For most of musical theatre history, getting a Broadway musical onto the big screen meant Hollywood had arrived to transform it. Sets became locations. Stage actors were frequently replaced by movie stars. Songs disappeared, new scenes appeared, orchestrations expanded and the musical that audiences had loved in the theatre could emerge from the process either gloriously cinematic—or almost unrecognizable. But something fascinating has happened over the past year.

Hollywood is once again mining Broadway for material, with Kiss of the Spider Woman and Wicked: For Good reaching movie theatres and adaptations including Octet and Merrily We Roll Along underway. Yet simultaneously, another model has moved decisively into the mainstream: don’t adapt the Broadway show at all. Film the damn thing.

Hamilton went to movie theatres. Suffs went to PBS. Frozen went to Disney+. Hadestown went to cinemas. And this weekend, SIX The Musical Live! arrived on American movie screens.

Suddenly the interesting question isn’t simply which Broadway musical Hollywood will adapt next. It’s whether some Broadway musicals need Hollywood at all.

Kiss of the Spider Woman: Prestige Doesn’t Guarantee an Audience

Bill Condon’s film of Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman arrived October 10, 2025, starring Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna and Tonatiuh. On paper, it made enormous sense. Condon understands movie musicals. Lopez possessed exactly the old-fashioned movie-star glamour required for Aurora, and the show’s fantasies seem almost designed for cinema. Audiences, however, largely stayed home.

The result demonstrated one of the persistent problems facing Broadway adaptations: theatrical prestige doesn’t automatically translate into mainstream recognition. Theatre people know Kiss of the Spider Woman. That doesn’t mean millions of moviegoers were waiting for it.

Sometimes Broadway’s enthusiasm exists almost entirely inside the Broadway bubble.

Wicked: For Good: When Broadway Becomes a Brand

Then there was Wicked: For Good, released November 21, 2025. Wicked presented Hollywood with the opposite situation. After more than two decades onstage, Elphaba and Glinda had escaped Broadway long before Hollywood came calling. “Defying Gravity” was already part of popular culture. The characters were recognizable. Generations had grown up with the musical.

Hollywood wasn’t introducing Wicked. It was delivering something audiences already believed belonged to them. That distinction matters enormously when trying to understand why some Broadway properties explode cinematically while others disappear.

Hamilton: Broadway Invades the Multiplex

Perhaps the more consequential development came September 5, 2025, when Disney finally put the filmed original Broadway production of Hamilton into American cinemas. Audiences had been able to watch the production on Disney+ since 2020, but the theatrical version added “Reuniting the Revolution,” a special prologue featuring new interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda and members of the original company reflecting on the show’s extraordinary cultural journey.

Suddenly something filmed at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in 2016 was playing movie theatres nearly a decade later. Think about that. No Hollywood recasting. No attempt to turn Revolutionary America into a sprawling location shoot. No replacing Broadway actors with stars considered more commercially recognizable.

There was Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Christopher Jackson, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, Jonathan Groff, Anthony Ramos, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Okieriete Onaodowan and Miranda—the people who created the phenomenon. Hollywood wasn’t remaking Broadway. It was exhibiting it.

Frozen: Broadway Comes Home to Disney

Disney made a similarly interesting decision with Frozen: The Hit Broadway Musical. Rather than create another movie adaptation of a stage musical that was itself adapted from a movie—a cultural hall of mirrors if ever there was one—Disney captured the West End production starring Samantha Barks as Elsa and released it on Disney+ in June 2025.

It preserved something audiences outside London might otherwise never have experienced while allowing Disney’s stage version—with its additional songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez—to exist independently from the animated film that created it.

Suffs: PBS Does What PBS Has Always Done Best

Then came Suffs. Shaina Taub’s Tony-winning musical about the American suffragist movement was recorded during its Broadway run in December 2024 and premiered on PBS’s Great Performances on May 8, 2026.

That recording preserved Taub, Nikki M. James, Jenn Colella, Hannah Cruz, Grace McLean, Emily Skinner and the Broadway company rather than allowing those performances simply to disappear after the production closed. Suffs particularly demonstrates why filmed theatre matters. Broadway is expensive. Geography is limiting. A production can run for months and still be inaccessible to most of the country.

PBS effectively removed the theatre walls. Suddenly a musical about American history wasn’t available only to people capable of buying a Broadway ticket and getting themselves to West 45th Street.

Hadestown: Don’t Reinvent It—Capture It

That argument becomes even stronger with Hadestown. Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera depends upon theatrical artifice. The musicians, lighting, movement and physical descent into the underworld aren’t limitations cinema needs to overcome. They’re part of the language of the piece.

Preserving performers intimately associated with the show’s original Broadway success gives audiences something Hollywood adaptations frequently take away: the performances that helped make people fall in love with the musical in the first place.

Perhaps some shows don’t need to become more cinematic. Perhaps cinema needs to become better at capturing theatre.

SIX: The Queens Have Entered the Building

Now comes SIX The Musical Live! The live capture opened in American cinemas August 14, reuniting the six original West End Queens—Jarnéia Richard-Noel, Millie O’Connell, Natalie Paris, Alexia McIntosh, Aimie Atkinson and Maiya Quansah-Breed—at London’s Vaudeville Theatre. Of all Broadway and West End musicals, SIX may be particularly suited to this treatment because it has always existed somewhere between theatre and pop concert.

There is comparatively little cinematic realism to gain by transforming it into a conventional movie. The audience is part of its electricity. The lighting is part of it. The band is part of it. Six women standing on a stage behaving like Tudor history’s most improbable girl group is the concept.

Why dismantle something that already works? Film it beautifully and let another audience into the room.

Octet: Of All the Musicals…This One?

Hollywood, however, isn’t abandoning traditional adaptations. Perhaps the most intriguing forthcoming example is Dave Malloy’s Octet.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is directing the film with a formidable cast including Amanda Seyfried and Jonathan Groff. I admit it: strange choice. Octet is an intimate chamber musical built around a cappella singing and people confronting their relationship with technology. It is deliberately enclosed, cerebral and theatrical—not exactly material screaming for panoramic cinema. Which may be precisely why Miranda finds it interesting.

A conventional adaptation of something already cinematic presents one challenge. Taking a piece that seemingly doesn’t want to be a movie and discovering its cinematic language presents another.

Octet’s examination of technological dependency certainly hasn’t become less relevant since its stage premiere. Strange choice? Absolutely. But potentially a fascinating one.

Merrily We Roll Along: Ask Me Again in Twenty Years

Then we have Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along. Linklater is filming it across approximately two decades so Paul Mescal, Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein actually age as the film moves through its characters’ lives.

It sounds insane. It could also be brilliant. Merrily has always been about what time does to people—how ambition, compromise and disappointment gradually transform the idealistic young people we once were. Allowing actual time to alter the actors could give Sondheim’s musical something makeup and prosthetics never could.

There is only one obvious drawback. Some of us would actually like to see the thing.

And Still Waiting in the Wings…

Adaptations of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Sunset Boulevard, Once on This Island and Guys and Dolls remain somewhere in Hollywood’s famously elastic development process. Some will happen. Some may not.

Sunset Boulevard remains the most wonderfully absurd proposition of all: Billy Wilder made a movie about Hollywood, Andrew Lloyd Webber turned the movie about Hollywood into a Broadway musical, and Hollywood now wants to make a movie of the Broadway musical based on the movie about Hollywood. Norma Desmond really is ready for her close-up.

The Real Revolution May Be the Pro-Shot

The most significant development may not be any individual adaptation. It may be the increasing legitimacy of the professionally filmed stage production. For years, theatre fans begged producers to film Broadway shows before they closed. The answer was invariably some combination of economics, union agreements, rights issues and the fear that a filmed version might cannibalize ticket sales. That thinking appears to be changing.

Recent pro-shots are demonstrating that filmed theatre can itself become commercially valuable, with Hadestownreportedly surpassing $20 million theatrically and SIX adding further evidence that audiences will pay to experience captured stage productions on movie screens.

That changes the equation. A Broadway production no longer necessarily has to choose between being ephemeral and becoming a Hollywood movie. There is now a third possibility: Preserve the Broadway production itself.

Let someone in Iowa see what New York saw. Let a teenager who cannot afford a $200 Broadway ticket encounter a performance that might change what they believe theatre can be. Let extraordinary performances survive beyond closing night. Let future generations see not merely what Hamilton or Suffs or Hadestown was, but something remarkably close to what it felt like when those actors stood on that stage.

Hollywood will continue adapting Broadway, and it should. Some musicals genuinely demand the possibilities of cinema, but others don’t need helicopters, locations, movie stars or $100 million budgets. They need the actors. They need the orchestra. They need the stage. They need someone to have the foresight to turn on the camera before the lights go out.

Some Broadway friendships end when the final curtain comes down. Others apparently turn into a rock-and-roll band.

Michael Longoria

The Midtown Men brought their irresistible combination of Broadway polish, four-part harmony and pure 1960s swagger to Eisenhower Park’s Harry Chapin Lakeside Theatre, proving once again that Jersey Boys may have introduced these four men to one another, but it certainly wasn’t the end of their story.

Christian Hoff

Tony Award winner Christian Hoff, Michael Longoria, Daniel Reichard and Tony Award nominee J. Robert Spencer first shared a stage as members of the original Broadway company of Jersey Boys, the musical phenomenon that turned the story and songs of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons into one of Broadway’s biggest hits.

Daniel Reichard

They spent more than a thousand performances together before doing something rather unusual: instead of simply moving on to their next individual Broadway jobs, they took the chemistry they had developed eight shows a week and created something of their own.

J. Robert Spencer

The result was The Midtown Men.

Michael Longoria, Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer

And while their pedigree is unmistakably Broadway, this isn’t Jersey Boys on tour. The Midtown Men became their own musical act, expanding beyond The Four Seasons to embrace the glorious pop landscape of the 1960s—The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Motown, The Rascals, The Mamas & the Papas, The Ronettes and more. Their official repertoire has long celebrated the decade that gave America some of its most enduring pop music, with four singers who know exactly how to sell both a harmony and a story.

Michael Longoria, Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer

What makes the group work isn’t simply nostalgia. Plenty of acts can recreate the music of the ’60s. The Midtown Men have something considerably harder to manufacture: history with one another.

Michael Longoria, Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer

They learned how to listen to one another on a Broadway stage. They know where the other voices are going, when to step forward, when to pull back and how to turn four leading men into one sound. Reichard has recalled that while they were still performing Jersey Boys, the four would gather in dressing rooms between shows and work out harmonies to other songs they loved from the decade. In other words, The Midtown Men were quietly being born backstage while another show was happening out front.

Michael Longoria, Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer

That musical shorthand followed them to Eisenhower Park.

Christian Hoff

Christian Hoff

Christian Hoff

Hoff brings the confidence that won him the Tony Award for his portrayal of Tommy DeVito. Reichard, Broadway’s original Bob Gaudio, possesses the musical-theatre storyteller’s instinct for finding the character inside a song. Spencer, the original Nick Massi and later a Tony nominee for Next to Normal, supplies formidable Broadway chops, while Longoria—who originated Joe Pesci before succeeding John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli—knows a thing or two about sending a voice soaring above a crowd.

Michael Longoria

Michael Longoria

Michael Longoria

Together, however, they stop being four Broadway résumés and become a genuine group.

J. Robert Spencer

J. Robert Spencer

J. Robert Spencer

There is something wonderfully circular about what happened to these men. They began as actors playing a band, only to discover along the way that they actually were one. What started under Broadway lights developed into years of concerts across the country, recordings and even a nationally televised concert special.

Daniel Reichard

Daniel Reichard

Daniel Reichard

The Harry Chapin Lakeside Theatre is precisely the sort of setting where this music feels at home. These songs weren’t created to sit politely behind glass as artifacts of another era. They were made for summer nights, for dancing, singing along and suddenly realizing that you remember every word to a song you haven’t consciously thought about in twenty years.

Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard

That’s the pleasure of The Midtown Men. They don’t treat the 1960s as a museum exhibition. They remind you why this music became permanent in the first place.

Christian Hoff, Michael Longoria

The Beatles gave us exuberance. Motown gave popular music sophistication and irresistible rhythm. The Beach Boys made adolescent longing sound like California sunshine. The Four Seasons gave us those impossible harmonies and that unmistakable falsetto.

Daniel Reichard

J. Robert Spencer

Daniel Reichard, J. Robert Spencer,

Michael Longoria

Christian Hoff

Four Broadway actors fell in love with all of it. Nearly two decades after first coming together, Hoff, Longoria, Reichard and Spencer are still standing beside one another, still singing, still touring and still having what appears to be a ridiculously good time doing it.

Michael Longoria, Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer

Not bad for four guys who were originally hired to pretend to be a band. Turns out they were just getting started.

One of New York’s favorite summer traditions continued this week as Broadway in Bryant Park once again turned the Midtown lawn into an open-air theatre, bringing together performers from The Book of Mormon, The Great Gatsby, Heathers: The Musical and Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody for an afternoon of free performances.

Helen Little

Ashley De La Rosa

Ashley De La Rosa, Helen Little

Presented by 106.7 LITE FM, the afternoon was hosted by the station’s Helen Little, with Ashley De La Rosa joining as co-host. Broadway in Bryant Park has long been one of those quintessentially New York events: office workers on lunch breaks, theatre lovers and tourists gathering on the lawn while Broadway performers trade their usual proscenium arches for sunshine, skyscrapers and a decidedly less formal audience.

J. Casey Barrett. Vance Klassen, Andrew Nelin, Kevin Clay. Andrew Stevens Purdy, Thomas Doelger, Diego Enrico, Joshua Keen and Henry McGuiness

Diego Enrico and Kevin Clay

Thomas Doelger and Charlie Franklin

Diego Enrico and Kevin Clay

The Book of Mormon, still one of Broadway’s most irreverent long-running hits, was represented by J. Casey Barrett, Vance Klassen, Andrew Nelin, Kevin Clay, Andrew Stevens Purdy, Thomas Doelger, Diego Enrico, Charlie Franklin, Joshua Keen and Henry McGuinness. More than a decade after arriving on Broadway, the musical continues to demonstrate the remarkable staying power of a show that turned religious satire, outrageous comedy and an unexpectedly traditional musical-theatre heart into a theatrical phenomenon.

Alex Prakken, Brandon J. Large, Nathaniel Hunt, Traci Elaine Lee, Drew Lake, Justin Keats, Emily Anne Nester, Matt Wiercinski and Kurt Csolak

The Cast of The Great Gatsby that includes, Brandon J. Large, Nathaniel Hunt, Traci Elaine Lee, Drew Lake, Justin Keats, Emily Anne Nester, Matt Wiercinski and Kurt Csolak

Alex Prakken

Alex Prakken

Alex Prakken

The Cast of The Great Gatsby that includes, Brandon J. Large, Nathaniel Hunt, Traci Elaine Lee, Drew Lake, Justin Keats, Emily Anne Nester, Matt Wiercinski and Kurt Csolak

The glamour of the Jazz Age arrived courtesy of The Great Gatsby, with Alex Prakken, Brandon J. Large, Nathaniel Hunt, Traci Elaine Lee, Drew Lake, Justin Keats, Emily Anne Nester, Matt Wiercinski and Kurt Csolak taking the Bryant Park stage. The Broadway musical, inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential American novel, brought a splash of Gatsby excess to the lawn—a fitting contrast to the decidedly democratic pleasure of seeing Broadway for free in the middle of Manhattan.

John Cardoza, Thalia Atallah, Ava DeMary, Jackera Davis, Zan Berube, Kiara Michelle Lee, Emma Benson and Syd Sider

John Cardoza and Kiara Michelle Lee

John Cardoza and Kiara Michelle Lee

John Cardoza

Jackera Davis, Zan Berube and Ava DeMary

Things became considerably darker—and deliciously more dangerous—with Heathers: The Musical. John Cardoza, Kiara Michelle Lee, Thalia Atallah, Ava DeMary, Jackera Davis, Zan Berube, Emma Benson and Syd Siderrepresented the cult musical, whose wicked combination of teenage cruelty, black comedy and infectious pop-rock music has given Heathers a devoted following that has only grown since the show first arrived in New York.

Jay Armstrong Johnson and Ryann Redmond

Kevin Clay

Ryan Duncan

Daniel Brackett, Ryan Duncan, Shelby Acosta, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Cherry Torres and Ryann Redmond

Daniel Brackett

Jay Armstrong Johnson

Ryann Redmond

Then came one of the afternoon’s cheekier offerings, Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody. Daniel Brackett, Ryan Duncan, Shelby Acosta, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Cherry Torres and Ryann Redmond brought the parody to Bryant Park, adding another flavor entirely to a program that happily jumped from established Broadway blockbusters to cult favorites and irreverent new work.

Jane Fujita

Daielle Dellilo

Eyllah Babbitt, Danielle Dellilo and Kelly Branco

Also participating in the afternoon were Eyllah Babbitt, Danielle Dellilo and Kelly Branco, along with Jane Fujita

and representatives from Taiwan Tourism, adding to an event that has increasingly become as much a Midtown summer gathering as a theatrical sampler.

That has always been the particular charm of Broadway in Bryant Park. Broadway can be expensive, carefully scheduled and sometimes intimidating to those who don’t regularly venture inside its theatres. Here, the walls disappear. There is no velvet rope separating the initiated from the curious. Someone can wander through Bryant Park, hear an extraordinary voice coming from the stage, sit down on the lawn and discover a show they had never considered seeing.

And for Broadway itself, that matters. A few songs performed on a summer afternoon can accomplish what an advertisement sometimes cannot: they allow an audience to experience the performers themselves. The theatre becomes immediate, accessible and wonderfully difficult to ignore.

Broadway in Bryant Park continues throughout the summer at Bryant Park, located along Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets. Lawn seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

In a city where Broadway normally begins when the house lights go down, Bryant Park continues to prove that sometimes the best way to sell the magic of theatre is simply to bring it outside and let New York stumble upon it.

The curtain may come down, a production may close, and a performance may disappear into theatrical memory, but the cast album is where musical theatre gets its second life. This summer and fall, an unusually rich group of recordings is arriving across streaming platforms, CDs and increasingly coveted vinyl editions, preserving everything from intimate new musicals and Off-Broadway discoveries to major Broadway revivals, conceptual works and a Cats recording unlike any Andrew Lloyd Webber has made before.

Already available is Alone, a new concept album featuring music and lyrics by John Ertman and Joseph Mathusek and an impressive company that includes Taylor Iman Jones, Linedy Genao, Zachary Noah Piser, Adi Roy, Rachel Webb, Kim Onah, Michael Nigro, Nathan Levy, Claire Kwon, Cassidy Sledge, Ellis Gage, Andy Harman and Gray Watson. Released digitally August 7 by Picardee Records, the album introduces its musical world without waiting for a full production to arrive—a reminder that increasingly, new musicals are finding audiences through headphones before they ever find a theatre.

Also newly released is Sappho: The Poetess, a London EP written and performed by Hayley Canham. The August 12 Center Stage Records release gives the ancient Greek poet a contemporary musical voice, joining the continuing wave of theatre composers rediscovering women whose lives have survived history largely through fragments, mythology and the interpretations of others.

August 14 brought two dramatically different recordings. Good Guy With A Gun!, a concept album by Philip Labes and Micah O’Konis, arrives with one of the most eclectic casts of the season, including Chris Sullivan, Kimiko Glenn, Anthony Rapp, Yvette Nicole Brown, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Jason Alexander, Richard Kind, Kristen Schaal and Paul Walter Hauser. Even before a full stage production, that roster alone gives the project considerable curiosity value.

The same day, Center Stage Records and Yellow Sound Label released Empire: Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording, preserving Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull’s musical about the creation of the Empire State Building. Directed Off-Broadway in 2024 by Tony winner Cady Huffman, Empire looks at the audacity required to build upward during one of the most precarious moments in American history. Its characters include industrialists, immigrants and Mohawk ironworkers, turning the construction of a skyscraper into a story about ambition, labor and New York’s almost pathological refusal to believe something cannot be done.

The recording features Danny Iktomi Bevins, Devin Cortez, Morgan Cowling, Kaitlyn Davidson, Joel Douglas, Alexandra Frohlinger, Albert Guerzon, Kiana Kabeary, Howard Kaye, April Ortiz, Jessica Ranville, Paul Salvatoriello, J Savage, Robbie Serrano and Ethan Saviet, with an ensemble including Joseph Fierberg, Kennedy Perez, Matt Gibson, Julia Louise Hosack and TJ Newton. For a musical whose central character is essentially New York itself, the album gives Empire a chance to continue climbing long after its Off-Broadway run.

Then comes one of the most intriguing releases of August. Night Side Songs, Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s deeply human musical produced by Lincoln Center Theater at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater earlier this year, arrives digitally and on streaming platforms August 21 through Octoverse Media and Warner Music Group’s Arts Music. The first single, “My Stuff,” is already available, with CD and vinyl editions planned later in the year.

Night Side Songs occupied an unusually delicate place in the theatrical landscape when it played LCT3 from February 14 through March 29. Rather than treating illness, caregiving and mortality as dramatic devices, the Lazours created a folk-inflected musical concerned with the conversations that happen around bedsides, the things people say and cannot say, the jokes that break unbearable tension and the strange community that forms around someone whose life has suddenly changed. The recording features the original Lincoln Center Theater company of Robin de Jesús, Brooke Ishibashi, Jonathan Raviv, Kris Saint-Louis and Mary Testa, joined in the studio by an audience that sings along in keeping with the score’s communal folk tradition.

The album is produced by Mara Isaacs, Todd Sickafoose and Andy Einhorn, with Daniel and Patrick Lazour co-producing. The stage production earned nominations from the Drama Desk, Drama League and Lucille Lortel Awards, including recognition for its music, ensemble and production. The album should allow one of the season’s quieter musicals to find the larger audience intimate work sometimes struggles to reach during a limited theatrical run.

Also arriving August 21 is Schmigadoon! (Original Broadway Cast Recording), with music and lyrics by Cinco Paul. The Joy Machine Records release features Alex Brightman, Sara Chase, Ana Gasteyer, Ann Harada, Brad Oscar, Isabelle McCalla, Ivan Hernandez, Maulik Pancholy, Max Clayton, McKenzie Kurtz and Ayaan Diop. What began as a television series lovingly skewering—and embracing—the conventions of classic musical theatre has now completed the circle by becoming a Broadway musical with its own cast recording. There is something wonderfully appropriate about a show born from affection for cast albums becoming one itself.

On August 28, Evita gets another major recording, this time preserving Jamie Lloyd’s London production starring Rachel Zegler, alongside Diego Andres Rodriguez, James Olivas, Aaron Lee Lambert and Bella Brown. The full album will be released digitally and as a triple-vinyl edition through The Other Songs. With Zegler bringing her acclaimed Eva Perón to Broadway in 2027, the recording arrives as both documentation of the London production and something of a preview for New York audiences. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s score has been recorded many times, but Evita has always been unusually dependent upon the personality of the performer standing at its center. Zegler now gets her own place in that lineage.

August 28 also brings Sara Bareilles’ Good Grief  through Epic Records on CD, digital and vinyl. Bareilles long ago crossed the line between pop songwriter and major theatrical voice with Waitress, and anything she releases now carries interest for both audiences. Her music has always lived comfortably in the space between confessional singer-songwriter intimacy and theatrical storytelling, making a new Bareilles album part of the broader musical-theatre conversation whether or not every song is headed for a stage.

September 4 brings the physical release Broadway collectors have been waiting for: the 2025 Broadway cast recording of Chess on CD and vinyl from Ghostlight Records, following its April digital release. The album preserves Nicholas Christopher, Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit, Hannah Cruz, Bradley Dean, Sean Allan Krill and Bryce Pinkham in Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice’s gloriously oversized Cold War musical. Whatever one thinks of Chessdramatically, that score remains one of musical theatre’s great guilty-not-guilty pleasures, and this cast gives it formidable vocal ammunition.

On September 18, Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody enters the recording studio canon with a digital and triple-vinyl release from Center Stage Records. Dylan MarcAurele’s score is performed by Jay Armstrong Johnson, Jimin Moon, Ryann Redmond, Cherry Torres, Ryan Duncan, Shelby Acosta and Daniel Brackett. The fact that a knowingly outrageous Off-Broadway parody is getting a triple-vinyl edition tells you almost everything you need to know about the current cast-album market: audiences increasingly want theatre not simply as something they attended, but as something they can collect.

September 25 brings another kind of theatrical souvenir with Rise Up! Hamilton: The Anthology, arriving from Atlantic/Rhino on CD, digital and vinyl. More than a decade after Hamilton permanently altered the commercial expectations for Broadway cast recordings, the musical remains one of the rare modern theatre properties capable of generating the kind of ancillary releases normally associated with major recording artists.

And then there is CATS: The Jellicle Ball.

Atlantic Records has opened pre-orders for the forthcoming Original Broadway Cast Recording of the Tony-winning revival, produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alana da Fonseca. No firm release date has yet been announced, but this is arguably the recording collectors will be most curious to hear because The Jellicle Ball did something almost unimaginable: it made Cats culturally dangerous again.

The Broadway production reimagined Lloyd Webber’s musical through New York ballroom culture, transforming the Jellicle competition into a glittering collision of fashion, dance, queer history and theatrical spectacle. The company includes André De Shields, Ken Ard, Kya Azeen, Bryson Battle, Jonathan Burke, Baby Byrne, Tara Lashan Clinkscales, Bryce Farris, Elisa Galindez, Sydney James Harcourt, Dava Huesca, Dudney Joseph Jr., Junior LaBeija, Leiomy, Robert “Silk” Mason, Ernest Mingo, Tempress Chasity Moore, Primo Thee Ballerino, Xavier Reyes, Nora Schell, Bebe Nicole Simpson, Emma Sofia, Phumzile Sojola, Kendall Grayson Stroud, B Noel Thomas, Kalyn West, Garnet Williams, Teddy Wilson Jr., Darius Wright and Donté Nadir Wilder.

The production earned nine Tony nominations and won three, including Best Direction of a Musical, Best Choreography and Best Costume Design. Qween Jean’s costume win also marked a Broadway milestone as the first openly trans woman to win a Tony Award. The recording now has the unusual task of capturing a production whose impact was profoundly visual and physical—ballroom movement, fashion, attitude and audience energy—through sound alone.

Several other recordings remain on the horizon without firm release dates. Joy Machine Records will release Beau The Musical, with music by Ethan D. Pakchar and Douglas Lyons and lyrics by Lyons, featuring Matt Rodin, Jeb Brown, Max Sangerman, Miyuki Miyagi, Andrea Goss, Amelia Cormack, Ryan Halsaver and Derek Stoltenberg.

Ghostlight Records is also preparing a London concept album of Death Note, The Musical, with Frank Wildhorn’s music and Jack Murphy’s lyrics performed by a company including Adam Pascal, Joaquin Pedro Valdes, Dean John Wilson, Aimie Atkinson, Frances Mayli McCann, Rachel Clare Chan and Christian Ray Marbella. Wildhorn and Death Notehave long seemed destined for one another—large emotions, operatic stakes and characters who consider moderation an unacceptable personality trait.

JAY Records has two particularly traditional theatre recordings waiting in the wings. A new studio cast recording of The Fantasticks features Brad Oscar, Telly Leung, Elizabeth Teeter, Lewis Cleale and Ron Raines, arriving just as the famously long-running Off-Broadway musical prepares, astonishingly, for its first Broadway production. The label will also release Lovesong, Michael Valenti’s setting of lyrics by Dorothy Parker and Sir Walter Raleigh, performed by Jenn Gambatese, Lauren Molina, Matt Bogart and Jeff Kready.

Also forthcoming is the studio EP Salem, with music and lyrics by Amanda Ribnick and Jennifer Lucy Cook and performances by Bryce Pinkham, Kuhoo Verma, John-Andrew Morrison, Gabi Carrubba, Lizzy Murray and Katherine Lynn-Rose, while PS Classics will release Ricky Ian Gordon’s Sycamore Trees, featuring a mouthwatering company of Farah Alvin, Marc Kudisch, Judy Kuhn, Jessica Molaskey, Matthew Risch, Diane Sutherland and Tony Yazbeck.

What makes this particular stretch of releases interesting is how thoroughly the cast album has escaped its old definition. Once, the recording primarily existed to preserve the score of a Broadway musical. Now we have concept albums creating audiences before productions exist, limited-run Off-Broadway shows finding permanence after closing, London productions introducing themselves to American listeners, parody musicals getting elaborate vinyl editions and established Broadway properties becoming collectible objects in multiple formats.

Streaming should theoretically have made albums less precious. Instead, vinyl has made them objects again.

And musical theatre, perhaps more than almost any other form, understands why that matters. A performance is ephemeral by design. The actor sings the note, the orchestra plays the chord, the audience hears it—and then the moment is gone.

A cast album refuses to let it disappear.

This fall, there will be quite a lot worth keeping.

Broadway never really sleeps anymore, but the 2026–2027 season is beginning to reveal itself as something considerably more interesting than another procession of movie adaptations and celebrity vehicles. There are certainly stars—Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Billy Crystal, Tom Hiddleston, Hayley Atwell, Rosamund Pike, Rachel Zegler and Raúl Esparza among them—but there is also an unusually strong concentration of playwrights: Molière, Shakespeare, Clifford Odets, Aaron Sorkin, Jon Robin Baitz, Jocelyn Bioh, Dominique Morisseau and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

Musically, the season travels everywhere from Dolly Parton and Prince to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the long-delayed Broadway arrival of The Fantasticks. Some productions arrive carrying enormous expectations; others may prove to be the surprises nobody saw coming. Here, in opening-night order, are the dates worth putting on the calendar now.

August

Photo credit: Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight in Paranormal Activity. (Photos by Teresa Castracane Photography)

8/25 — Paranormal Activity: August Wilson Theatre: Previews began 8/14

Broadway begins the fall by turning off the lights. Levi Holloway’s Paranormal Activity, inspired by the extraordinarily profitable horror-film franchise, stars Cher Álvarez, Travis A. Knight, Shannon Cochran and Andrea Syglowski under the direction of Felix Barrett. Barrett, the co-founder and artistic director of Punchdrunk, is the intriguing element here: this is a director whose career has been built around immersive theatrical experiences and the manipulation of space, expectation and audience anxiety. A horror film can control precisely what the camera allows us to see. Theatre cannot. The question—and potentially the thrill—is how Paranormal Activity makes an entire Broadway house afraid of what might be standing just outside our field of vision.

September

9/28 — School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre: Previews 9/8 – Through 10/1

Jocelyn Bioh’s wickedly funny examination of beauty, colorism, ambition and teenage hierarchy gets its Broadway debut in a new Manhattan Theatre Club production directed by Whitney White. Set at an elite girls’ boarding school in Ghana, the comedy follows a group of students competing for the chance to enter the Miss Ghana pageant—and the social warfare that erupts when a new girl threatens the established queen bee. Denée Benton and Patina Miller lead an excellent company that also includes Lucia Aremu, Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jordan Rice, Jasmine Amy Rogers and Heather Alicia Simms. Bioh knows how to make an audience laugh before quietly revealing exactly what it has been laughing about.

October

10/18 — Other Desert Cities: Hudson Theatre: Previews 10/29 – 1/17

One of the season’s most formidable casts gathers for the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s family drama: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe, directed by John Benjamin Hickey. The setting is Palm Springs, where a politically prominent family gathers for Christmas only to discover that daughter Brooke is preparing to publish a memoir exposing a secret everyone else would prefer remain buried. Baitz’s play is essentially civilized warfare conducted over cocktails, and with Louis-Dreyfus, Harris and Janney occupying the same room, this could become one of the acting events of the season.

10/21 — 860: Imperial Theatre: Previews 10/1 – 1/3

Billy Crystal returns to the form that gave Broadway 700 Sundays, this time beginning with the loss of the Pacific Palisades home where his family lived for 46 years before it was destroyed in the 2025 fires. Written and performed by Crystal and directed by Scott Ellis, 860 uses one house—and everything accumulated inside it—as the doorway into family, memory, grief and the peculiar emotional geography of home. Crystal has always understood that laughter and loss need not cancel each other out. That makes this considerably more intriguing than a conventional celebrity memoir placed onstage.

10/22 — The Imaginary Invalid: Todd Haimes Theatre: 9/25 – 11/22

Give Bill Irwin Molière and immediately the possibilities become interesting. Irwin adapts and stars in The Imaginary Invalid, Molière’s 1673 comedy about a wealthy hypochondriac surrounded by doctors, opportunists and relatives with competing interests in his supposed illnesses. Brandon J. Dirden directs. Irwin’s extraordinary physical intelligence makes him particularly suited to Molière’s collision of verbal wit and bodily absurdity—and a 353-year-old satire about medicine, money and people obsessed with their health may turn out to be rather less antiquated than expected.

10/29 — A Few Good Men: Vivian Beaumont Theater: Previews 10/8 – Through 1/10

Before Aaron Sorkin gave television The West Wing, there was A Few Good Men. Now his breakthrough military courtroom drama returns to Broadway with Bradley Whitford and Tom Blyth under the direction of Michael Arden. The play’s questions about institutional loyalty, obedience, accountability and the moral compromises made in the name of protecting powerful systems have hardly lost their bite. The famous courtroom confrontation may be embedded in popular culture thanks to the film, but Sorkin wrote A Few Good Men for the stage. Broadway gets it back.

November

11/8 — Wanted: James Earl Jones Theatre: Previews 10/15

Previously titled Gun & Powder, Wanted arrives with music by Ross Baum and a book and lyrics by Angelica Chéri, inspired by the story of Mary and Martha Clarke, African-American twin sisters who became outlaws in 1890s Texas while attempting to free their mother from crushing sharecropper debt. Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine and Grammy winner Ledisi star, with Stevie Walker-Webb directing. It has the bones of an American myth—the Western, the outlaw, the pursuit of freedom—but told through people traditionally erased from that mythology. That alone makes it one of the season’s original musicals worth watching.

11/16 — The Fantasticks: Hayes Theater: Previews 10/22 – 2/7

Here is one for the theatrical history books. Sixty-six years after The Fantasticks began the legendary Off-Broadway run that ultimately lasted more than four decades, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s little musical finally reaches Broadway. Christopher Gattelli directs a new version reimagining its central romance as a contemporary gay love story. The score still contains “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” but the fascinating question is whether a musical famous for its simplicity can retain its intimacy on Broadway while allowing its story to speak to another generation.

11/19 — Much Ado About Nothing: Winter Garden Theatre: Previews 10/31 – 1/10

Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell arrive from London as Benedick and Beatrice in Jamie Lloyd’s exuberant reinvention of Shakespeare’s great romantic battle of wits. Lloyd turns Messina into something approaching a party, but beneath the production’s exuberance remains one of Shakespeare’s sharpest observations about pride, vulnerability and two people desperately attempting not to fall in love. Hiddleston and Atwell already proved their chemistry in London; Broadway now gets ten weeks to see what all the fuss was about.

December

12/1 — Inter Alia: Music Box Theatre: Previews 11/10 – 2/21

Rosamund Pike makes her Broadway debut in Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, following its London premiere. Miller and director Justin Martin, the team behind Prima Facie, return to the legal world through Jessica Parks, a Crown Court judge accustomed to weighing evidence, imposing order and dispensing justice—until an event inside her own family makes those principles brutally personal. After Jodie Comer’s astonishing Broadway success in Prima Facie, expectations for Miller and Martin’s next legal drama will be understandably high.

12/6 — Galileo: Shubert Theatre: Previews 11/10

The return of Raúl Esparza to a new Broadway musical is reason enough to circle December 6. He stars as Galileo Galilei opposite Joy Woods and Jeremy Kushnier in a new musical with music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak and Michael Weiner and a book by Danny Strong. Michael Mayer directs. Galileo’s collision with the Catholic Church over a universe that refused to behave according to accepted doctrine gives the musical an enormous subject: what happens when observable truth threatens institutions whose authority depends upon another version of reality?

January

1/7 — Awake and Sing!: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre | Previews 12/16

Clifford Odets returns to Broadway with Danny Burstein, Jessica Hecht and Jeremy Shamos leading Tyne Rafaeli’s revival of Awake and Sing!. Set inside a struggling Jewish family in Depression-era Brooklyn, Odets’s 1935 masterpiece examines money, generational conflict, thwarted ambition and the stubborn insistence upon hope when economic reality keeps crushing it. In an age once again consumed by questions of economic survival and what one generation owes another, Odets may sound unnervingly contemporary.

1/19 — DOLLY: A True Original Musical: St. James Theatre: Previews 12/7

Dolly Parton gets the Broadway bio-musical treatment—but importantly, she is telling the story herself. Parton and Maria S. Schlatter have written the book, with Bartlett Sher directing the musical journey from a childhood in the Smoky Mountains to one of the most remarkable careers in American popular culture. The inevitable hits will be there, but Parton’s life contains something richer than a jukebox score: poverty, ambition, authorship, image-making, business acumen and a woman who understood very early that appearing unserious could be an extraordinarily effective way of being underestimated.

1/27 — Mix and Master: Todd Haimes Theatre | Previews 1/5

Dominique Morisseau turns toward Brooklyn’s musical ecosystem with Mix and Master, starring Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Kara Young and directed by Kamilah Forbes. The new play follows a rising DJ attempting to save the neighborhood’s last record store—a premise that opens naturally into questions of ownership, memory, gentrification and what disappears when a neighborhood’s cultural institutions become economically inconvenient. With Morisseau writing and two actors of this caliber involved, this is one to watch.

March

3/25 — Evita: Winter Garden Theatre: Previews 2/27

Rachel Zegler brings her acclaimed Eva Perón to Broadway in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita. The musical has always existed in the dangerous space between political history, celebrity and spectacle: Eva constructs herself before the public while Che keeps puncturing the mythology. Lloyd is a director fascinated by performance itself—who is watching, who is being watched and what happens when image overtakes reality—which makes him particularly well matched to this material. Zegler reprises the performance that won her an Olivier Award.

April

4/5 — Gloria: Hayes Theater: Previews 4/17

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Pulitzer finalist Gloria finally reaches Broadway after its acclaimed 2015 Off-Broadway premiere. Evan Cabnet again directs the dark comedy about ambitious editorial assistants working at a prestigious New York magazine, where professional resentment, status anxiety and the hunger to turn experience into intellectual property collide after catastrophe strikes the office. Eleven years later, in an era even more obsessed with monetizing personal trauma and controlling narratives, Gloria may have become sharper with age.

4/12 —Purple Rain: Majestic Theatre: Previews 3/12

And suddenly the Majestic turns purple. Prince’s Purple Rain arrives on Broadway with more than 20 Prince songs performed by musicians onstage, including “When Doves Cry,” “I Would Die 4 U,” “Take Me With U” and “The Beautiful Ones.” Peter Duchan writes the book, Saheem Ali directs and Ebony Williams choreographs. The original film wasn’t simply a delivery system for hit songs; it was instrumental in transforming Prince into a global icon. Broadway therefore has a considerable challenge: capture the danger, sexuality and musical electricity of Purple Rain without turning Prince into a museum exhibit.

4/15 — The Sound of Music: Vivian Beaumont Theater: Previews 3/23

Lear deBessonet follows Once Upon a Mattress and Ragtime with one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most beloved musicals, starring Jasmine Amy Rogers. The Sound of Music has been so thoroughly absorbed into popular culture that it is easy to forget how much darkness surrounds those familiar songs. This is a musical about a family confronting fascism and ultimately choosing what it refuses to become. At the Vivian Beaumont, with deBessonet at the helm, there is an opportunity to rediscover the dramatic stakes beneath the edelweiss.

4/18 — Paddington The Musical: Al Hirschfeld Theatre: Previews 3/30

After becoming a West End hit, everyone’s favorite marmalade-obsessed bear crosses the Atlantic. Tom Fletcher supplies music and lyrics, Jessica Swale writes the book and Luke Sheppard directs the adaptation inspired by Michael Bond’s books and the enormously successful films. The great challenge, of course, is Paddington himself: the London production’s theatrical realization of the bear became part of its magic. If Broadway audiences surrender to him as thoroughly as London did, the Hirschfeld may have a formidable family hit on its hands.

4/25 — The Full Monty: Todd Haimes Theatre: Previews 4/3

David Yazbek and Terrence McNally’s The Full Monty returns to Broadway in a new Roundabout production directed by Leigh Silverman. Beneath the famous strip-show premise has always been something more tender: unemployed men confronting economic displacement, masculinity, body image and the humiliations of discovering that the world no longer values the labor that once defined them. McNally’s humanity and Yazbek’s terrific score are reasons enough to welcome it back.

Still To Come…

The calendar isn’t finished. Broadway seasons never are this early.

Manhattan Theatre Club has David Hare’s Montauk slated for the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, while Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’s Warriors has claimed the Lunt-Fontanne but has yet to announce the opening date. And between now and the Tony eligibility cutoff, more productions will inevitably appear, theatres will change hands, casts will be announced and at least a few projects currently described as “Broadway-bound” will either materialize unexpectedly or quietly disappear.

What we can already see is a season unusually interested in memory, truth and reinvention. Other Desert Cities asks who owns a family’s history. 860 asks what remains when the physical container of memory disappears. Galileo pits truth against institutional authority. Evita interrogates the manufacture of public mythology. Gloria asks who gets to own catastrophe. The Sound of Music places private conscience against political power. Even The Fantasticks, after 66 years, is being asked to tell its love story differently.

Then there are the glorious theatrical curveballs: a paranormal horror franchise invading the August Wilson, Paddington arriving with his marmalade sandwiches, Prince taking over the Majestic, Bill Irwin tackling Molière and Dolly Parton finally putting Dolly Parton on Broadway.

The 2026–2027 season isn’t finished announcing itself. But it has already given us plenty of dates worth circling.