The Best Plays and Musicals of 2025

Looking over the list of shows that really stuck with me in 2025, I’m moved by how many of them are fundamentally about the act of conjuring, of making believe within an empty or even a hostile space — imagination and embodiment as radical efforts, courageous and purgative, at times frightening or cautionary. I’m moved because it’s the oldest and the youngest form of theater — “Sing in me, muse” … “Let’s pretend” — and because it marks a shift away from the flatter, more self-certain issue dramas that have dominated so much programming in recent years. Plays like Liberation and John Proctor Is the Villain were political animals that also had full lives, teeth and soft bellies, questions and mysteries along with cries from the heart — whereas productions like Vanya, The Brothers Size, and Lobster made real wrenching magic out of the strange, sad, loving, combustible act of trying to tell a story.

Music Box Theatre

The theater’s big deployers of expensive live-feed scenography tend to be self-serious — which is one of many reasons that Kip Williams’s camera-happy adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s still deadly clever novella came as such a delight. Sarah Snook cartwheeled through 26 roles — from the beautiful and doomed protagonist to his oily, eloquent corruptor, Lord Henry, to the tragically self-sabotaging actress Sibyl Vane — without, seemingly, losing her breath or putting a single curl on Dorian’s golden head out of place. Meanwhile, a team of flat-out-astounding camera-handlers and stagehands flurried around her like puppeteers around a hypercomplex marionette, turning an almost-empty stage into a Technicolor whirlwind of character and story. The effect was that of a giddy high followed by the inevitable crash: Poor, monstrous Dorian — and woe to us, his heirs, trapped in our own bright little boxes of vanity and influence.

Brooklyn Academy of Music

Rebecca Frecknall’s fierce, stripped-back, literally percussive revival of Tennessee Williams’s sweltering southern tragedy had its haters, but I was here for it. Even if a shirtless Paul Mescal was the draw, I thrilled at hearing Williams’s spiky, self-lacerating poetry spoken with the Brits’ commitment to pace. No wilting languor on this veranda — for that matter, no veranda either — just ferocity, desperation, and, of course, brutal desire. Mescal’s admirably vulnerable Stanley, Patsy Ferran’s Blanche (bright-eyed, volcanic, and semi-feral), and Anjana Vasan‘s earthy Stella balanced and buoyed each other, revivifying the play as an exercise not in stardom but in devastating three-part harmony.

Booth Theatre

Lorde made an epic comeback this year, and I’m not even talking about her newest album or her Where’s Waldo? tour through lower Manhattan back in April. I’m talking about the banging finale to Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, in which Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo danced to rouse the devil to the singer’s defiant anthem “Green Light.” The easy way to describe Belflower’s play is to call it a revisitation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible for the Me Too era, but that wouldn’t do justice to its nuance or its humor. In an 11th-grade English classroom in rural Georgia, Belflower’s characters grappled not only with Miller’s text — its lasting power and its painful blind spots — but with the dreams and demons of their own all-too-complicated burgeoning adulthood. Gabriel Ebert was immaculately cast as the teens’ seeming ally of a teacher, and Sink and her castmates all bared their teeth and howled their humanity at the moon.

Playwrights Horizons

Ambitious in form and merciless in attack, Nazareth Hassan’s biting exposé of what they call “theater’s addiction to power” turned the good old making-a-play play into a full-fledged house of horrors. Under Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s meticulous direction, the show’s ensemble embodied a narcissistic auteur with a Genius grant (a very scary Ronald Peet) and a company of actors who offer themselves up like sacrifices, exalting in the gradual, intentional theft of their autonomy, their dignity, and their grip on the right and the real. Practice also featured the best intermission this year, in which Peet’s director stood like a Nazi commandant, legs spread and back to the audience, soaked in Masha Tsimring’s hellish red lights, while a wall of mirrors slowly moved downstage, transforming the space from Act One’s rehearsal hall to Act Two’s Berlin performance venue. Over the loudspeakers, the operatic bass Davone Tines boomed the eerily hypnotic prelude to Julius Eastman’s “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc,” but God was nowhere to be found — just a devil in saint’s clothing.

The Shed

The Brothers Size has always been a lyrical, muscular play, and after almost 20 years its return to New York felt sharper and more graceful than ever — a show entirely grown into itself. Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney co-directed with Bijan Sheibani, and together with choreographer Juel D. Lane and the play’s agile trio of actors — especially the riveting André Holland as elder brother Ogun Size — they created something truly balletic, a profound, incantatory dance of grief and love. They also kept the show fast and funny, their confidence mirrored in the potent spareness of Suzu Sakai’s in-the-round set design. Especially at the Shed, a venue given to overblown aesthetics, it felt invigorating to see magic made with little more than bodies, rhythm, and a circle of sand.

Public Theater

Else Went’s epic elegy to the great loves and losses of high school captured a certain moment — the precarious turn of the millennium — and a certain kind of teenage terror and heartache with precision and compassion. In the Dungeons & Dragons game run by its aspiring young writer, Riley (a wonderful Greg Cuellar), Time became an omnipotent deity, speaking as a boom from the blue and urging the adventuring alter ego of Riley’s childhood friend Clara (Olivia Barressi) to choose: “Sunrise or sunset?” In a way, Went’s whole project was an experiment with time and a kind of offering at its shrine — the show unfolded patiently over five hours; its characters stood on the cusp of adulthood, wondering how to “do anything worthwhile” with their lives, or how much life and possibility would in fact be granted them; and the play itself executed a kind of time travel, a visit to a vanished childhood, still vivid and formative even in its evanescence.

Public Theater

“Give sorrow words,” the prince Malcolm urges Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Richard Nelson’s extraordinary collaboration with Ukraine’s Theater on Podil did just that, finding an expression for contemporary grief through a gorgeous evocation of history. Performed in Ukrainian by a company of six phenomenal actors, Nelson’s play took place in 1920, when the real-life “father of the modern Ukrainian theater,” Les Kurbas, took his theater company to the countryside while Kyiv was under attack. There they performed the first Ukrainian translation of Macbeth, trading tickets for food and caring for their children in an abandoned farmhouse. In When the Hurlyburly’s Done, we sat with the women of Kurbas’s company in the quiet hours after a performance as they prepared dinner, joked, and reminisced and chatted about art and kids and men and war, and wondered if the future would be as cruel as the present. The performances were exquisite, the choreography (by Charlotte Bydwell) superb, and the echoes of the story’s then in our terrible now almost too much to bear.

Lucille Lortel Theatre

There are celebrity solo shows, and then there’s Andrew Scott’s Vanya. The buzz was entirely earned in this poignant, gripping, unsettlingly sexy one-actor reworking of Chekhov’s “scenes from country life.” As the show’s namesake, Scott was frantic and full of pathos; as the beautiful, ennui-riddled woman Vanya fixates on, he worked marvels with a gold-chain necklace and a soft sideways glance; and as the play’s secondary characters, like the household’s old nanny and a luckless neighbor, he fleshed out a whole world of eccentricity and yearning. Simon Stephens’s deceptively easy-speaking adaptation elucidated the spiritual overlaps between Chekhov’s Russia and Scott’s native Ireland, and Sam Yates’s direction turned the project — already deeply moving in Scott’s conjuring of the play’s unquiet souls — into a meditation on the spaciousness and loneliness of the actor.

The Tank

Kallan Dana’s hilarious and curious (in both senses) memory play was an unsentimentally wrenching study of fixation — how certain people and stories get their claws into us and never let go. Directed with tenderness and comic precision by Hanna Yurfest, the show’s crack quintet of actors became awkward, ambitious teenagers in Portland, Oregon, three of them in thrall to a charismatic fourth, Nora, a 16-year-old auteur with big plans to make Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s deranged 1971 play Cowboy Mouth into the hit of their high school’s One Acts Festival. Nora’s ex, meanwhile, is starring in the school’s big musical instead, so every time strains from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast invade the moldy classroom where Nora is attempting to work her genius, she also gets a stab to the heart over the girl who left her, the one she thought was her misfit soulmate. Told in rehearsals, fragments of memory from Nora’s actors in their adulthood, and increasingly desperate voicemails from Nora to her lost love, Lobster was a tragedy tucked inside a comedy, an ode to aspiring, impassioned youth and to the unforgettable, transformative magnetism of strange people and strange art.

Laura Pels Theatre/James Earl Jones Theatre

When I called Bess Wohl’s Liberation the best play I had seen all season, it was, to be fair, only February. But now 2026 is in sight, Liberation has transferred to Broadway, and its incredible light remains undimmed. An unqualified triumph, Wohl’s play weaves its spell from strands of memory, history, and autobiography: It follows a feminist consciousness-raising group in the 1970s and, at the same time, also and always unfolds in the right-now reality of the theater, where a narrator stand-in for Wohl (played by the fantastic Susannah Flood) is looking back on the group her mother founded, trying to reconcile a radical past with a sinister present. Whitney White’s direction is muscular and meticulous, the play’s whole ensemble is inspired, and the sudden rush of simple theatrical magic in Wohl’s finale — where the marvelous Betsy Aidem volunteers to stand in for the narrator’s absent mother — is a stroke of quietly cumulative brilliance that dares your heart not to break.

Onstage in 2025, the past caught up with us. The consequences of COVID-era economics — swelling costs, especially for musicals, and an accompanying need to provide enough zing to get large audiences into seats — made themselves known in the programming, in splashy star casting on Broadway and in the proliferation of more intentionally modestly budgeted work elsewhere. But there was also the sense, in the greatest work of this year, of artists turning back to what’s led us here, confronting and also embracing history at the moment of its impact with the present. In Liberation, Bess Wohl had the feminism of 1970 colliding with the feminism of our time; in Can I Be Frank?, Morgan Bassichis performed a séance with an ahead-of-the-curve comedian of the AIDS era; a revival of The Brothers Size communed across the decades with itself. Theater, alive in a flickering glorious moment of performance, kept leaning on its considerable talent for raising the dead, asking how they led us here, and how, with or against them, we might lead ourselves back out.

An unnamed apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

I recognize that it’s inside baseball to recognize a production that played to only a half-dozen audience members a night inside an apartment in Greenpoint, but I hope it’s cause enough to bring Slanted Floors back to a larger audience, or at least for the team behind it to keep putting on plays like this one. In Billy McEntee’s drama, we saw two halves of a Brooklyn gay couple, played by Adam Chanler-Berat and Kyle Beltran, negotiate life as aspiring theater-adjacent creatives while working through the tensions of their own relationship and prepping dinner (a hearty soup, served to those of us watching). The piece had precision realism, helped along by Ryan Dobrin, but also, crucially, an open and wandering heart, handing Beltran a speech where he imagines a whole alternate-universe life upstate that I will not soon forget.

Second Stage

In equal part lacerating and hilarious, Talene Monahon’s drama splits its acts between a recreation of the 1925 legal battle that the Armenian refugee immigrant Tatos Cartozian fought to be recognized as a white man and thus become a naturalized American citizen and a surreal reality TV taping, 100 years later, of a show very much like Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Monahon’s script juggles the knives of satire and devastation, and Second Stage’s production had a director, in David Cromer, and a cast, including Andrea Martin, Will Brill, Tamara Sevunts, Raffi Barsoumian, Susan Pourfar, and a heartbreaking Nael Nacer, that could keep up with the tricky emotional choreography of assimilation.

Theater 154

You have to give it up for theater that meets the moment with a howl of pain and fury. At a time when most New York theaters were disorientingly silent on the subject of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the playwright Torrey Townsend took himself and the institutions around him to task with a very meta drama. To try to summarize it succinctly: Jewish Plot is about a reading of an imaginary 19th-century author’s play about antisemitism that a version of the playwright is trying (and failing) to update as a career boost, because he’s been told playing into his own Jewishness will help him succeed. All the while, he’s alienating his cast with increasingly arcane rewrites. Like those poor actor characters, Jewish Plot teetered under the pile of things it tried to accomplish at once, but when it connected it really connected, delivering an indelible final monologue that transfigured the theater into a wasteland.

Atlantic Theater Company

What would New York theater do without David Greenspan? He’s always working, and his impish delight in acting makes him a reliable high point in pretty much every production he’s in — right now, that would be Prince Faggot, where he dons a wig as a palace aide. In the spring, the playwright Mona Pirnot handed him a tribute on a silver platter where, in imitation of Greenspan’s own solo performances, he played every member of a clique of 30-something playwright friends gathered for a reading at an apartment. Pirnot’s play contained plenty of despair and self-laceration at the economic realities of playwriting, contraposed with sheer delight in what Greenspan can pull off onstage. It’s insane to pursue a stage career, but look at what magic it can contain.

Public Theater

It’s hard to think of a more indelible monologue this year than the one Deirdre O’Connell delivered while sitting in a cloud, rhapsodizing about the suffering humanity inflicts in her name. In the second of Caryl Churchill’s quartet of short plays, O’Connell rambled on as “The Gods,” reciting the chain of retribution that makes up Greek myth, including matricide, patricide, fratricide, and war. “We’re the reason it happens, we can enjoy a war,” she purrs. “We don’t exist.” Churchill’s abiding interest in the violence that sustains specifically Western civilization pervades the play — in other vignettes, a boy wooed a fragile girl made of glass, and O’Connell was a Londoner pensioner who kept an imp in bottle to wish ill on her enemies — and here, it crystallized into a bloodied spear point. The gods tell us to kill, and they love it, and they don’t exist, but we make them up because we love to kill.

Public Theater

The most moving act of kindness I’ve seen onstage this year occurred midway through the five-hour staging of Else Went’s Initiative. A California teenager named Riley (Greg Cuellar), trying his hand at devising a storyline in Dungeons & Dragons, has crafted a heroic fable for his former best friend Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi) to repair a relationship splintered by high-school circumstance. Under Emma Rose Went’s direction, as Clara discovers she does have the power to repair her fantasy universe, a glowing orb descends from the ceiling, engulfing the theater in warmth. Throughout Initiative, which lies somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Our Town, you’ll see the extreme mundane of nerdy California 2000s teenage life — it gave me stress flashbacks to my own experiences — contrasted with the possibilities of imagination and storytelling, which offers an escape for these characters from “Coastal Podunk,” but also, crucially, a way to heal each other and the world.

The Shed

The image of the circle repeats across Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play. It’s present in the dust (or maybe sand, or cocaine) laid out on the stage, and you can sense something cyclical in the action of the drama — two brothers, one of them making his way back into life after a stint in prison, both reckoning with the patterns of their lives. The sense of repetition enhanced and deepened the play’s revival, co-directed by McCraney and Bijan Sheibani at the Shed, with McCraney’s longtime friend and collaborator André Holland as the elder brother, Ogun. Nearly 20 years on, these artists could return to the same material and still find deep mysteries within it.

Lucille Lortel

Andrew Scott’s co-stars in Vanya included a piano, a tennis ball, a rope swing, a tea towel, and a gold chain. Sure, Scott was the only human star in this Chekhov play adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates, but like any great actor, he made space for his scene partners, which in this case were the inanimate objects that helped indicate all the despairing characters on the play’s now-Irish estate. Through the prism of Scott, Vanya was as rich as ever — richer, in some ways, for how it lived both in Scott’s body and the objects around him, which kept even characters who weren’t in a scene at the front of your mind. I think, surprisingly often, of the piano that sat at the side of the stage, operating as a spectral presence of Vanya’s late sister.

SoHo Playhouse

The solo stage performance that’s also a stand-up show — a child of theater, comedy and, often, economically friendly production budgets — was everywhere this year, but no one brought more heft and invention to the form than Morgan Bassichis. In their shapeshifting and blistering work, Bassichis, directed by Sam Pinkleton, revived the “rants” of Frank Maya — a pioneering gay comedian of the late 1980s and early ’90s who died of AIDS just as he was breaking into the mainstream. Bassichis is fascinated by what was urgent to Maya in the midst of an epidemic, the way he called out Liberace and other closeted celebrities, and also his petty and personal commentary, like diatribes about men who don’t call back after a date. An inquiry into what comedy is and what power we want it to wield that was, thank God, also cuttingly hilarious.

Laura Pels Theatre/James Earl Jones Theatre

In the first few self-effacing minutes of Liberation, Bess Wohl, through her onstage avatar, a playwright played by Susannah Flood, tells the audience not to worry: The running time isn’t too long, and you’ll get your phones back soon. Don’t be fooled, because even though Liberation occupies a relatively modest physical space — it plays out in a gym basement in 1970s Ohio where a consciousness-raising women’s-liberation group is meeting — the play climbs toward a cosmic wallop. Wohl welds together her memories of her mother and her own interviews with second-wave feminists into a time-hopping, soul-searching portrait of their movement, its achievements and failures, and its legacy. Directed by Whitney White, with a honed-to-perfection ensemble, Liberation overwhelmed me twice, both on and Off Broadway.