Theatrically speaking, the spring ahead of us does not look like the springs behind us.
At this point in the season, Broadway is gussying itself up for the Tony Awards push — the cutoff for eligibility is April 26 — meaning that the new-musical conveyor belt should be humming at speed. Last year, for instance, the January-April stretch included eight plays (two of which were star-driven classics), and 12 musicals (only three of which were revivals). But this spring, for the most part, the conventional wisdom isn’t in gear.
Instead, the proportion has inverted: In the first third of 2026, we’ll see 11 plays and only six musicals on Broadway. And many of the musicals that will open share a certain downtown sensibility instead of, say, a stately Sondheim import or Disneyfied cheer.
Classics and Divas
Producers are wagering on the resolutely fabulous. The musical landscape is dominated by the return of a transgressive classic, Richard O’Brien’s “The Rocky Horror Show,” from 1973, and various burlesques of cultural landmarks — like the “Titanic” parody “Titaníque”; or Cinco Paul’s Golden Age musical spoof, “Schmigadoon”; or Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston’s refashioning of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 “Cats” into the queer ballroom extravaganza “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”
Even a little bit of diva will do: The adaptation of the 1988 movie “Beaches” will probably treat its source material more faithfully than, say, “Titaníque,” but it surely hopes to be associated with the original “Beaches” star, Bette Midler, our gay icon ne plus ultra. Long-running shows are still using the sequined pipeline that goes from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to Broadway, so Bob the Drag Queen has taken over as the emcee at “Moulin Rouge!” And the only musical seemingly not playing its spangled cards is “The Lost Boys,” an adaptation of the 1987 movie that has no divas whatsoever. It will have to make do with the erotics of a boy-band’s worth of vampires, slinking luxuriously in the shadows and eyeing all the other boys’ necks.
Is this the influence of Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” which received two Tonys last year? Possibly. Success begets success. (That show’s Tony-winning director, Sam Pinkleton, stands at the helm of “Rocky Horror.”) Maybe, too, as productions struggle to recoup — “The Outsiders” has been the only new musical since 2022 to turn a profit — camp is looking like a good bet. It knows how to make much with less.
Time Traveling
And so after several decades of Broadway pitching itself to families and tourists, we have a slate of shows targeting something old fashioned: the theater-obsessive, inside-baseball, local New York audience. What is this, the ’70s?
In one way, yes. Among Broadway’s dramatic efforts this spring is Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” adapted from the 1975 Sidney Lumet film about a bank robber trying to fund his lover’s gender-affirming surgery. Down in the subway, not quite as grungy as it was 50 years ago, you can see posters of the play’s stars, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal, looking sweaty and beautiful, set against a specific burnt orange shade that evokes the heat of the Summer of Sam. Nostalgia!
With so many plays on offer, the season feels like a throwback to a period before the British Invasion of the 1980s, when megamusicals changed Broadway’s economics. I mean, the British Invasion hasn’t exactly stopped: David Lindsay-Abaire’s neighbor-against-neighbor farce “The Balusters” is the only new U.S. play that is: a) not adapted from a screenplay; and b) produced by a U.S. institution, namely, Manhattan Theater Club.
Transfers and American Revivals
The other new plays hail from London: John Lithgow will star in “Giant,” Mark Rosenblatt’s Olivier Award-winning drama about Roald Dahl; Daniel Radcliffe stars in Jonny Donahoe’s comedy about depression, “Every Brilliant Thing,” which played the West End; and Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson arrive in “The Fear of 13,” Lindsey Ferrentino’s death-row drama, after an acclaimed Donmar Warehouse run. (Roundabout Theater Company’s production of Noël Coward’s 1925 “Fallen Angels,” with Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara bickering crisply over a man, only feels like a British import — it’s actually a homegrown revival.)
And for anyone who had despaired that Broadway wasn’t interested in the American canon any more, the spring crop of revivals refutes them: Tracy Letts’s “Bug” had a January opening; Alden Ehrenreich and Lauren Patten star in Gina Gionfriddo’s dating nightmare comedy “Becky Shaw”; Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf return to the stage in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”; Don Cheadle and Ayo Edebiri play father and daughter in David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Proof”; and Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer appear in a remount of August Wilson’s masterpiece “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”
There’s a way to look at this weird, retro season and see it as symptomatic of the field’s continuing crises — plays and spoofs are relatively inexpensive, for instance. But I nurse a tiny hope that we’re returning, momentarily, to the things that once made New York theater bloom: the treasury of our great playwrights, and the good sense to know that the best stuff probably started in a club, downtown.
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