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    The Best Theater Moments of 2025, So Far

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    Our critic picked 10 moments that tapped into a range of emotions, often all at once.The theater is more than the sum of its parts; it is also the parts themselves. As I began to look back at the first half of 2025, I found myself primarily recalling those parts: the scene, not the script; the props, not the production. Here are 10 such moments, some sad, some funny, some furious, most all at once.Audra’s Turn at the Tonys“Rose’s Turn,” the 11 o’clock number to end them all, is often described as a nervous breakdown in song. It was certainly that when I first saw Audra McDonald slay it in the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy.” But by the time she performed it on the Tony Awards months later, it was no longer just a personal crisis: a mother grieving the lost opportunities her daughter now enjoys. The lyric “Somebody tell me, when is it my turn?” now rang out with greater depth and anger as McDonald, the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway, invoked the lost opportunities of generations of talented Black women behind her.Read our review of “Gypsy” and our feature about “Rose’s Turn.”A Multiplicity of GreenspansDavid Greenspan as an impeccably dressed palace publicist in Jordan Tannahill’s play at Playwrights Horizons. The actor takes on multiple roles in the production, each meticulously specific.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThough he was the subject of the recent Off Broadway play “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” most people don’t. Nor will Greenspan’s astonishing quadruple performance in the Off Broadway production of “Prince Faggot,” Jordan Tannahill’s shocker about a gay heir to the British throne, help pin him down: He’s that shape-shifty. A bossy palace publicist, a discreet royal servant, even the possibly gay Edward II are among his perfectly etched characters. And the monologue in which he supposedly plays himself? Indescribable (at least here).Read our review of the play.A Face and a Name to RememberNow it can be told. In the Broadway show “Smash,” based on the television melodrama about a Marilyn Monroe musical, the big number (“Let Me Be Your Star”) was deeply undersold in the opening scene. That was a marvelous feint because, at the end of Act I, to bring the curtain down with a huge surprise bang, out came Bella Coppola, as a suddenly promoted assistant choreographer, performing the same song when no one else could. Can you oversell something? Turns out, no.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Marjorie Prime’ and ‘Becky Shaw’ Are Coming to Broadway This Season

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      Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit, will put on the two plays, both of which were Pulitzer finalists, at its Helen Hayes Theater.Second Stage Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, said it would present the plays “Marjorie Prime” and “Becky Shaw,” both of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, at its Helen Hayes Theater this season.The organization, beginning the first season programmed by its new artistic director, Evan Cabnet, said that it would continue its focus on work by contemporary American writers.“Marjorie Prime,” written by Jordan Harrison, is about an older woman whose companion is a hologram of her dead husband fueled by artificial intelligence. The play was staged by Center Theater Group in Los Angeles in 2014, then by Playwrights Horizons in New York in 2015, and was adapted into a movie in 2017. Ben Brantley, then a theater critic for The New York Times, called the play “elegant, thoughtful and quietly unsettling”; the Pulitzer board described it as “a sly and surprising work about technology and artificial intelligence told through images and ideas that resonate.”The new production will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who also directed the Off Broadway production. It is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 20 and to open on Dec. 8.“Becky Shaw,” written by Gina Gionfriddo, is a dark comedy about a bad date. The play was staged at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., in 2008, and then opened at Second Stage’s Off Broadway theater in 2009. Charles Isherwood, then a theater critic for The Times, called the play “as engrossing as it is ferociously funny, like a big box of fireworks fizzing and crackling across the stage from its first moments to its last”; the Pulitzer board described it as “a jarring comedy that examines family and romantic relationships with a lacerating wit while eschewing easy answers and pat resolutions.”The new production will be directed by Trip Cullman, beginning previews on March 18 and opening on April 8.Second Stage did not announce casting for either play. The nonprofit organization said its new season would also include three Off Broadway plays: “Meet the Cartozians,” written by Talene Monahon and directed by David Cromer; “Meat Suit,” written and directed by Aya Ogawa; and a revival of “The Receptionist,” a 2007 play written by Adam Bock. All three will be staged at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where Second Stage has presented its Off Broadway work since giving up its lease on the Tony Kiser Theater. More

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      ‘The Antiquities’ Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits

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      According to Jordan Harrison’s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg’s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More