Musicals & Music Theater in Greater Boston
Thu Oct 22 – Sun Oct 25
A drought has put every toilet under private control, and using one requires paying a corporation for the privilege. Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis wrote a satire that keeps interrupting itself to point out what a musical is doing. Queer Artists & Players call it their largest production yet.
Thu Oct 8 – Sat Oct 10
Seven plays by UMass Boston students, all receiving their first performance, given as enhanced staged readings rather than full productions and free to the public. The bill includes Donovan Ambroise's Jack and the Beans, about a talking can of beans, and Deleyah Creese's When Fall Comes Around Again. Michael Fennimore directs with two student directors; Ginger Lazarus is dramaturg.
Tue Oct 6 – Sun Oct 11
Eric Idle's stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with the killer rabbit, the French taunting and a score he wrote with John Du Prez. This touring production follows Josh Rhodes's Broadway revival, which he both directed and choreographed.
Thu Oct 15 – Sun Oct 18
Fifty-five original songs by Taylor Mac and Matt Ray, taken from their rock-opera meditation on queerness and performed by an international collective in costumes by Machine Dazzle. The company describes the effect as carrying the elation of a pride parade.
Fri Oct 2 – Sun Oct 18
Richard O'Brien's rock musical strands a newly engaged couple at the castle of Dr Frank-N-Furter, who is building a man in his laboratory. Fifty years on it survives on audience participation as much as on the score. Staged here for mature audiences.
Sat Oct 17 – Sat Oct 24
A revue of songs by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire, who went on to write Baby and Closer Than Ever: no book and no plot, just a sequence about love arriving, failing, and going nowhere at all. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company.
Tue Oct 13 – Sun Oct 25
The true story of the 1943 deception in which British intelligence floated a corpse carrying false invasion plans, told by a small cast playing dozens of parts at speed. SpitLip's musical won the Olivier for Best New Musical after its West End premiere, and has since run on Broadway.
Thu Oct 22 – Sun Oct 25
Nobody Cares is Laura Benanti's one-woman comedy show, stories and original songs about motherhood, people-pleasing and ageing, arriving after a run at the Edinburgh Fringe and two Off-Broadway engagements; the New York Times made it a Critic's Pick. Benanti, a Tony winner and five-time nominee, created it; music director Todd Almond co-wrote the songs, and Annie Tippe, who directed Dave Malloy's Octet, directs.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25 · 7pm
Sat Oct 24 / Sun Oct 25 · 7pm
Bill Barclay's play with music, an original adaptation of The Life and Music of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, follows the Black violin virtuoso through his friendships with Mozart and Marie Antoinette and his “widely unrecognized contribution to the abolition of slavery.” Barclay conceived, wrote and directs it. The Chamber Orchestra of Boston opens its season with the piece, in collaboration with Concert Theatre Works and Project STEP.
Sat Oct 17 – Sat Oct 31
Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel as a chamber musical in which the dead never quite leave: Mary Lennox arrives at a Yorkshire house full of ghosts who sing alongside the living. Marsha Norman wrote the book and lyrics, Lucy Simon the music.
Wed Oct 28 – Sat Oct 31
Sondheim and Lapine send Cinderella, Jack, Rapunzel and the Baker past their happy endings into a second act where the wishes granted in the first one come due. It opened on Broadway in 1987 and won three Tony Awards. An undergraduate cast takes on the score.
Wed Oct 21 – Sun Nov 1
The other Phantom: Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit wrote their version of Gaston Leroux's novel at the same time as Lloyd Webber's and were beaten to the stage, so it is rarely produced. It gives the Phantom considerably more backstory.
Wed Oct 28 – Sun Nov 1
An anxious high-schooler lets a lie about a dead classmate grow into a public story he cannot stop. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul wrote the score and Steven Levenson the book; it opened on Broadway in 2016 and won six Tony Awards, including best musical. An undergraduate production.
Fri Oct 16 – Sun Nov 1
Rodgers and Hammerstein's last musical together opens Riverside Theatre Works's forty-fifth anniversary season: a novice sent from the abbey to keep house for a widowed Austrian naval officer and his seven children, and the family's departure over the mountains as Austria is annexed. The score runs from "Do-Re-Mi" to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain."
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Nov 1
Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire's musical of the DreamWorks film, staged by Stage 284's adult Main Stage company at the Community House. An ogre bargains to reclaim his swamp, escorts a princess out of a tower with a talking donkey in tow, and finds the fairy-tale misfits are the ones worth keeping.
Fri Sep 25 – Sun Nov 8
Laurence O'Keefe's camp horror musical, book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, about the half-bat, half-boy tabloid legend from the Weekly World News — a misunderstood monster taken in by a veterinarian's family and reviled by the town, searching for somewhere to belong. The production’s Halloween performance also adds a photobooth, a costume contest and themed drinks.
Sat Oct 31 – Sat Nov 14
Thomas Meehan's book with Charles Strouse's music and Martin Charnin's lyrics, taken from the Little Orphan Annie comic strip: a Depression-era orphan who believes better days are always ahead, and turns out to be mostly right. Programmed into the Footlight Club's 150th-anniversary season.
Wed Sep 23 – Sun Nov 15
The Oz story told from the witches' side, taken from Gregory Maguire's novel: how the green girl came to be called wicked and the blonde one good. Stephen Schwartz wrote the score and Winnie Holzman the book. This is an eight-week sit-down run.
Fri Oct 30 – Sun Nov 15
Alcott's four sisters in the 2005 Broadway musical, with Jo's writing ambition driving the book rather than the marriages. Allan Knee wrote the book, Jason Howland the music and Mindi Dickstein the lyrics. Doug Hodge directs for the Footlighters, with Chris Holownia as music director.
Tue Oct 27 – Sun Nov 22
Hannah flees an abusive relationship and rides the rails with three outcasts, and after barely surviving an illegal abortion she finds the Janes, the underground network that arranged abortions before Roe. Chadwick Stokes of Dispatch wrote the music for this world premiere.
Thu Nov 5 – Sun Nov 15
Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Sally and Schroeder across a series of short scenes drawn from Charles Schulz's strip. Clark Gesner wrote the songs and the book, and the whole thing runs on the rhythm of the comic rather than a plot.
Thu Nov 5 – Sun Nov 8
Six members of a Canadian chamber choir die on a roller coaster and wake in limbo, where a mechanical fortune teller offers one of them a return to life in exchange for a story. Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell's cult musical.
Thu Nov 5 – Sun Nov 8
Two clerks in a 1930s European perfumery bicker across the counter while carrying on an anonymous romance by letter, each unaware the other is the correspondent. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick wrote the score between Fiorello! and Fiddler on the Roof; Joe Masteroff's book comes from Miklos Laszlo's play Parfumerie, the same source as The Shop Around the Corner.
Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 8
The Broadway musical of the 1988 film, in the abridged Junior edition: a recently deceased couple enlist a chaotic ghost to scare off the family that has moved into their house. Staged by the Academy of the Company Theatre's youth performers.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:00pm
Ted Kaczynski appears before a parole board and recounts his life in song, hoping to prove that he never wanted to be a monster, only a star. John Lampe and Michael Wysong wrote the musical and perform it themselves. It played the Boston Fringe Festival before this booking.
$20–$25
Sun Nov 8 – Sat Nov 14
An evening of Christopher Durang's short comedies, among them The Actor's Nightmare, in which a man wanders on stage into a play he has never rehearsed and the cast carries on regardless, and a compressed Medea. Durang won the Tony for Best Play in 2013 for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.
Tue Nov 10 – Sat Nov 14
Anais Mitchell's folk opera retells Orpheus and Eurydice in a Depression-era underworld, with Hermes narrating and the band on stage throughout. It took eight Tony Awards including Best Musical, along with four Drama Desk and six Outer Critics Circle awards.
Fri Nov 13 – Sat Nov 21
The Quannapowitt Players' annual fundraiser, and the fifteenth of them: an evening of short holiday plays written new for the occasion each year rather than carried over. The company has run it as the opening of its holiday season since 2011, in its own house on Hopkins Street in Reading.
Sat Nov 14 – Sun Dec 13
A stage adaptation of the Pixar film, with songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who wrote Frozen and Coco: a clownfish leaves the reef to find his son, and meets most of the ocean on the way. Wheelock plays it over the holidays.
Tue Nov 17 – Sun Nov 22
The last musical Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote together: an Austrian convent, a widowed naval captain's seven children, and the Anschluss closing in around them. The score carries My Favorite Things, Edelweiss and Do-Re-Mi. This is a new North American touring production.
Wed Nov 18 – Sun Nov 22
The Catskills summer, the dance lessons and the line everyone in the room is waiting for, staged with the 1987 film's soundtrack largely intact. Lonny Price, who directed Sunset Boulevard and Beaches, directs this new national tour, launched in August 2026.
Wed Nov 18 – Sun Nov 22
Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley's musical follows a young woman, scarred in a childhood accident, across the American South by Greyhound in 1964 to a television preacher she believes can heal her. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical.
Nov 18–20/22
Wed Nov 18 · 7:30pm / Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 20 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 22 · 2pm
Shakespeare's comedy moves to a place not unlike Florida, where the country club abuts the Everglades, in this new musical by Daniel Lazour, Patrick Lazour and Mark Sonnenblick, whose credits include KPop Demon Hunters. It opens on the eve of billionaire film producer Demetrius and District Attorney Hermia's wedding. Patrick Lazour, Boston College's 2026–27 Monan Professor of Theatre Arts, directs, with music direction by David McGrory.
$12.50 (Students/Staff); $17.50 (Public)
Thu Nov 19 – Sun Nov 22
An electro-acoustic vocal piece from The HawtPlates, a two-time Grammy-winning family band, built around whether we can remember our own dreams and share the ones we hold in common. A review the company quotes calls it comfort found in sharing your most disorienting dreams.
Fri Nov 20 – Sun Nov 29
Horton, the Cat in the Hat and most of the Seuss canon folded into one sung-through show by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote Ragtime. Needham Community Theatre chose its season by committee, working from suggestions its own audience sent in.
Fri Nov 20 – Sun Nov 22
Parables from Matthew's gospel staged as a troupe of clowns playing games, with Stephen Schwartz's early-seventies score carrying most of the feeling. John-Michael Tebelak devised it as a graduate thesis before Schwartz wrote the songs, one of which, Day by Day, became a hit single.
Fri Nov 27 – Sun Dec 20
Joe Landry stages the Capra film as a 1940s radio broadcast: a small cast at microphones playing every part, with a foley table supplying the snow, the doors and the ice. The audience watches the sound being made as much as the story.
Fri Nov 27 – Sun Dec 20
The stage version of the Disney film, with the Lopezes' screen songs plus a dozen more written for the theatre, and considerably more weight given to what passes between the two sisters. Jennifer Lee, who co-directed the film, wrote the book.
Fri Nov 27
A touring family musical of the Book of Daniel — the Babylonian court, the accusation, the night in the lions' den — sharing a bill with Esther: The Bravest Queen, about the queen who risks her own position to intervene for her people. Aimed at all ages, with a large cast and score.
Thu Dec 3 – Wed Dec 23
Jon Kimbell's musical adaptation of Dickens's novella, made for this theatre and revived every holiday season since 1989, follows Ebenezer Scrooge through a night of spectral visits, set to traditional carols such as “The Boar's Head Carol” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing”. David Coffee plays Scrooge for a 32nd year, with Kevin P. Hill directing; the Boston Globe called it “spellbinding for all ages”.
Fri Dec 4 – Sat Dec 5
The Footlight Club's annual fundraiser reaches its twenty-fifth year: an evening of song and unexpected hilarity that has raised more than $600,000 towards restoring Eliot Hall. It falls inside the club's 150th-anniversary season, and runs for two performances. Eliot Hall has been the club's home since 1889.
Fri Dec 4 – Sun Jan 10
Two performers build the entire score live with loop pedals, telling the history of the Underground Railroad that ran south into Mexico rather than north into Canada. Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson wrote the piece and perform it themselves.
Fri Dec 4 – Sun Dec 20
Langston Hughes's gospel song cycle retells the Nativity through the African American experience in gospel music, dance, African drumming and spoken word. This is the National Center of Afro-American Artists' 56th season of the piece, which it bills as the world's longest-running production; Desiree A. Springer directs, keeping the staging legacy of founder Elma Lewis and the music arrangements of John Andrew Ross.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 13
The Broadway version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein television Cinderella, with a new book by Douglas Carter Beane that gives the heroine markedly more will of her own. The songs include In My Own Little Corner and Impossible/It's Possible. It was written for television in 1957 and first staged on Broadway in 2013.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 13
Reagle Music Theatre's long-running holiday variety show: Broadway standards and seasonal numbers performed by a large chorus with a live orchestra, rather than a book musical. The company has programmed some version of it every December for years, and it remains its principal seasonal production.
Sun Dec 6 · 5pm
The touring stage version of the 1965 Peanuts television special comes to Lynn for one December afternoon: Charlie Brown's search for the real meaning of Christmas, played out with the Vince Guaraldi songs and the whole gang, for audiences of all ages.
Tue Dec 8 – Sun Dec 20
Nicholas Sparks's novel as a musical, with three pairs of actors playing Allie and Noah at different ages, often on stage at the same time. Ingrid Michaelson wrote the score, her first for the theatre; it ran on Broadway in 2024.
Fri Dec 11 – Mon Dec 28
The 56th annual Midwinter Revels marks the country's 250th with an American story drawn from 19th-century songs and stories of the Great Plains, taking in the frontier and the Polish, Irish, German, Indigenous, Chinese and Black families who shaped it. The Cambridge Revels solstice show runs two and a half hours, with an intermission that includes The Lord of the Dance.
Tue Dec 15 – Wed Dec 16
The Divas, a group of five women singers who have appeared with the Company Theatre before, return for two nights of holiday cabaret, performing seasonal classics “with a twist.” Each ticket carries a temporary $2 restoration fee, which pays for a new stage floor, new drapes and new carpeting between the seats.
Fri Dec 18 – Thu Dec 24
Celebrate the season with a family-friendly variety show, with live music you can sing along to and plenty of puppets! All ages welcome, especially enjoyed by ages 2 - 9. Mixed puppetry styles and live music.
Tue Jan 12 – Sun Jan 24
The 1992 film about two women, one immortality potion and a great deal of bodily damage, turned into a high-camp musical. Marco Pennette wrote the book, with songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey. It transfers from Broadway to this tour.
Fri Jan 22 – Sun Jan 24
The soul, gospel and funk retelling of The Wizard of Oz that won Best Musical in 1975 and produced Ease on Down the Road. Schele Williams directs this touring revival, with additional material by Amber Ruffin and choreography by Jaquel Knight.
Fri Jan 22 – Sun Feb 7
Sondheim wrote almost the entire score in three-quarter time, sending several badly matched couples to a country weekend for a retired courtesan to sort out. It contains Send in the Clowns, written overnight for an actress who could not sustain long phrases.
Fri Jan 22 · 7:30pm
A jukebox musical that follows five women friends on a night out as they revisit their past, take stock of the present and look to the future, set to pop hits including “Lady Marmalade,” “It’s Raining Men,” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and “I Will Survive.” Applause Magazine described it as “Desperate Housewives meets Mamma Mia.” Spectacle Live presents the touring production.
Tue Feb 2 – Sun Feb 14
Two obsolete helper robots in a Seoul apartment block fall into something like love as their batteries run down, with a house plant called HwaBoon between them. Will Aronson and Hue Park's Korean-English musical won six Tony Awards in 2025.
Fri Feb 5 – Sun Mar 7
The Hasty Pudding's 178th production, running a month at Farkas Hall. The company has staged an original student-written burlesque with an all-male cast in drag every year since 1844, making it the oldest theatrical organisation in the United States. Neither the title nor the synopsis has been announced — the show's own page still reads 'Title Coming Soon'.
Tue Feb 9 – Sun Feb 21
Tim Burton's film as a musical, with sandworms, apparitions and a great deal of green light. Eddie Perfect wrote the songs and Scott Brown and Anthony King the book, which is louder and considerably more morbid than the screen version.
Wed Feb 17 – Sat Feb 20
Stephen King's first novel as a musical: Carrie White, bullied at school and dominated at home by her loving but cruelly controlling mother, discovers a telekinetic power she will use if pushed too far. Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford wrote the songs and Lawrence D. Cohen the book; the show failed on Broadway in 1988 and was revised in 2012. Christopher Shin directs this lab production.
Wed Feb 24 – Sun Mar 14
Six anxious children compete in a school spelling bee while the adults running it fail them in various ways. William Finn's songs and Rachel Sheinkin's book leave room for audience volunteers, pulled on stage to spell until they are eliminated.
Fri Feb 26 – Sun Mar 21
Sondheim and Lapine's musical sends Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and a childless baker into the same forest, grants everyone a wish by the interval, and spends the second act on what the wishes cost. It won Tony Awards for its book and score.
Mon Mar 1 – Sun Mar 14
Six members of a school chamber choir die on a rollercoaster, and a mechanical fortune teller offers exactly one of them the chance to come back — the others have to choose which. Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell wrote the Canadian musical.
Fri Mar 5 – Sun Mar 14
Six anxious children compete in a school spelling bee while the adults running it fail them in various ways. William Finn's songs and Rachel Sheinkin's book leave room for audience volunteers, pulled on stage to spell until they are eliminated.
Fri Mar 5 – Sun Mar 14
A revue of Kander and Ebb songs, drawn from Cabaret, Chicago, New York, New York and the shows that never travelled as far, performed by a small cast with no book between the numbers. It won the 1991 Outer Critics Circle Award for best off-Broadway musical.
Fri Mar 12 – Sun Mar 21
Charlemagne's son goes looking for a life that means something while a troupe of players narrates, offers him war, sex and politics in turn, and steers him towards their finale. Stephen Schwartz wrote the score and Roger O. Hirson the book; it opened on Broadway in 1972 under Bob Fosse.
Fri Mar 19 – Sun Apr 4
A distant heir to an earldom works his way through the eight relatives standing between him and the title, with one actor playing all eight. Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak's musical won the 2014 Tony for Best Musical. It is adapted from the same novel as the film Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Tue Mar 23 – Sun Apr 4
Neil Diamond's songbook arranged as a biographical musical, framed by the songwriter in a therapist's office looking back. Anthony McCarten, who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, did the book. Sweet Caroline, Cracklin' Rosie and I Am… I Said are all in it.
Wed Mar 24 – Sat Mar 27
The musical of Adrienne Shelly's 2007 film follows Jenna, a small-town diner waitress and expert pie-maker stuck in a rocky marriage, who sees a way out through a baking contest in a nearby county and an encounter with someone new. Sara Bareilles wrote the music and lyrics, Jessie Nelson the book, and Diane Paulus directed the original Broadway production, which opened in 2016. This is a national tour.
Thu Apr 1 – Sun Apr 25
Studs Terkel interviewed Americans about their jobs, and this musical sets those interviews to songs by several writers, Stephen Schwartz and Lin-Manuel Miranda among them. Central Square Theater stages it with the Front Porch Arts Collective. The interviews were published in 1974 and the musical first staged in 1978.
Thu Apr 8 – Sun Apr 11
Ken Ludwig's 1992 book strings George and Ira Gershwin songs — 'I Got Rhythm', 'Embraceable You', 'Someone to Watch Over Me' — around a banker sent to Nevada to foreclose on a theatre who instead decides to save it, disguising himself as a Broadway impresario to do so. It won the Tony for Best Musical and is built on tap.
Sat Apr 10 – Sun Apr 18
Dolly Parton wrote the score for this adaptation of the 1980 film, in which three women in a late-1970s office decide to get even with a boss they describe as a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot, and briefly get the chance.
Tue Apr 13 – Sun Apr 25
A bride-to-be on a Greek island invites three men to her wedding, one of whom is her father. The show is twenty-five years old this year, and carries Super Trouper, Dancing Queen and most of the rest of ABBA's catalogue.
Thu Apr 15 – Sun Apr 18
Brecht and Weill's Victorian London of beggars, thieves and Macheath, written in 1928 to be sung badly on purpose and to stop the audience getting comfortable. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company. Its best-known number, Mack the Knife, was added late and became a jazz standard. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company.
Fri Apr 16 – Sun Apr 25
PigPen Theatre Co.'s folk musical, played with shadow puppetry, hand-made effects and a live band on stage: the old man whose job is to refill the moon with light each night leaves the post and sails after his wife, who has gone off following a song she half remembers.
Fri Apr 30 – Sun Jun 20
Boublil and Schonberg's setting of Hugo, following Valjean from the galleys through the June Rebellion of 1832 while Javert pursues him. This is the newer production staged by arrangement with Cameron Mackintosh, not the original revolving-stage version. Hugo published the novel in 1862, and it runs past a thousand pages.
Fri Apr 30 – Sun May 2
A song cycle reckoning with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in the nineteenth century on the principle of "Kill the Indian, and Save the Man" and used as the blueprint for government-sponsored assimilation. It blends song, satire and ceremony.
Fri Apr 30 – Sun May 16
Three actresses play Donna Summer at three stages of one life, from Boston church choirs to Munich studios to disco stardom, singing Hot Stuff, Last Dance and Bad Girls between the scenes. Colman Domingo, Robert Cary and Des McAnuff wrote the book; it opened on Broadway in 2018.
Fri Apr 30 – Sat May 15
Sondheim's waltz-time musical, after Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night: Desiree Armfeldt, an actress whose career and love affairs are both fading, spots an old lover, Fredrik Egerman, in the audience of a provincial town, seated beside his teenage wife. It contains "Send in the Clowns."
Sat May 1 – Sat May 15
Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance relocated from the Cornish coast to New Orleans, with jazz, blues and Caribbean rhythms worked through fresh orchestrations and the original's wordplay left intact. The Footlight Club, founded in 1877, closes its season with it.
Tue May 4 – Sun May 16
Pete Townshend's rock opera about a boy who goes deaf, dumb and blind after witnessing a killing, and becomes a pinball champion and then a messiah. Des McAnuff, who directed the 1993 original, reworked this staging; it was nominated for the 2024 Tony for Best Musical Revival.
Thu May 6 – Sun Jun 6
Devoiri enters an arranged marriage in Brooklyn's Hasidic Satmar community at seventeen; sixty years earlier her grandmother Fraida arrived in America alone at about the same age. One woman is joining the world the other chose. Joshua Harmon wrote the book, with songs by Benj Pasek and Shaina Taub.
Fri May 7 – Sat May 22
A man leaves his wife for another man in 1979, and the two acts jump forward into the first years of the AIDS crisis. William Finn and James Lapine's musical is sung almost entirely through, and the second half was written seven years after the first.
Sat May 8 – Sun May 23
The ogre, the donkey and the princess, in David Lindsay-Abaire's book with a score by Jeanine Tesori. It gives the fairy-tale creatures a good deal more to sing than the film gave them to say. Tesori also wrote Fun Home and Caroline, or Change.
Sat May 8 – Sun May 23
The American women recruited as bilingual switchboard operators for the Signal Corps in the First World War, who ran the lines under fire and then spent sixty years fighting to be recognised as veterans. Peter Mills and Cara Reichel wrote the musical.
Tue May 18 – Sat Jul 3
An immersive production directed by Diane Paulus and built on David Bowie's music, made by special arrangement with the Bowie estate. The A.R.T. frames its season around resilience in turbulent times, and this closes it. Bowie's own musical, Lazarus, opened the year before he died.
Tue Jun 1 – Sun Jun 13
Ali is seventeen, living in a Manhattan tower block and looking for a way out. Alicia Keys wrote new songs alongside her existing ones for this coming-of-age story, which draws on her own upbringing in the neighbourhood. Keys has sixteen Grammy awards; these are her first songs written for the stage.
Fri Jun 4 – Sun Jun 27
Roald Dahl's clever, neglected girl and the headmistress who throws children by the pigtails, with songs by Tim Minchin and a book by Dennis Kelly. Minchin's lyrics are considerably more intricate than most scores written for children. The Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned and first staged it in 2010.
Fri Jun 18 – Sun Jun 27
A suburban mother's bipolar illness, and what sixteen years of it have done to a family that keeps performing normality. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's rock musical won the 2010 Pulitzer for Drama, one of very few musicals to do so.
Fri Jun 18 – Sun Jun 27
Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman's musical, set around a Saint-Tropez drag club, in which Georges and Albin try to pass one evening as a conventional couple so their son can present them to his fiancée's ultra-conservative parents. It contains "I Am What I Am." Andrew Hankinson directs; Thom Smoker is music director.
Tue Jun 22 – Sun Jun 27
Two Mormon missionaries are posted to Uganda, where nothing they were trained for applies. Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez wrote it. The New York Times called it the best musical of this century. Parker and Stone made South Park; Lopez went on to write Frozen.
Wed Jul 21 – Sun Aug 8
Andrew Lloyd Webber's Paris Opera House, its chandelier and the masked composer beneath it, in a newly staged North American tour rather than the original production. Isaiah Bailey plays the title role. The original London production ran for thirty-five years, and the score is sung throughout.
dates TBA
Boston Theater Company's annual evening of new short work by LGBTQ+ writers, staged at Arrow Street Arts. The company runs it as a showcase of unproduced pieces rather than a single play, and had published only the title when this was recorded — no dates, no writers, no running order.
dates TBA
History Alive's annual programme of New England winter customs from the period before Christmas was a public holiday at all, rewritten every year around a different theme. The 2026 edition takes the overlap between abolitionism and Christmas in the nineteenth century. The company works in costume in Salem, in historic rooms rather than a theatre.
