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The year 2025 found Broadway at a major inflection point – New York theater finally fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, as the 2024-2025 season became the highest-grossing of all time, with $1.89bn in tickets sold thanks in part to a new generation of stars and fans. But with a record box office came record ticket prices, as Hollywood stars from Denzel Washington to George Clooney commanded sums pushing four figures for orchestra seating. This year feels relatively less Hollywood-y, though no less starry, with a healthy mix of revivals, new material and buzzy transfers on the calendar. Here are 12 of the most anticipated Broadway shows in 2026.
Bug
Broadway kicks off the season with a bang – or, well, a bug – with Tracy Letts’s 1996 cult classic, which began previews just before the new year and officially opens on 8 January. The new production, directed by David Cromer after an acclaimed run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2021, reunites The White Lotus star (and Letts’s partner) Carrie Coon with Pass Over’s Namir Smallwood as two unexpected lovers – a lonely waitress and a mysterious drifter – whose motel room tryst devolves into something darker. With extremely strong word-of-mouth buzz and the arguably never-more-relevant theme of creeping paranoia, expect many to catch the bug this winter.
Death of a Salesman
Broadway is never short of starry revivals, and arguably this year’s starriest is Nathan Lane’s take on ill-fated businessman Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s mid-century classic Death of a Salesman. The Broadway stalwart will appear alongside Laurie Metcalf and Girls’s Christopher Abbott in a production helmed by Joe Mantello, who most recently directed Metcalf in an acclaimed run of Samuel Hunter’s similarly disillusioned play Little Bear Ridge Road. Opening in April, this will be the sixth revival of the Pulitzer-winning portrait of failed American dreams, which almost always attracts Broadway heavyweights; previous versions starred Wendell Pierce, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman, George C Scott and Brian Dennehy.
Giant
In keeping with the theme of turning to the past to speak to the present, Giant, starring John Lithgow as the famously irascible children’s author Roald Dahl, enters the superheated conversations around Israel, Palestine and antisemitism via a scandalous episode in the late writer’s life. The critically acclaimed play, which picked up three Olivier awards in its recent West End run before transferring to New York, blends fact with fiction in the fallout of an explosive book review Dahl wrote in the early 1980s, criticizing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in language some deemed antisemitic. As his friends, colleagues and an American Jewish sales executive war-room the controversy, the play touches on several third rails of many a dinner party. To quote the Guardian’s Arifa Akbar: “This is what theatre is for.”
Every Brilliant Thing
The Broadway lovefest continues for Daniel Radcliffe – less than two years after taking home the Tony for his role in the beloved revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the Harry Potter star returns to the New York stage this spring (sans music) with Every Brilliant Thing, a one-person show that grapples with depression via a flurry of hopeful lists. The show, written by Duncan Macmillan and originally starring Jonny Donahoe, has become an international hit over the decade since its debut at the Edinburgh fringe festival; it was most recently performed in London by a rotating cast of actors including Minnie Driver, Ambika Mod and Lenny Henry, handling material inspiring enough to, at least in his telling, coax Radcliffe out of his planned Broadway hiatus.
Becky Shaw
For those looking for some bite, Becky Shaw, a razor-sharp dark comedy about a blind date gone horribly awry, begins performances in March with a cast including Alden Ehrenreich, Linda Emond and Patrick Ball (aka The Pitt’s Dr Frank Langdon). Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 play of bad manners, bad sex and one unplanned trip to the police station – amid a thorny tangle of class, gender and relationship dynamics – drew rave reviews at its off-Broadway premiere in 2009. Presumably, some updates have been made for the age of dating apps.
Dog Day Afternoon
The boys are back: The Bear’s Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal) and Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) reunite in March for Dog Day Afternoon, the true story of a 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery immortalized in the 1975 film starring Al Pacino and John Cazale, and adapted for the stage for the first time by Pulitzer-winning author Stephen Adly Guirgis. Bernthal, no stranger to playing an action hero or criminal (or both), and Moss-Bachrach, who deservedly garnered multiple awards for his live-wire performance of the frenetic restaurant manager, should have no issue letting it rip in a story of the chaos that happens “when passion and desperation collide”.
Proof
Also making her Broadway debut this spring: Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach’s The Bear co-star Ayo Edebiri, who will co-lead the first Broadway revival of David Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer-award-winning play alongside Don Cheadle. After the mixed results of After the Hunt, the Emmy winner and comedian continues to explore more dramatic roles as a young woman in Chicago grappling with her father’s legacy as a brilliant but troubled mathematician, in a production helmed by Hamilton director (and Michelle Williams’s spouse) Thomas Kail.
Titanique
In huge news for those unfortunate enough to miss Titanique during its buzzy off-Broadway run, this delightfully kooky riff on the beloved 1997 film, which doubles as an appropriately kooky revue of Céline Dion’s music, finally returns to New York after an acclaimed run abroad (including a recent Olivier award for best entertainment or comedy). Who better to the (re)tell the story of Jack and Rose than the Quebecois queen of feelings? Or, more accurately, show creator Marla Mindelle, who returns for the Broadway debut to sing Dion’s unparalleled catalog of maximalist ballads.
Fallen Angels
In 1925, English playwright Noël Coward caused a mild moral panic with his play Fallen Angels, in which two upper-class women toast to their premarital sexual dalliances with the same man. The risque play drew a rebuke from the theater censor office of the Lord Chamberlain (he eventually relented, on the grounds of farcical comedy, after a personal intervention). A century later, the fizzy scandal makes for rich material for Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara, who will play the two conspiratorial women (whose husbands are away for the day!) in Scott Ellis’s revival of Coward’s groundbreaking comedy, opening in March at the Todd Haimes Theatre.
Dreamgirls
Twenty years after Jennifer Hudson upstaged Beyoncé in Bill Condon’s film adaptation, Dreamgirls is once again looking to cement a new star. The beloved Motown musical, which ran from 1981 until 1985, will return to Broadway this fall for the first time since 1987, with five-time Tony nominee Camille A Brown, who recently choreographed the hit Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen, set to direct and choreograph. Casting is yet to be announced, as an international star search is under way.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Legendary jack-of-all-trades Debbie Allen – actor, singer, dancer, choreographer and teacher Lydia Grant on the TV series Fame – helms this revival of August Wilson’s 1988 play, set in 1911 in his home town of Pittsburgh. Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P Henson star in this dispatch from the great migration, where a Pittsburgh boarding house serves as a refuge for those Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south for the still redlined north.
Dolly: A True Original Musical
Another year, another jukebox musical, though I expect few to grouse about a revue celebrating the life and music of one of polarized America’s universally beloved heroines, Dolly Parton. The country icon, now 79, penned the book (along with Maria S Schlatter) for this tribute musical, which traces her legendary rags-to-riches story from childhood poverty in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee to the Grand Ole Opry to Hollywood. Directed by Broadway veteran Bartlett Sher with a premiere date to be announced, the so-called True Original Musical will feature many of her top hits, including Jolene, I Will Always Love You, Coat of Many Colors and 9 to 5, as well as new songs by Parton herself.
