S.H.

Hate Radio

February 12 

Venue: St. Ann’s Warehouse

I’m still thinking about the Swiss provocateur Milo Rau’s Antigone in the Amazon long after its visit to NYU Skirball last year. Now the fiercely political director is back in the States with a performance that re-creates RTLM, the radio station whose virulent broadcasts helped ignite the Rwandan genocide. As the killing continues in Gaza, it feels, in the most awful way, like exactly the right time to turn our sights on propaganda, on the insidious twisting of language in the service of brutality. —S.H.

Cold War Choir Practice

February 21 

Venue: MCC Theater

Directed by Tony nominee Knud Adams, Ro Reddick’s spiky comedy had its first run this past summer at Clubbed Thumb’s always delightful Summerworks festival. For its heroine, Meek, a 10-year-old Black girl caught up in conspiracy in Reagan-era upstate New York, it’s tough to concentrate on children’s choir and Pound Puppies when you’re also building a fallout shelter in your basement. —S.H.

Giant

March 11 

Venue: Music Box Theatre

Giant’s thorny portrait of the artist as charismatic bigot made big waves in the U.K.: John Lithgow and first-time playwright Mark Rosenblatt both won Oliviers for this exploration of the scandal that followed when, in 1983, the children’s-book titan Roald Dahl published an antisemitic book review. —S.H.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball

March 18 

Venue: Broadhurst Theatre

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s poems became a bafflingly long-running Broadway hit and a real miss of a movie — and, several decades into its existence, it has … become great? This revival, directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and last seen at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in the summer of 2024, sets the show within a queer ballroom competition with veterans of that community performing alongside Broadway pros. It’s a mixture of two forms of ’80s excess that somehow blend perfectly. —J.M.

The Wild Party

March 18 

Venue: New York City Center

Infamously, at the turn of this millennium, two entirely separate musicals premiered in New York City in the same season based on Joseph Moncure March’s poem about Jazz Age excess. As part of its great Encores! series, City Center is reviving the one created by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe (the better one, most people agree, though there’s still debate). The big thing here is that Encores! has booked two killer leads: Adrienne Warren (of Tina) and Jasmine Amy Rogers (of Boop!). —J.M.

Seagull: True Story

March 22 

Venue: Public Theater

Alexander Molochnikov directs a semi-autobiographical riff on Chekhov, following Kon, a director at the Moscow Art Theatre who has to flee to the U.S. after his too-political production of The Seagull sparks dangerous ire in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Comedy, tragedy, censorship, art, exile, and survival collide in Eli Rarey’s script based on Molochnikov’s own experience. —S.H.

The Rocky Horror Show

March 26 

Venue: Studio 54

Oh, the antici … … … pation! Hunky Luke Evans straps on the sweet Transylvanian’s corset in what promises to be a gay fantasia of a production directed by Oh, Mary!’s Tony-winning Sam Pinkleton. Creatures of the night, assemble! —S.H.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

March 30 

Venue: Barrymore Theatre

Taraji P. Henson, that always watchable Oscar and Emmy winner, makes her Broadway debut as a boardinghouse operator in Debbie Allen’s revival of one of August Wilson’s ten-play, ten-decade cycle of dramas. (Recent big productions from the set include Fences and The Piano Lesson.) Cedric the Entertainer, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and the Outsiders standout Joshua Boone co-star. —J.M.

Proof

March 31 

Venue: Booth Theatre

Millennial nerd girls who wanted to act can rejoice: The source of their most dependable audition monologues is coming back to Broadway. Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle star in David Auburn’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play about two genius mathematicians, daughter and father, and how all the brains in the world don’t make the struggle to navigate grief, love, and doubt any easier. —S.H.

Schmigadoon!

April 6 

Venue: Nederlander Theatre

A musical based on an Apple TV show that was itself spoofing classic musicals, Schmigadoon! may take a little advance explanation, but the basics of its plot are straightforward: A couple from the present get stuck in a magical town where everyone behaves as though they’re in a golden-age show by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe. The songs we’ve heard onscreen, by the show’s creator, Cinco Paul, were clever parodies of the form, including an earworm of an ode to “corn puddin’.” —J.M.

Rheology

April 14 

Venue: Playwrights Horizons

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is always a theater artist to keep an eye on, whether he’s directing or writing — and he did both in the sensitively observed Public Obscenities, staged in New York in early 2024. In Rheology, which premiered at the Bushwick Starr last year, Chowdhury and his physicist mother, Bulbul Chakraborty (not an actor playing his mother — his actual mother), ponder the mysteries of sand and of life and death. —J.M.

Hamlet

April 19 

Venue: BAM

BAM and London’s National Theatre begin a new partnership with this visit from Robert Hastie’s darkly comedic production of Hamlet. Hiran Abeysekera, who won an Olivier for Life of Pi, plays a particularly antic version of the Danish prince with Francesca Mills (striking in Harlots) as his much-wronged Ophelia. —S.H.

Animal Wisdom

May 5 

Venue: Signature Theatre

All praise to Signature for giving us a year of Heather Christian. Following its staging of the MacArthur-winning composer’s gorgeous Oratorio for Living Things, the theater presents her Animal Wisdom, a stunning séance of a show drawing from Christian’s mystical southern Catholic upbringing in Mississippi. Expect astonishing imagery, ecstatic musicianship, and singing to wring you out and fill you up again. —S.H.