This week the Playbill Discount Club is celebrating Off-Broadway with discounts for a selection of shows that highlight the diverse array of theatre being produced across New York City. From plays to musicals, premieres and revivals, here’s our list of 15 Off-Broadway productions to catch.
Click here to access discounts for the following shows:
BABETTE'S FEAST
Theatre at Saint Clement’s
Babette’s Feast tells the story of how a refugee transforms a closed religious community by sacrificing all she has to throw a lavish dinner party. This adaptation re-imagines the story you thought you knew about Babette’s singular feast: deep, funny, dangerous, sensual, and beautiful.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF WOMEN
59E59
Alan Ayckbourn’s latest comedy (presented in four parts) tells the life story of an unremarkable man and the remarkable women who loved him, left him, or lost him over sixty years; and of the equally remarkable old manor house that saw and heard it all happen.
CONFLICT
Mint Theater Company
Miles Malleson’s 1925 comedy Conflict is a love story set against the backdrop of a hotly contested election. Malleson combines his two great passions: sex and politics for this London-set play that takes place during the Roaring 20s. The result is a provocative romance that sizzles with both wit and ideas.
DAN CODY'S YACHT
Manhattan Theater Club
A single schoolteacher is struggling to get by when the wealthy father of one of her students surprises her with a financial proposal that could change her daughter's life. Anthony Giardina’s new play asks, what truly separates the haves and the have nots?
DESPERATE MEASURES
New World Stages
David Friedman and Peter Kellogg’s new musical comedy set in the lawless west where a hot-tempered young cowboy finds himself sentenced to hang for killing a man in a bar fight. His sister, a novice nun in a nearby mission, is persuaded to plead with a corrupt governor to spare her brother's life. The governor promises to pardon Johnny if his sister, the Sister, will “do his bidding” for the night.
THE FOURTH WALL
Theater Breaking Through Barriers
A.R. Gurney’s comedy about a woman who redecorates her living room to look like a stage set where everything faces one wall, the fourth wall, and everyone who enters the room begins to behave as if they were acting in a play.
HARRY CLARKE
Minetta Lane Theatre, produced by Audible
Billy Crudup stars in this sexually charged and wickedly funny one-man thriller about a shy Midwestern man leading an outrageous double life as the cocky Londoner Harry Clarke who moves to New York and charms his way into a wealthy family’s life.
LAURA BUSH KILLED A GUY
The Flea Theater
Lisa Hodsoll was nominated for a 2017 Helen Hayes Award for her performance as Laura Bush in Ian Allen’s one-women show that is currently playing its world-premiere run at The Klunch in Washington, D.C. This surreal reexamination of the Bush years arrives in New York June 14.
A LETTER TO HARVEY MILK
Theatre Row
When a lonely widower fulfills a writing assignment to compose a letter to someone from his past who’s dead, he writes not to his late wife Frannie, but to Harvey Milk, the first openly gay political leader in California, setting off life-changing revelations in this new musical about friendship and loss, the grip of the past, and the hard-won acceptance set in motion by the most unexpected people.
LITTLE ROCK
Sheen Center
Shanice Williams (The Wiz) is featured in writer-director Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s drama that tells the riveting true story of the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to attend their city’s formerly segregated central high school. What began as their quest for a better education soon became a national crisis, igniting the passions of a divided country and sparking a historic fight for justice in the Jim Crow South.
ME AND MY GIRL
Encores! New York City Center
Part music hall frolic, part class-warfare comedy, Me and My Girlwas the toast of the 1937 London season before becoming a Broadway darling in the 1980s. Tony winner Christian Borle and Laura Michelle Kelly star in the limited run that is directed and choreographed by Tony winner Warren Carlyle.
MISS YOU LIKE HELL
Public Theater
Rentstar Daphne Rubin-Vega stars in the new musical about a whip-smart teenager who agrees to go on a life-changing road trip with her free-spirited Latina mother. Chance encounters with an assortment of characters along the way bring them closer together in this new musical that explores the joy and frustration of being a family in a changing country.
OPERATION CRUCIBLE
59E59
On the December 12, 1940, during World War II, a single bomb reduced the Marples Hotel, which stood proudly in Fitzalan Square in Sheffield, from seven stories to just 15 feet of rubble. Only one of the ten compartments in the hotel's cellars withstood the blast. Trapped within it were four men.Playwright Kieran Knowlestells their story in the production that arrives in New York following a 2016 London debut.
PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES
The New Group at The Pershing Square Signature Center
Lois Smith and Johanna Day star in Lily Thorne’s play about a 90-year-old woman, born to refugees fleeing the Armenian genocide, whose last wish is to die peacefully at home surrounded by her family. Her dream collides with reality as three generations of explosive women flood her small New England home to battle for their family’s legacy.
SINGLE RIDER
The Player’s Theatre
In this new musical comedy by the songwriting team of Amanda D’Archangelis and Sami Horneff, it’s the first day of Rumspringa, and Amish girls Abigail, Sarah, and Moira are about to be in for the ride of their lives. With the newfound freedom to explore the “English” world, they visit Lucky Land, a storied amusement park in the heart of Lancaster County. But when Abigail meets troubled teen, Shane, on the single rider line of her very first roller coaster, the two embark on an adventure that will change them both forever.
