Vulture: 22 Plays and Musicals We Can’t Wait to See This Fall

This year’s Fall Preview surveys the movies, shows, books, plays, exhibits, albums, and performances that our writers and editors are excited to consume this season. Below, our theater list:

The Shows We're Seeing in ...

September

School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play

Jocelyn Bioh’s whirligig of a play about Ghanaian classmates obsessed with a beauty pageant has been her calling card since it premiered nearly a decade ago. MTC is finally bringing it to Broadway in a new production with a covetable cast — Denée Benton; Patina Miller; this spring’s Sound of Music star, Jasmine Amy Rodgers — helmed by director Whitney White, who worked with Bioh on Jaja’s African Hair Braiding and recently led Liberation to a Tony win. (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, previews begin September 8.)

kUnST fEsT

The West Village festival’s fall lineup includes three experimental plays, all by artists who are mothers and who say they created their work “between caring, peeing, and teaching” from inside “the child-rearing vortex.” Catch Lisa Clair’s Notes From the Cottage, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s The Cycles, and Kate Kremer’s The Intimacy, or: The Long and Storied History of the Garbage Can. (Collapsable Hole, September 15–20)

Degenerates

Playwright Else Went and her wife, the director Emma Rosa Went, broke the hearts of anyone who came of age in the early aughts with their play Initiative at the Public Theater last fall. Now they’re back — along with two of Initiative’s stellar cast members, Christopher Dylan White and Olivia Rose Barresi — to tell a story about American masculinity in the age of the dark web. If there’s a pair of theater-makers we’d trust to turn a light both eviscerating and empathetic (not to mention funny) on incel culture, it’s the Wents. (Playwrights Horizons, September 16–October 11)

Good Time Charlie

The gifted actor and playwright Ryan J. Haddad (Dark Disabled Stories and Hold Me in the Water) often spins autobiography into tender and biting drama. Here, he looks across generations of gay men with a play about a dentist named Charlie who has suppressed dreams of the stage and becomes a mentor to his nephew Ryan, who chases after that same ambition. (The Public Theater, previews begin September 24)

ANON: A Tempest at Our Kitchen Table

Anne Washburn’s extraordinary Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play was and is a defining piece of theater for our surreal American moment. The plot of her latest work may sound relatable enough: In suburban Texas, two households descend into chaos when a Pride flag appears outside the home across from a TikToker named Jeanie. But leave it to Washburn and director Anne Kauffman to tilt the lens somehow, keeping things sharp and more than a little weird. (MCC, September 25–November 1)

Kramer/Fauci

Daniel Fish restages a 1993 C-Span interview with Anthony Fauci (Will Brill), a top aids researcher, and activist Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan). The actors keep to the text of the interview while Fish brings a host of directorial intrusions — a bubble machine, a chicken suit. The audience, aware of Fauci’s experiences to come in the covid era, arrives with its own baggage. (St. Ann’s Warehouse, previews begin September 27)

Other Desert Cities

We’re getting used to seeing star-packed plays on Broadway, but even so, the cast of this one is especially starry. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, and Allison Janney, plus Lily Rabe and Stranger Things’s Joe Keery, lead a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s play about an upper-crust Jewish Californian family and its discontents. (Hudson Theatre, previews begin September 29)



October

A Few Good Men

Can we still handle “You can’t handle the truth”? Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 play is coming back to Broadway in a new production from Michael Arden, starring Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) with Bradley Whitford as the iron-jawed colonel who gets to shout the line Jack Nicholson made famous. Blyth plays hotshot young military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee, whose defense of two marines accused of murder exposes a cover-up that goes all the way to the top. (Lincoln Center Theater, previews begin October 8)

Wanted

A musical born as a project in an NYU grad program, Ross Baum and Angelica Chéri’s show follows two white-passing Black sisters who become 19th-century outlaws, played by rising stars Liisi LaFontaine and Solea Pfeiffer. (James Earl Jones Theatre, previews begin October 15)

Waiting for Lefty

The actor Steven Pasquale makes his directing debut with this revival of Clifford Odets’s 1935 play made famous by the Group Theatre, about the boiling tensions of a Depression-era New York cabdrivers’ strike. The time is certainly ripe for some union-proud theater. (Classic Stage Company, October 15–November 22)

The Fantasticks

After a record 42-year run Off Broadway, this charming little musical about parents who pretend to feud to get each other’s kids to fall in love is finally hitting Broadway — with a twist. This time, the kids are gay. Tom Jones, lyricist-librettist of the original, worked on this version before his death in 2023. Now, we’ll get to see how the revisions play out as directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli (Schmigadoon!). (Hayes Theater, previews begin October 22)

In the Heights

Somehow, it’s been 19 years since the Off Broadway debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s first musical. New York City Center’s Encores! now takes it on for one of the series’ signature short-run revivals with an inevitably longer run to follow. David Mendizábal (Mexodus) is directing this version with a cast of young new names. (New York City Center, previews begin October 28)

Much Ado About Nothing

Jamie Lloyd may not be able to end Shakespeare’s romantic comedy with someone mostly naked covered in blood — or maybe he can! American audiences will find out when the director’s West End production, starring Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston as the merrily warring lovers Beatrice and Benedick, arrives on Broadway. (Winter Garden Theatre, previews begin October 31)



November

Elektra

The poet Anne Carson is known for her piercing and distinctive translations of the Greeks, and director Daniel Fish (2018’s menacing and marvelous Oklahoma!revival) isn’t afraid to pull out the knives when grappling with a classic. Their take on the story of Agamemnon’s obsessive daughter — fixated on revenge since his death at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra — should be something fierce to behold. It’s also a part of the Theatre for a New Audience’s first season fully programmed by Arin Arbus, its new artistic director, an exciting lineup that includes work by Suzanne Bocanegra and Arbus’s King Lear starring John Douglas Thompson. (Theatre for a New Audience, November 10–December 6)

Galileo

A rock musical about Renaissance heliocentrist genius and enemy of the Church Galileo Galilei is one of the wilder pitches we can imagine, yet maybe it could be kind of fun? It stars Raúl Esparza, a true musical-theater gem. We’re excited to hear him sing about anything, even telescopes. (Shubert Theatre, previews begin November 10)

Inter Alia

Playwright Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin — the team behind Prima Facie, for which Jodie Comer won a Tony — are back with another star-driven, issue-forward legal drama. Will the formula strike gold again? In this case, a powerful judge finds her convictions tested when her son becomes the subject of an investigation. She’ll be played by the formidable Rosamund Pike, making her Broadway debut after winning an Olivier for the role in London. (Music Box Theatre, previews begin November 10)

La Distance

Tiago Rodrigues, the Portuguese auteur and director of the Festival d’Avignon, snagged a top spot in our slate of favorite shows in 2024 with Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, a breathtaking hypothetical study of what might happen to a family, and a world, maimed by state violence. Now, he’s back at BAM with a speculative tale about choice and consequences set in 2077, when humanity’s ability to survive on Earth is quickly crumbling and a daughter leaves her father behind for a chosen exile on Mars. (BAM Next Wave, November 18–29)

A View From the Bridge

Everything about this production is odd but also … intriguing? Sam Rockwell, Marin Ireland, and Alfred Molina lead a buzzy revival of the Arthur Miller play — about a Red Hook longshoreman whose protectiveness toward his teenage niece metastasizes into violent obsession — at, of all places, La MaMa. The show’s producers are touting their arrangement with the East Village institution as not just any old rental but a test-drive for a new “sustainable framework” that rethinks the relationship between commercial theaters and nonprofits. Potentially fascinating stuff onstage and off. (La MaMa, previews begin November 27)

You Never Learn

The writer-director-performer William Sydney makes unabashedly off-kilter theater, riffing on the Bible, Brecht, and Walter Benjamin, among others. His new play is based on Jane Austen’s Emma, so it’s in the best of company with Clueless, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that its story of a handsome, clever, rich young woman, her hypochondriac father, and her well-meaning, not always well-made choices won’t look like the latest from the BBC. Sources say there’s a gorilla involved. (Target Margin Theater, November 27–December 13)



December

Hole!

Over the past few months, people have been raving about this show in terms as breathless as they are nearly incomprehensible. The project, which has played Joe’s Pub, Soho Theatre in London, and Edinburgh Fringe, is a collaboration between the theatrical degenerates Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hooper that tells a tale through songs about butt plugs, Evangelical cults, and what seems to be a trek in the style of The Road across postapocalypse America. (Playwrights Horizons, December 1–January 10)

Saigon

St. Ann’s Warehouse has programmed the heck out of its fall season. Alongside Daniel Fish’s gripping Kramer/Fauci and the return of Emma Rice and Kneehigh’s bracingly imaginative treatment of Tristan & Yseult, the theater and film director Caroline Guiela Nguyen presents her meditation on home, loss, migration, and memory. Saigon is set in two different restaurants at two moments in time — 1990s France and 1950s Vietnam — as Nguyen weaves the lives and longings of strangers into an intimate and expansive story of connection in exile. (St. Ann’s Warehouse, December 3–20)



To Be Announced

Spring Awakening

If you were near midtown this purple summer, you might have noticed the crowd of bright-eyed young musical-theater actors lining up to audition for this revival of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s 19th-century German rock musical, all hoping to become the next Jonathan Groff or Lea Michele. We’ll see if whoever makes it into the cast, along with director Danya Taymor (an old hand at teen drama: see The Outsiders and John Proctor Is the Villain), can manage to conjure a spell on par with the original’s. (Studio Seaview, fall 2026)