Special Reports

The 5 Best Off-Broadway Shows of 2024

These plays and musicals topped our list of shows from theaters around New York City.

Pete Hempstead

Pete Hempstead

| Off-Broadway |

December 19, 2024

Charming comedies, hard-hitting dramas, unforgettable musicals — off-Broadway offered them all this year. Picking just five was tough, but here are the shows that stayed with us through 2024.


Stephen Ochsner as Jakub Katz in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, directed by Irgor Golyak, for Arlekin Players Theatre at Classic Stage Company.
(© Jeremy Daniel)

5. Our Class
Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class came to New York as a part of the Under the Radar festival before receiving a stunning full production at Classic Stage Company in September, and it was one of the most powerful plays of the year. Telling the story of children who grow up in Poland during the 1930s, it looks at how evil governments turn friends against friends and how their horrific deeds follow them through their lives. Director Igor Golyak used everyday objects to tell a terrifying story about ordinary people doing unspeakable things. By no means an easy play to watch, Our Class makes us question how much we’ve really learned from the past.


Biko Eisen-Martin and Kara Young in Douglas Lyons’s Table 17, directed by Zhailon Levingston, at MCC Theater.
(© Daniel J. Vasquez)

4. Table 17
Last year MCC Theatre staged a charming comedy about a couple trying to figure out their relationship in Bees & Honey. This year it did something similar but in an altogether different vein with Douglas Lyons’s smart, funny play Table 17. Director Zhailon Levingston directed Kara Young and Biko Eisen-Martin as exes who meet at a restaurant to reconnect — and maybe more. Onstage with them was Michael Rishawn playing several roles, including a sassy waiter, in a brilliant feat of comedic agility. Along the way we get to see just what happened before things went kablooey, and who was most at fault for the breakup. The writing is crisp, the humor nonstop, and the performances off-the-chart. No other comedy this year touched me quite as much.


Trent Saunders, Andrew Durand, and Eddie Cooper in the world premiere of Dead Outlaw, directed by David Cromer, for Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre.
(© Matthew Murphy)

3. Dead Outlaw
Now for one of the oddest shows of the year, and certainly one of the weirdest musicals I’ve ever seen, but what a complete joy Dead Outlaw was. Who would have thought that a story about a traveling corpse would make for a good tuner? David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna, and Itamar Moses did, and they were right. Based on the true story of Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), who was shot dead in a gunfight in 1911, Dead Outlaw follows McCurdy’s corpse as it goes from one sideshow to the next and finally ends up hanging in a funhouse. The music comprises an eclectic mix of genres that follow the body through the decades and has some of the funniest performances of the year, including Thom Sesma’s hilarious portrayal of a coroner singing over McCurdy. Durand should get an award for being able to stand motionless for what seemed like an eternity. The whole show was nuts in the best possible way.


Elizabeth Stahlmann stands in front of a photo of the Auschwitz Helferinnen eating blueberries in Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s Here There Are Blueberries, directed by Kaufman, at New York Theatre Workshop.
(© Matthew Murphy)

2. Here There Are Blueberries
History, we like to think, is something fixed, an incorruptible record of facts that helps us understand the past. Of course, it’s not, and we’re constantly rewriting it. That’s one of the inconvenient truths that come up for a group of archivists in the documentary play Here There Are Blueberries, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama this year. Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich look at the true story surrounding a photo album of Nazis at leisure that was sent to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the archivists’ efforts to uncover the truth of the photos’ origins. The play is at once disturbing for showing us otherwise regular people blithely participating in horror, and intriguing as the archivists gradually uncover the history of the album. Kaufman directed this suspenseful story with impeccable precision as it asked us to reevaluate our own relationships with the past.


The company of Cats: The Jellicle Ball at PAC NYC.
(© Matthew Murphy)

1. Cats: “The Jellicle Ball”
I admit that I am not generally a huge fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. There are exceptions, but Cats is not one of them — at least it wasn’t until I saw Cats: “The Jellicle Ball,” an inspired, positively joyous reimagination of the original. While the music was the same, there was not one Lycra cat suit anywhere. It took place not in an old junk yard but on the runway of a ball where fabulous “cats” walk and compete for the honor of being recognized by Old Deuteronomy, played by the most regal theater cat of them all, André De Shields. The show is notorious for not having much of a plot, but this version became about something: working the catwalk, fashion, celebration, and strutting your stuff for glory. Bringing ballroom culture together with the Heaviside Layer was a stroke of genius from directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, who actually made Cats make sense. Here’s to hoping we see it again soon.


Full Company 2 Credit MSG Entertainment
Julia Nicole Hunter, Whoopi Goldberg, Hazel Vogel, Kevin the dog, and Christopher Swan in Annie
(© MSG Entertainment)

Bonus show: It’s a little too big to be considered an off-Broadway theater, but I’m giving the Theater at Madison Square Garden a shoutout here for its must-see production of Annie. There’s nothing we need more at this time of year than a shot of positivity and hope. This Annie, with its optimistic score, family-style comedy, and hilarious performances by Whoopi Goldberg and a terrific cast, was just what I needed to put me in the holiday spirit. Don’t miss it.

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