Deadline’s Theater Critic Greg Evans Picks His Top 10 Broadway Shows Of 2025

Last spring, Broadway prognosticators would have been well within the boundaries of common sense to posit that the big theater story of 2025 might be the arrival of big-name Hollywood stars on Manhattan stages. George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Kieran Culkin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sarah Snook and Keanu Reeves were among the stars of film and TV who gave Broadway one of its starriest seasons in memory.

And they brought big box office numbers (and big ticket prices) with them. For a moment there, it seemed as though Broadway, still not fully recovered from Covid, had found its saviors.

To be more specific, it seemed Broadway plays had discovered their saviors. Because the other major Broadway story of the year was the dismal reality faced by the Broadway musical. With the New York Times repeatedly shining a spotlight on the commercial failures of one highly anticipated musical after another — Smash, Boop!, Sunset Blvd., Cabaret, Gypsy, Redwood and, more recently, The Queen of Versailles — disappointing investors with multimillion-dollar losses, the future of the Broadway’s splashy, expensive stagings seemed (and seems) legitimately grim.

And yet.

As Deadline’s theater critic, I found that a look back at Broadway’s 2025 brings a welcome reminder that there was plenty to love on those Manhattan stages. Even if we push aside the new-ish productions that opened prior to the start of the year — Oh, Mary!, The Outsiders, Maybe Happy Ending, to name just three — a threatened-though-durable Broadway didn’t lose its ability to surprise, with more than a few 2025 productions boasting the wonderful performances and excellent craftsmanship that puts Broadway square in the mix of New York City’s entertainment and cultural gifts to the world.

With that in mind, here are my choices for the 10 Best Broadway plays and musicals of 2025. I’ll also include some misses and a glance ahead to the upcoming shows I’m most anticipating.

1) Liberation

Bess Wohl’s wonderful play juxtaposes the heady, optimistic days of the Women’s Liberation Movement with the oppressive state of affairs that exists under the thumb of Donald Trump — even if his name is never given so much as a mention. Dreary? Not for a moment. Liberation is funny, poignant and, yes, liberating in its expression of the very human need for justice and freedom in an era when those words have been co-opted by forces who value only self-enrichment. Breathing life into the well-trod Memory Play genre, Liberation follows Lizzie (a remarkable Susannah Flood) as she approaches a middle age that’s filled with more questions than answers, particularly when it comes to her late mother, a onetime feminist firebrand who showed her daughter only her most domesticated, traditional mother-and-wife profile. In one of her direct addresses to the audience, Lizzie lays it all out: “This is a play — a memory play, in a way — it’s about my mother. For my mother. Who recently … Who’s not here anymore. And so it’s about her, and her friends, her beautiful friends — and a thing — this is important —a thing they tried very hard to do. No, a thing that they did, that they unquestionably did — so why does it feel somehow like it’s all slipping away? And how do we get it back?”

With the cast portraying a group of women in a “consciousness raising” feminist group of the 1970s as well as their 21st century selves, Liberation jumps back and forth in time, giving audiences a wide-ranging perspective on radicalism, gender roles, race, oppression and defiance. And yes, Liberation is as funny and entertaining as it is wise. Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) directs with confidence, signaling her arrival at the forefront of Broadway’s strongest players.

Liberation is playing at the James Earl Jones Theatre through February 1

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Broadway’s current fall season, the Lincoln Center Theater revival of the 1990s musical Ragtime should be seen as no less than director Lear deBessonet’s heartfelt embrace of a work that, frankly, had heretofore failed to stake its claim on the theatrical landscape. Too often lumped together with Titanic, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Miss Saigon and other bloated offerings of 1990s Broadway, Ragtime was rescued by deBessonet with a leaner, more emotionally powerful staging for City Center’s Encores! series, and like so many of Encores! better stagings Ragtime transferred to Broadway with its superb cast (led by Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy and Brandon Uranowitz) largely intact. In 2025, it finally found its proper place on Broadway.

Ragtime is playing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater through June 14

Few theatergoers knew what to expect with the announcement early this year that a Broadway newcomer named Kimberly Belflower had written a play that would combine elements of the Salem Witch Trials, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the MeToo movement, sexual harassment, Lorde and Taylor Swift, with a starring role given to young Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame. To say Belflower, director Danya Taymor, Sink and everyone else associated with this magnificent production pulled it off is an understatement. With surprises aplenty — and a final scene that ranks among Broadway’s most invigorating send-offs of the 21st century — John Proctor is the Villain cast a spell that resonates months after its too-early September 7 closing.

John Proctor is the Villain played at the Booth Theatre from March 20 to September 7, 2025

4) Dead Outlaw

If I could pick one Broadway production of 2025 to outlast a too-brief engagement long enough to find its rightful audience, Dead Outlaw would be it. The quirky David Yazbek-Erik Della Penna-Itamar Moses musical deserved a far happier ending than it unlikely inspiration, the real-life Elmer McCurdy, a turn-of-the-century wannabe train robber whose shooting death in 1911 was only the beginning of a very strange existence: His corpse, long thought to be a prop or a mannequin, was located in 1976 at a Long Beach amusement park when crew members of The Six Million Dollar Man made the grisly discovery while shooting a location scene.

Somehow Dead Outlaw‘s creators made a discovery of their own: Ably assisted by a stirring (if often motionless) lead performance from Andrew Durand in the title role (check out his scorching “Killed a Man in Maine”), this musical went well beyond the macabre to find the humanity in a most unlikely place.

Dead Outlaw played at the Longacre Theatre from April 2 to June 29, 2025

5) Operation Mincemeat

What are the chances that two musicals about corpses would wash up on the Broadway shores within a single season? And that they’d both provide such lively entertainment? Like Dead Outlaw, Operation Mincemeat is based on a real-life incident (and a real-life dead body). As resurrected by the British musical comedy troupe SplitLip, Mincemeat recounts a World War II exploit in which British intelligence officers concocted an outlandish scheme to trick the Germans: They’d dress the corpse of a recently deceased — and unclaimed — homeless man in a British royal marine uniform, complete with phony documents in the pockets that would divert the Nazis from the Allies’ true attack plan.

Mixing outrageous slapstick comedy, a Monty Python-esque love of wordplay and one of Broadway’s most poignant new love songs in “Dear Bill,” Mincemeat, like Dead Outlaw, proves all over again that in the right hands no idea is too outlandish to conquer the stage or the free world.

Operation Mincemeat is playing at the John Golden Theatre

6) Marjorie Prime

If Dead Outlaw and Operation Mincemeat could be theatrical cousins, Marjorie Prime and Maybe Happy Ending at the very least could be something-or-other once removed. Both envision a future in which robots, for lack of a better word (these are not your Lost in Space tin men), become all but indistinguishable from humans. Which says a lot about humans, for better and worse. While Maybe Happy Ending won 2025’s Best Musical Tony at least in part by infusing its tale of “helper bots” with genuine heart, Marjorie Prime takes an altogether more haunting approach: What if you could purchase an AI hologram — a “prime,” in the word of playwright Jordan Harrison — that resembled a dead loved one, say, the elderly mother who just passed, and that could be infused with all the memories and mannerisms for which you grieve? Directed by the irreplaceable Anne Kauffman, Marjorie Prime (flawlessly performed by June Squibb, Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein and Christopher Lowell) suggests that few of us could resist the unholy temptation, and that all of our technological know-how won’t save us from our longings.

Marjorie Prime is playing at the Hayes Theatre through February 15

7) Little Bear Ridge Road

Early closings are never easy, but some hit more deeply than others. That certainly was the case with Little Bear Ridge Road, Samuel D. Hunter’s play about a cantankerous woman long estranged from her adult nephew and the life twists that bring them together again, however fleetingly. By turns brittle and compassionate, Little Bear Ridge Road showed us a generosity of spirit that could overcome even the most entrenched emotional barriers. The two lost souls granted a bit of grace were played by the one and only Laurie Metcalf and one of Broadway’s brightest new stars, Micah Stock, both under the unerring direction of Joe Mantello. So why didn’t this fine play produced by Scott Rudin and Barry Diller last beyond a scant 11 weeks? Rudin, of course, is no stranger to controversy or hard feelings, and the play’s less-than-happy ending might have dampened word-of-mouth, but the playwright, the cast and the director deserved a heartier Broadway embrace. Little Bear Ridge Road ranks right up there with Dead Outlaw in recent theater’s gone-too-soon territory.

Little Bear Ridge Road played at the Booth Theatre from October 7 to December 21, 2025

8) Purpose

A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the 21st century, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Purpose examined the inner workings and emotional fine points of a Black family presided over by its civil rights hero patriarch and his tougher-than-she-would-seem wife. Seemingly based ever-so-loosely on Jesse Jackson and his sometimes errant namesake son, Purpose exposed the concept of familial legacy and obligation for the fragile deceptions they so often are. With Phylicia Rashad staking her claim as a Broadway director of high order, Purpose boasted a cast that more than met the emotional challenges laid out by Jacobs-Jenkins: LaTanya Richardson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Alana Arenas (in a remarkable Broadway debut), Glenn Davis Solomon and the invaluable Kara Young made for an ensemble that won’t soon be forgotten.

Purpose played at the Hayes Theatre from February 25 through August 31, 2025

9) Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

I’m still not convinced that title did anything for box office, but this charming British import by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, directed and choreographed by Tim Jackson, would seem capable of rising above just about anything. Starring Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty (in a winning performance that gives Jasmine Amy Rogers of Boop! and Louis McCartney of Stranger Things: The First Shadow some real competition for best Broadway debut of the season), Two Strangers is that surprisingly rare creature: a romantic comedy that actually works on stage. Need proof of such rarity: Recall the boredom and the cringe of The Last Five Years and The Notebook.

Pitts and Tutty play a soon-to-be aunt and her nephew (a Broadway trend in the making? See Little Bear Ridge Road) who meet when young and puppy-dogish Englishman Dougal Todd arrives in New York to attend the wedding of his long-estranged dad to a much younger woman. The bride’s New York-jaded sister Robin (the terrific Pitts) arrives at the airport to greet and schlep the wide-eyed Dougal. They meet cute (that’s where the cake comes into play), she bristles, he fawns, and pretty soon they’re ripping off that creepy dad and heading to a happy ending the audience has long seen coming. But do they? No spoilers here, but Tutty, Pitts and all concerned with the modestly staged Two Strangers are worthy of whatever good comes their way.

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) is playing at the Longacre Theatre

10) Stranger Things: The First Shadow

You don’t have to follow Netflix’s Stranger Things – or, in my case, even particularly like it – to fall under the big-spectacle spell of Broadway’s Stranger Things: The First Shadow. A prequel to the goings-on in the series’ bedeviled Hawkins, Indiana, First Shadow brings something even scarcer on Broadway than romantic comedy (see Two Strangers, above): Honest-to-Vecna scares. Taking what struck me as a more grown-up, less Scooby Doo-ish pitch to the material than the series’ Young Adult leanings, First Shadow, written by Kate Trefry from a story by herself, the Duffer Brothers and Jack Thorne, brings technical achievement and a thrilling panache to a medium not exactly hospitable to the horror genre. Carrie tried and failed. So did Grey House and King Kong and Dracula and Jekyll & Hyde. First Shadow, led by the impressive newcomer Louis McCartney as a pre-Vecna Henry Creel, just might open the door to a parallel universe where stage fright has a whole new meaning.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow is playing at the Marquis Theatre

Honorable Mentions

Top 10 lists have to make cuts somewhere, so sincere apologies to Buena Vista Social Club, English, Just in Time, Oedipus, Waiting for Godot, The Picture Of Dorian Gray and the casts of Art (James Corden in particular), Call Me Izzy (Jean Smart, gripping), Floyd Collins (Jeremy Jordan, proving his Broadway mettle yet again) and Boop! (Jasmine Amy Rogers, rising high above the material).

Broadway 2025 Misses

Some were mere almost-there disappointments, some outright flops, but a survey of Broadway’s less-than-successful 2025 offerings should include:

The Last Five Years — Starring Nick Jonas and a deserves-better Adrienne Warren. Five years? Nah, it only seemed that long.

Glengarry Glen Ross — It wasn’t terrible, but with a cast that included Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean and Bill Burr, the David Mamet classic should have soared to the rhythms of the playwright’s language.

Good Night, and Good Luck — It was a monster money-maker, but c’mon, Clooney could have played Betty Boop and audiences would have lined up for the privilege. Imagine if Clooney had chosen to use his star power to spotlight a genuinely worthy project — the way, say, Sarah Paulson did with Appropriate or Keanu Reeves is doing with Waiting For Godot — rather than the stuffy, moribund, on-the-nose hectoring that was Good Night, and Good Luck? The same, actually, could be said of Washington, whose somber performance in the modern-dress Othello did nothing that hasn’t been done in any number of Shakespeare in the Park’s lesser offerings.

The Queen of Versailles — Oh, please. It had nothing to do with Kristin Chenoweth’s kind words for a slain right-winger. The musical is just plain tedious, full of forgettable songs, muddled intentions and dumb-to-the-point-of-surreal ancien régime flashbacks. I’m still not sure if this musical even likes Jackie Siegel, its subject-turned-investor, and I was paying attention. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, and its not about gilded ambition or lousy parenting or money can’t buy happiness. Maybe its about deep pockets and artistic compromise and wanting to be liked so intensely that you lose any chance for a Rose’s Turn all your own. And maybe someone, someday, will make a musical about it.

Chess — While audiences seem to like it, reviews were mostly mixed. Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher are certainly and without a doubt very, very loud (except, oddly enough, at the exact moment you want volume — Tveit gets all but drowned out by the orchestra during the big, indecipherable “One Night In Bangkok.”) Mostly this revival of the 1980s flop from Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice, with Danny Strong’s new book crammed with inelegant topical references, seems to exist mostly to give reviewers the chance to offer some variation of “close, but no checkmate.”

A Look Ahead To 2026

There’s some promising stuff waiting in the Broadway wings, not the least of which is Tracy Letts’ Bug (starring Carrie Coon and Namir Smallwood); Daniel Radcliff’s stage return in Every Brilliant Thing; John Lithgow’s turn as Roald Dahl in Giant; and Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw starring Patrick Ball, Alden Ehrenreich and Linda Emond. Two revivals will boast some intriguing pairings: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman will team Nathan Lane with Laurie Metcalf and director Joe Mantello, and Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle co-star in David Auburn’s Proof. Acclaimed Off Broadway treasures Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Titanique should lend some downtown elan to midtown, while Schmigadoon! hopes to tap into the cult appeal of the Apple TV series.

Roundabout’s Fallen Angels, pairing Broadway icon Kelli O’Hara with Broadway iconic to infinity Noël Coward, had me at hello, and Manhattan Theatre Club’s The Balusters, marking the Broadway returns of the great David Lindsay-Abaire (Kimberly Akimbo) and director Kenny Leon, boasts the kind of rock-solid stage cast — Marylouise Burke, Margaret Colin, Michael Esper, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Thomas — that is the fever dream of every nonprofit theater company.

Then there’s the upcoming Beaches musical (no judgments), director Sam Pinkleton’s Oh, Mary! follow-up a Rocky Horror Show revival, and the Broadway debut of Taraji P. Henson in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

But I’d be lying if I said my interest isn’t perhaps most piqued by what at first glance seems an irresistibly kooky premise: a Dog Day Afternoon stage adaptation starring Jon Bernthal (respect for anyone tackling Al Pacino’s “Attica! Attica” chant) and The Bear‘s Ebon Moss-Bachrach. And then there’s another screen-to-stage project in The Lost Boys, which has the opportunity to follow in the horror footsteps of Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Movies have a rocky history of being relocated to the stage, to be sure, but this vampire project boasts an intriguing team in director Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending), music and lyrics by indie rockers The Rescues, a producing team that includes actor Patrick Wilson, and a cast that features, among others, Hell’s Kitchen‘s Shoshana Bean, Tommy‘s Ali Louis Bourzgui and young Benjamin Pajak, one of the most promising young actors to hit Broadway in years. Before starring opposite Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill in the Mike Flanagan film The Life of Chuck, Pajak all but stole Broadway’s The Music Man revival from adults Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and wowed Encores! audiences with his powerhouse, crystal-clear vocals as the title character in 2023’s Oliver! revival.