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THE CONNECTOR, ONCE UPON A MATTRESS & More Lead Top Off-Broadway Shows for January
Each month we're rounding up 10 off-Broadway recommendations for audiences not to miss!
By: Team BWW Jan. 01, 2024
What's happening off-Broadway? BroadwayWorld is helping you pick what to see next by rounding up our top recommended theatre each month. Coming up off-Broadway this January is a new Jason Robert Brown musical, a revival of a classic, and more.
Once Upon a Mattress
New York City Center
January 24-February 4, 2024
In 1959, two as-yet-untested stars made their Broadway debuts: Mary Rodgers, with a gorgeous score that put her on the map, and Carol Burnett, in her first stage role as the brassy, loveable Princess Winifred the Woebegone—or “Fred” to her friends. More than six decades later, musical theater legend Sutton Foster (The Music Man) returns to the City Center stage alongside an all-star creative team to recapture that same infectious energy and joy.
Led by Encores! Artistic Director Lear deBessonet (Into the Woods, Lionel Bart’s Oliver!) and with a new concert adaptation by Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Once Upon a Mattress sets an unapologetic free spirit loose in a repressed kingdom, reveling in Fred’s ability to charm and transform with willpower, honesty, and a little bit of help from her friends. Full of gloriously catchy melodies like “Shy” and “In a Little While,” this uproarious update of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” promises both classic charms and new delights.
Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana
The Pershing Square Signature Center [Irene Diamond Stage]
Now through February 25, 2024
In Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, a defrocked clergyman encounters inside disturbances amid outside disturbances during one stormy night at the Costa Verde Hotel in Acapulco as the world prepares for World War II. After four women of different ages and backgrounds, along with a 97-year-old poet, engage in the clergyman’s spiritual struggles, their lives leap dramatically forward. And the catalytic, defrocked clergyman survives the night.
The Connector
Begins Previews January 12, 2024
From Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown (PARADE) comes a timely new musical about two talented young journalists on increasingly diverging paths. Set in the late 1990s amid a rapidly changing media landscape we meet a fast-rising journalist, Ethan Dobson, and an assistant copy editor, Robin Martinez, at the revered magazine The Connector. In a world that values the next big sensation, Ethan’s writing prowess and ambition force him to confront how far he’ll go for the ultimate scoop and Robin to consider how far she’ll go to stop him.
With a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, THE CONNECTOR will feature Brown leading the band at each performance and reuniting with THE LAST FIVE YEARS and SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD director Daisy Prince.
Russian Troll Farm
January 25-February 25, 2024
Steve likes Masha; Masha likes Nikolai; and Egor just wants to win a microwave. It’s another day at the office for the workers of St. Petersburg’s infamous (real-life) Internet Research Agency, whose job is manipulating social media to advance Russia’s agenda at home and abroad. Set in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, office comedy meets political satire in Sarah Gancher’s shape-shifting examination of the power, seduction, and danger of a good story. A New York Times Critic’s Pick in its acclaimed online version, the NYC premiere is directed by Tony Award® winner Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder).
Bacon
SoHo Playhouse
January 4-28, 2024
Following a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the multi-award-winning play comes to New York for 24 performances only. Bacon was the winner of the Tony Craze Award, three Off West End Awards in London for Best Director and Best Lead Performer in a Play for both actors, and the Peggy Ramsay / Film 4 Foundation Award. Sophie Swithinbank is a writer on attachment to The National Theatre and Matthew Iliffe is a programme member of The National Theatre.
Bacon is an unflinching and unexpectedly humorous look at masculinity, sexuality and power, through the dizzying lens of youth. We follow Mark and Darren on Year 10's first day back at school. Mark is new and too scared to make friends; Darren is out of control and too scary to make friends. The two of them need each other - but neither would ever admit it.
Mind Mangler
New World Stages
Now through January 28, 2024
*Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion* stars original company members Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer and is based on a character originally created in *Magic Goes Wrong* by Penn Jillette, Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Teller.
From the minds that brought *The Play That Goes Wrong* and *Peter Pan Goes Wrong* to Broadway comes the hilarious new comedy by Mischief. Join the “Mind Mangler” as he returns to the stage following a disappointing two-night run at the Scranton, PA Holiday Inn Conference Center, suite 2B. His new two-man show solo spectacular is predicted to spiral into chaos as he attempts to read your MIND…
Direct from a UK Tour including sold-out West End performances, Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion is a guaranteed night of “laugh-filled, mind-bending silliness” (BroadwayWorld) that will leave you gasping for breath. Not to be missed!
Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man
AMT Theater
Now through January 20, 2024
At a local "meet the author" event for the best-selling author of "Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man", the shy young moderator and her hunky stage hand assistant get thrown into a wild ride where the discussion turns into a demonstration and no one in the audience is safe!
Voted Best Comedy for Couples, Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man has been sharing its interactive, upbeat brand of comedy with theater audiences all across America for nearly a decade!
After becoming one of the longest running Off-Broadway comedies in history, and following a smash-hit residency in Las Vegas, this “uproariously funny” (The Tribune) show is back in the Big Apple every Friday and Saturday night at 8pm.
Hailed by Theatermania as “one of the best date-night shows you’ll see", Sex Tips has recently been showcased on television in three different reality series whose stars performed in the show, including Kendra On Top, Real Housewives of New York, and Shahs of Sunset. The popularity of this production is no surprise given its source material is the international best-selling book of the same title, which has been published in over 50 different countries and translated into 17 different languages.
Get your tickets, and your tips, today!
White Rose: The Musical
Theatre Row
January 25-March 31, 2024
White Rose: The Musical is based upon a true story of a small group of university students who secretly met to write, print, and distribute leaflets exposing Hitler's lies and Nazi deception.
Starring Jo Ellen Pellman (Netflix "The Prom") as Sophie Scholl, Mike Cefalo (Broadway: New York, New York) as Hans Scholl, Kennedy Kanagawa (Broadway: Into the Woods) as Christoph Probst. Laura Sky Herman (National Tour: Hello, Dolly!) as Lila Ramdohr, Paolo Montalban (Broadway: Funny Girl, Pacific Overtures) as Kurt Huber, Sam Gravitte (Broadway: Wicked) as Frederick Fischer, Cole Thompson (Broadway: Into the Woods) as Willi Graf, Ellis Gage (International: Next To Normal) as Swing, Dani Apple (NY: The Sorceress) as Swing.
Full cast to be announced soon.
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Jonah
Laura Pels Theatre
January 11-March 10, 2024
What’s your fantasy? Ana knows that everybody has one—her especially, and she’d do anything to make it come true. And when she meets Jonah, a sweet and caring student at her boarding school, everything she’s ever wanted is finally falling into place. Except Jonah, like everything else in this moving world premiere play from Rachel Bonds, is not all that he seems. A singularly haunting and heart-racing coming-of-age tale that will keep you guessing until its final twisting moments, Jonah is about the true cost of survival, and the lengths some will travel to feel just a little less alone in the world. Danya Taymor directs.
Little Shop of Horrors
Now Playing
Seymour is a down-on-his-luck florist with a crush on his co-worker Audrey. When he discovers a mysterious – and voracious – plant, suddenly Seymour and Audrey are thrust into an epic battle that will determine the fate of the entire human race. Little Shop of Horrors made its highly-anticipated return home to Off-Broadway, in an intimate new production directed by Michael Mayer that offers an unprecedented opportunity to get close — maybe too close — to an incredible plant with an insatiable appetite.
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