If the last season on Broadway overflowed with new musicals, this fall is looking like the beginning of the season of the diva. We’ve got Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard, Audra McDonald in Gypsy, and dueling musical-comedy treasures Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her, with more to come in the spring, and a few divas having already debuted over the summer (shout-out to raging misfits Princess Winnifred and, well, Mary Todd Lincoln). But if you zoom out a bit, the larger theme may just be stardom in general. In the wake of that post-strike Hollywood contraction, the serious men of film and television are coming to New York’s stages too, with Robert Downey Jr. alighting at Lincoln Center and Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh squeezing into smaller spaces Off Broadway. There are also new productions about chasing fame, as with The Hills of California or even Tammy Faye; plays that might launch lesser-known names into greater fame; and return engagements of famed productions, as with Gatz. Curtain up! Light the lights!
September
McNeal
Lincoln Center Theater, September 5–November 24
While Kylo Ren sings the blues downtown, Iron Man (and, I guess, Doctor Doom?) is coming to Broadway in Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s new play. Bartlett Sher directs Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal, a “great American novelist” with an estranged son and a sinister obsession with AI. He may not have an arc reactor implanted in his chest, but through his increasingly maniacal ambition, is McNeal becoming less and less human? — Sara Holdren
The Hills of California
Broadhurst Theatre, previews begin September 11
The playwright Jez Butterworth swings big — his sprawling, rollicking Jerusalem (anchored by a blow-your-hair-back central performance by Mark Rylance) was up for the Best Play Tony in 2011, and eight years later his haunted Irish family drama The Ferryman (anchored by a real goose and a real baby) walked away with the prize. His new play, The Hills of California, follows the reunion of four sisters, once a childhood singing group, at the bedside of their dying mother in the rundown amusement park town of Blackpool, England. Sam Mendes directs this musical, multigenerational drama-with-a-capital-D in its transfer from London’s West End. — S.H.
Yellow Face
Roundabout, Todd Haimes Theatre, September 13–November 24
David Henry Hwang became the first Asian American playwright to win the Best Play Tony with M. Butterfly in 1988. Now Leigh Silverman directs the Broadway premiere of his sharp-fanged, semi-autobiographical farce about the tricky forging of art and identity. In Yellow Face, a beleaguered Asian American playwright (Daniel Dae Kim) speaks out against the titular toxic casting trend in a production of Miss Saigon… and then proceeds to inadvertently cast a white actor as the Asian protagonist in his own play. What could possibly go right? — S.H.
Safety Not Guaranteed
BAM Harvey Theater, September 17–October 20
Obie winner Lee Sunday Evans directs this new musical adaptation of the 2012 indie film, in which a disillusioned magazine intern forms an unlikely friendship with a local weirdo who’s placed a classified ad looking for someone to join him to go back in time. (“I have only done this once before,” reads the ad. “Safety not guaranteed.”) If all of that isn’t nerd-nostalgia coded enough, Guster’s Ryan Miller wrote the score. If you still get “Barrel of a Gun” stuck in your head, this year’s Next Wave fest is for you. —S.H.
Hold On to Me Darling
Lucille Lortel Theatre, September 24–December 22
The overwhelmingly large Adam Driver returns to the stage this fall in Kenneth Lonergan’s play about a country-western star in freefall after the death of his mother. Hold On to Me Darling follows Strings McCrane as he abandons fame and fortune to return to his small town roots in Tennessee. Our burning questions include: Is there a better country singer name than Strings McCrane? Will Adam Driver play guitar? And will he have to duck on the Lucille Lortel stage? —S.H.
Romeo + Juliet
Circle in the Square, previews begin September 26
Sam Gold is more than fond of recontextualizing a classic, whether he’s reconsidering the depiction of disability in The Glass Menagerie or serving Aquavit at intermission at An Enemy of the People. It’s hard to know what direction he’ll take with Shakespeare’s tragic teen romance, but he’s cast two screen stars: Kit Connor, of Netflix’s cozy romance Heartstopper, and Rachel Zegler, who played another version of Juliet in the 2022 film of West Side Story, both making their Broadway debuts. There will also be singing, with music by pop whisperer Jack Antonoff. — Jackson McHenry
Sunset Boulevard
St. James Theater, previews begin September 28
This upcoming Broadway season is fully dominated by divas, and it kicks off with the greatest star of all (according to herself): Norma Desmond, a fading silent film star with dreams of a return to cinema. The original run of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pop operatic adaptation of the classic Billy Wilder film was famous for its sumptuous sets, its behind-the-scenes drama, and for Glenn Close’s Tony-winning turn as Norma. Director Jamie Lloyd’s production is more stripped-down, European-style, now starring former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger in what London critics have referred to as a career-defining role of its own. We’ll see if the hosannas continue as her Norma comes home to America at last. — J.M.
October
Tammy Faye
The Palace Theatre, previews begin October 19
A musical that may have all others beat simply in terms of sheer tonnage of fake eyelashes, Tammy Faye seems as if it will learn as hard into camp as possible. The music is by Elton John and Jake Shears, the book is by James Graham, Rupert Goold directs, and British theater star Katie Brayben plays America’s favorite kinda-sorta very complicit embezzling televangelist. She’s a relative unknown over here, but hey, the part just won Jessica Chastain an Oscar. Her husband, Jim, will be played by Christian Borle, after Andrew Rannells dropped out at the last minute owing to a contract dispute. On theme! — J.M.
Death Becomes Her
Lunt-Fontanne Theater, previews begin October 23
Given that movie-to-musical adaptations are all the rage, it’s surprising that nobody’s taken a swing at the Robert Zemeckis/Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn camp-and-gore-fest that is Death Becomes Her. The story of two frenemies fighting over the secret to eternal youth, this version comes to us after positive buzz in Chicago. At the very least, it provides two meaty lead roles for two of New York’s musical-comedic not-so-secret weapons: Megan Hilty (a.k.a. Ivy, the correct choice for Marilyn in Smash) and Jennifer Simard (of Company, among many other great scene-stealing roles). — J.M.
Reconstructing (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside)
BAM Fishman Space, October 24–27
More than a decade ago, Rachel Chavkin and her Brooklyn-based theater collective known as the TEAM, created Architecting, a Rubik’s cube of a play that, among other things, used Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara as lenses through which to view the pernicious rise of American capitalism. For just a few performances at this year’s Next Wave, the TEAM keeps that complex, combustible project going: In Reconstructing, under the co-direction of Chavkin and Zhailon Levingston, a protean house sits center stage — is it a new, Tyvek-wrapped suburban home? Or the muddy ruins of a flood? Or Scarlett’s Tara? The show brings together a writing collective of 21 artists (aged 28 through 98, including André De Shields, Jeremy O. Harris, and Eric Berryman) to wrestle with questions of intimacy and society-building in the wake of American slavery. — S.H.
King Lear
The Shed, October 26–December 16
Kenneth Branagh’s only 63, but that was pretty old in Britain around 700 BCE. Or if all of your co-stars are in drama school. Either way, Branagh is dividing up his kingdom and howling on the heath this fall in a new production at the Shed, featuring a supporting cast of fresh faces from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck co-direct the show along with its lead, who’s rounding out a tragic hat trick after playing Hamlet in 1996 and Macbeth in 2014. — S.H.
Swept Away
Longacre Theatre, previews begin October 29
After buzzy runs at Berkeley Rep and D.C.’s Arena Stage, the new musical by the Avett Brothers and John Logan (a Tony winner for Red) brings its story of shipwreck and the macabre and, here, melodious aftermath to Broadway. Twenty years ago, the Avett Brothers based their album Mignonette on the true story of four sailors who, in 1884, spent 19 days adrift in a dinghy after the loss of their ship. Starvation, moral quandary, and nautical cannibalism ensued. Now, with some retooling, the shanties of Mignonette become the latest addition to Broadway’s growing catalog of millennial folk rock. When’s the Mumford & Sons musical? — S.H.
Ragtime
New York City Center, October 30–November 14
As City Center’s Encores! series of musical revivals has edged closer to the present, they’ve hit the big historical pageant musicals of the 1990s: Parade, Titanic, and now the biggest, pageant-y-est of all, Ragtime. The Ahrens-and-Flaherty adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel, with a book by Terrence McNally, sweeps across the early 20th century, telling the entwined stories of three families alongside a host of real historical figures (Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit). Encores!’s artistic director Lear deBessonet, who wrangled that super-starry post-pandemic Into the Woods, has assembled a plum cast of singers for this journey back to before, including Joshua Henry, Joy Woods, Brandon Uranowitz, and Caissie Levy. — J.M
November
Gatz
The Public Theater, November 1–December 1
Even if you’ve momentarily had your fill of beautiful shirts and little green lights, you should make time for the return of Elevator Repair Service’s marvelous Gatz. The company created their playfully transcendent, six-and-a-half-hour-long performance of every word of The Great Gatsby more than ten years ago, and its encore performance this fall at the Public is being billed as the show’s final bow. Don’t be daunted — the book flies by, and the actors of ERS perform like acrobats, swinging and balancing on the fine strands of Fitzgerald’s text, brilliantly accessing the aspirational throb of its broken heart. — S.H.
Cult of Love
Hayes Theater, previews begin November 20
We’ve seen Leslye Headland’s work mostly onscreen recently—as a writer and director she’s brought an acidic bent to Russian Doll and Star Wars with The Acolyte—but she’s coming back to the stage with a big, traditional family drama. (Something Second Stage tends to specialize in, considering last season’s Appropriate.) Cult of Love, which is somewhat autobiographical for Headland, takes place as a very Christian, very fractured family gathers together from the holidays. It comes to New York by way of Berkeley Rep, directed by Trip Cullman. — J.M.
Gypsy
Majestic Theatre, previews begin November 21
Here she is, boys! Here she is, world! With six Tonys, Audra McDonald has more individual wins than any other actor, and with her natural radiance and resonance, it shouldn’t be hard to see why her Momma Rose—the genre’s most terrifyingly tragic theater mom, not to mention an extremely demanding role to sing—was herself meant for the stage. Rumors and wishes abound as to who will play her daughter, the wallflower turned celebrity stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, in George C. Wolfe’s production. Whoever she is, she’s got one hell of a mother to contend with. — S.H.
Eureka Day
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, in previews November 25 for a December 16 opening
You knew a vaccination play had to be coming to Broadway, but this one was actually written before the pandemic: In Jonathan Spector’s comedy, last produced in New York in 2019, board members from a progressive progressive California elementary school debate how to deal with a mumps outbreak. Anna D. Shapiro directs this version, which comes with a cast of theatrical heavy hitters including Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht, and Amber Gray. — J.M.
Another show coming out later this fall:
This Is My Favorite Song
Playwrights Horizons, fall 2024
We’ve experienced a bloom of comedians having breakout moments with pieces of solo(ish) theater over the past few years, from Mike Birbiglia to Cole Escola. Among this fall’s crop, there’s a new piece by Francesca D’Uva, a Brooklyn alt-comedian favorite of Vulture’s staff—you really must see D’UVa perform her surreal and hilarious bit about Moana—that’s a “musical fever dream about sex, grief, nannying, and Shakira.” — J.M.
