14 Plays and Musicals We Cant Wait to See in 2024

Izzard in Shakespeare, Strong in Ibsen, Carell in Chekhov, and a freaky Michael R. Jackson musical.

This spring’s schedule is already crammed with competition. Broadway, in the run-up to the Tony awards in March and April, will bring an Oscar party’s worth of of high-profile visitors to New York — Jeremy Strong doing Ibsen, Eddie Redmayne in Cabaret, Rachel McAdams onstage for the first time, and Steve Carell in a star-filled Uncle Vanya. We’ll see the uptown transfers of a few notable shows, as with Hell’s Kitchen and Days of Wine and Roses, as well as the arrival of work that’s gotten intriguing buzz out of town, like the Art Deco art musical Lempicka. Away from the big houses, January’s festival season will mark the extremely welcome rebirth of Under the Radar. We’ve also noticed a number eccentric adaptations: a Sufjan Stevens dance piece, Eddie Izzard’s one-actor-does-23-roles Hamlet, a Michael R. Jackson musical about a vagina that bites. It’s a season that may look like a return to business as usual, but attacked from a stranger and potentially more inventive and exciting angle.

January

Terce: A Practical Breviary

The Space at Irondale, January 10–20

Heather Christian devotees, rejoice! The uncategorizable and hauntingly brilliant song-and-play-maker is back with a new piece for the Prototype Festival. Christian — who plays transcendent piano and sings with a voice like a wire vibrating between celestial and infernal poles — makes luminous, rapturous works of music theater, drawing on folk and gospel traditions and on her mystical Southern Catholic roots. Her Animal Wisdom baptized me back in 2017; her Oratorio for Living Things sent up a radiant flare in the clinging shadows of the pandemic; and now her second “Practical Breviary” invites audiences to a combination of opera, ritual, song cycle, and dance. A breviary is a guide for prayer, and Christian’s work often feels like a long spiritual crescendo. In the chaotic darkness of April 2020, she premiered Prime, an audio show reinterpreting the first mass of the day in the Catholic liturgy. Now, Terce will reimagine the 9 a.m. mass, turning it into an ecstatic contemplation of the divine feminine, inspired by the writings of women mystics and sung by a communal choir of more than 30 caregivers. Heather Christian, take me to church. — Sara Holdren

Public Obscenities

Theatre for a New Audience, beginning January 17

After an acclaimed run at Soho Rep last spring, Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play is back for a longer stint in Brooklyn. Told in English and Bangla, with supertitles about the stage, the play depicts a Bengali American Ph.D. student and his American boyfriend’s trip back to Kolkata, where they research the local queer history and discover a complex family history along the way. — Jackson McHenry

Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet

Greenwich House Theater, January 25–March 3

There may not be cake, but there will be death! Lots of deaths, actually. After playing 19 characters in a one-person adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations last year, the indefatigable comic and actor is back to play 23 in a solo Hamlet, adapted by her brother, Mark Izzard. Suzy Izzard — she still uses Eddie as her performance name — once ran 32 marathons in 31 days (and threw in 31 comedy shows while she was at it). Now, she’s expanding her taste for epic endeavors to the theatrical canon. “I want it so that 10-year-old kids can grab this,” she told the Guardian. “I want it for the people who don’t find Shakespeare easy, like I didn’t when I was a dyslexic kid … I want audiences to see and hear an accessible, touching, scary, and dramatic Hamlet.” Izzard is about as close as you can get to infinite in faculty, and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of flag she plants in Hamlet’s vast and variable terrain. — S.H.

February

The Seven Year Disappear

The New Group, beginning February 6

The latest play by Jordan Seavey (chronicler of a gay breakup in Homos, or Everyone in America) is cast with one of the more intriguing double acts I can imagine: Taylor Trensch (of Camelot and Dear Evan Hansen) playing the son of Cynthia Nixon (thankfully finding time for a play between her HBO obligations), a performance artist who disappeared years ago but suddenly inserts herself back into his life. — J.M.

Teeth

Playwrights Horizons, beginning February 21

You have to support Michael R. Jackson’s big swings. He followed up his Tony-winning autobiographical head trip A Strange Loop with White Girl in Danger, a fascinating hot-mess send-up of soap operas and diversity-equity-and-inclusion lingo. Now he’s adapting a cult horror film about an Evangelical teen with a vagina that bites. Strange? Probably. Camp? Likely. Unsettling? Hope so. — J.M.

March

Illinoise

Park Avenue Armory, March 2–23

Driving alone on a major highway, toward or away from a major city, and singing along to Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago” while sobbing is a fundamental American Millennial Experience. Now we can all sob together as the sweeping theatrical adaptation of Stevens’s beloved 2005 concept album Illinois comes to the Park Avenue Armory. (It looks like, after years of confusion over the album’s real title — is it Illinois or Illinoise or Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel the Illinoise!? — the controversial e has been officially added for this production.) The buzzy choreographer Justin Peck (Carousel and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story) directs, and he and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole) have created a story line to tie together Stevens’s soaring suite of songs inspired by the Prairie State, newly orchestrated for a live band. There will be dancing, singing, and heartbreaking indie poetry about all the regular things — death, desire, coming of age — and about UFOs, killer wasps, and zombies, too. I’ll be somewhere on the aisle crying to “Casimir Pulaski Day.” — S.H.

Enemy of the People

Circle in the Square, in previews February 27 for a March 18 opening

Jeremy Strong, having completed his definitive run as the eldest boy, is heading back to the stage in a less-often-performed Ibsen (newly adapted by Amy Herzog, doing double duty with this and Mary Jane). An issue drama about a man who discovers the spa waters of a resort town are contaminated, Enemy of the People is ripe for exploration in the climate-change era. It’ll be an HBO team up, with Michael Imperioli (of The Sopranos and The White Lotus) playing Strong’s brother. — J.M.

Lempicka

Longacre Theatre, in previews March 19 for an April 14 opening

Eden Espinosa stars in this new musical about the Polish Art Deco Cubist painter Tamara de Lempicka, who blew up the art world while making her way through the Russian Revolution and both world wars — and not in the background. She saved her first husband from the Russian secret police, then ditched him in Paris for a string of lovers — aristocrats and nightclub singers, male and female — but her real project was herself. It’s not every self-portrait that shows its subject unapologetically vamping in a green Bugatti. With an original concept and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer and a book by Kreitzer and composer Matt Gould, Lempicka comes to Broadway after workshops at La Jolla Playhouse and Williamstown Theater Festival. The inexhaustible Rachel Chavkin directs, which feels right for a musical about a steely, glamorous woman barnstorming through the art world. “My goal,” said Lempicka about her own work: “Never copy. Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors … Among a hundred canvases, mine were always recognizable.” — S.H.

April

Mother Play

Helen Hayes Theater, in previews April 2

A new Paula Vogel play is an event of its own, and this one already has the best title on Broadway as well as an eye-catching cast — Jessica Lange, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Jim Parsons — playing a mother and her two children. In the play’s description, those children are teenagers with their mother lording over them as they move into a new apartment, which gives you a sense of the potential metatheatrical to come. — J.M.

Mary Jane

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, in previews April 2

Amy Herzog’s play about a mother caring for a child with a chronic illness was last seen Off Broadway in 2017, directed by Anne Kauffman and starring Carrie Coon. Kauffman is back to direct the Broadway premiere, now led by Rachel McAdams, always great on film, here making her Broadway debut (though she’s got eternal stage cred from being in the TV series Slings & Arrows). Completing a spring of McAdams, Mary Jane will be playing at the same time as a musical adaptation of The Notebook. — J.M.

Orlando

Signature Theatre, April 2–May 12

In 1928, Virginia Woolf published Orlando: A Biography, a rollicking, exquisite novel inspired by and dedicated to her lover, the poet Vita Sackville-West. (Coincidentally, it’s just entered the public domain.) In it, a young man named Orlando — an aspiring poet and a charming, sighing bit of arm candy for Queen Elizabeth I — lives through the centuries, maturing and marveling at the shifting world from the late 1500s to the present — and along the way somewhere, he becomes a woman. Or perhaps he/she/they don’t “become” so much as awaken into their fullness. Here, in an exciting piece of casting, the genre-and-gender-busting performance artist Taylor Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) takes on Woolf’s open-souled, always transforming protagonist. Will Davis, recently appointed artistic director at Rattlestick Theatre, directs Sarah Ruhl’s lithe stage adaptation, which retains all of Woolf’s humor and whimsy, along with her heartache, inside a vibrant theatrical container built for a shape-shifting ensemble of storytellers. — S.H.

Uncle Vanya

Lincoln Center Theater, in previews April 2

Diving straight into Chekhovian existential crisis for your first-ever performance on Broadway? It’s a flex, and Steve Carell (of The Office, Anchorman, and various other little projects you may have heard of) is committing to it. But Vanya is so hot right now, and as the play’s titular middle-aged malcontent, Carell has a pretty bang-up cast to play with, including William Jackson Harper (The Good Place), Mia Katigbak (Infinite Life), Alison Pill, Anika Noni Rose, and Jayne Houdyshell. He even gets to take a shot at Alfred Molina. Lila Neugebauer directs a new translation by Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me), which may yet be the most exciting piece of the whole starry endeavor. Still, there’s no denying that Uncle Vanya is about the crushed hopes of a middle-manager, and Michael Scott certainly knows a thing or two about that. — S.H.

Cabaret

August Wilson Theatre, in previews April 1 for an April 21 opening

Every decade or so someone has to revive Cabaret on Broadway; this time, we’re getting a semi-immersive staging straight from London (via up-and-coming director Rebecca Frecknall), led by the big name Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee and the less-well-known Gayle Rankin as the toast of Mayfair, Sally Bowles. The lure for true theater heads, however, has got to be Bebe Neuwirth, back on Broadway after far too long, as Fraulein Schneider. — J.M.

May

The Welkin

Atlantic Theater, May 16–June 30

This tight, tense ensemble drama by Lucy Kirkwood (The Children) premiered in London just before lockdown in 2020, and I’ve been waiting for it to cross the Atlantic ever since. Kirkwood writes sturdy, elegant, feminist plays with a sharp moral compass and a fascination with science, history, and societal complicity. With The Welkin, she’s created a complex, character-rich courtroom drama that feels like what might happen if Caryl Churchill were let loose on Twelve Angry Men. It’s 1759 in rural England, and a young woman has been sentenced to hang for murdering a child. But the accused swears that she’s going to have a baby, and so, in accordance with local custom, a jury of matrons is assembled to deliberate: If they decide that the girl is pregnant, then her life will be spared. Meanwhile, Halley’s Comet is blazing overhead and personal grievances, fears, and prejudices are flaring down below. Freshly out of her tenure at Soho Rep, Sarah Benson directs a huge cast of almost all women in this smart, unsettling meditation on female labor, the spaces in which women claim power, and the violence that’s always just outside the door. — S.H.

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