Broadway & Off-Broadway: Everything That’s Happening in the Final Days of May 2026 — Tony Season, Star Switches, Big Closings and the Season to Come

The final week of May 2026 on Broadway is one of the most dramatic of the season: Daniel Radcliffe takes his final bow, Mariska Hargitay steps into the spotlight, Beaches goes dark, the Tony nominations loom large, and a wave of new announcements for fall and beyond are reshaping what New York theatre will look like through 2027.

Published: 27 May 2026  ·  Broadway & Off-Broadway News Roundup  ·  Sources: Broadway.com, Playbill, BroadwayWorld, New York Theatre Guide, New York Theater, Broadway Direct, IBDB, NY1, People, Variety, Show-Score, Seatplan

The 79th Annual Tony Awards: Nominations, Performances Announced and the June 7 Countdown

The biggest story of the past three weeks on Broadway has been the announcement of the 79th Annual Tony Award nominations on 5 May 2026 — a moment that simultaneously validated some of the season’s most adventurous work, generated considerable discussion about what was left out, and set the stage (literally) for the 7 June ceremony at Radio City Music Hall.

Announced by Tony nominee Uzo Aduba and Tony winner Darren Criss, the nominations confirmed The Lost Boys: A New Musical and Schmigadoon! as the season’s dominant new musicals, each earning a remarkable 12 nominations — including Best Musical for both. Ragtime, Lincoln Center Theater’s acclaimed revival, followed closely with 11 nominations, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman emerged as the most-nominated play of the season with nine nominations — tying it with Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show in the revival categories.

The nominations generated several headline moments beyond the numbers. June Squibb — the beloved actress of Nebraska fame — received a Tony nomination at the age of 96, making her the oldest performer ever nominated in an acting category in Tony history. The announcement was greeted with enormous affection by the theatrical community. Meanwhile, Danny Burstein received a nomination that made him the most Tony-nominated male actor in Broadway history — an extraordinary milestone for one of the stage’s most distinguished and consistent performers.

The nominations also produced some notable snubs that have generated considerable conversation. Buena Vista Social Club — which won five Tonys in 2025 and is still running to packed houses — was ineligible this year, having already been honoured. But the complete shut-out of Beaches — which received zero nominations from a production that had been hoping for at least one for Jessica Vosk — contributed directly to that show’s decision to close early on 24 May, as we will discuss below.

The performances for the Tony ceremony have now been announced. All nominees for Best Musical and Best Revival of a Musical will perform at Radio City Music Hall on 7 June, meaning audiences can expect live performances from the casts of The Lost Boys, Schmigadoon!, Titaníque, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Ragtime, and Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show. The ceremony will be broadcast on CBS.

Full Tony Nominations by Production

Production	Nominations	Category Note
The Lost Boys (Musical)	12	Best Musical nominated
Schmigadoon! (Musical)	12	Best Musical nominated
Ragtime (Revival)	11	Henry, Uranowitz both nominated
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (Revival)	9	Season’s top-nominated play
Cats: The Jellicle Ball (Revival)	9	Drag/ballroom reimagining
Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Revival)	9	Luke Evans Broadway debut
Two Strangers (Musical)	8	NYT Critics’ Pick
Oedipus (Revival)	7	Mark Strong & Lesley Manville
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Revival)	5	Denzel Washington producing
The Balusters (Play)	5	Outer Critics Circle winner
Chess (Revival)	5	Nicholas Christopher nominated
Fallen Angels (Revival)	5	Byrne & O’Hara both nominated
Liberation (Play)	5	Pulitzer Prize winner
Bug (Revival)	4	Carrie Coon nominated
Giant (Play)	4	John Lithgow nominated
Titaníque (Musical)	4	Best Musical nominated

The Biggest Star Switch of May: Radcliffe’s Final Bow and Hargitay’s Historic Broadway Debut

The most-discussed news story of the final week of May 2026 in the Broadway world is the transition in Every Brilliant Thing at the Hudson Theatre — a production that has now completed the most remarkable casting sequence of its Broadway run.

Tony winner Daniel Radcliffe played his final performance as the unnamed narrator on Sunday 24 May 2026 — a performance that drew standing ovations and an outpouring of critical and audience appreciation for what many described as his finest Broadway performance, following his Tony win for Merrily We Roll Along. Radcliffe’s nine-week run generated enormous box office and critical success, with the production earning two Tony nominations (Best Play and Best Actor for Radcliffe himself) and playing to near-capacity throughout.

From Monday 26 May 2026, Mariska Hargitay — the Emmy Award-winning star of Law & Order: SVU, in which she has played Detective Olivia Benson for an extraordinary 27 seasons — makes her Broadway debut in the role, taking the production through to 5 July 2026. The casting was announced to significant media attention: Hargitay, known to millions of American television viewers, brings a celebrity recognition and fan loyalty that should sustain the production’s commercial momentum through the early summer tourist season.

Following Hargitay’s run, Tracee Ellis Ross — Black-ish star, daughter of Diana Ross, and Golden Globe winner — takes the role from 7 July through the production’s final performance on 9 August 2026. The three-star rotation strategy has been hailed by industry observers as one of the most innovative commercial approaches to a solo show in recent Broadway history, turning a single production into, in effect, three distinct theatrical events for three different celebrity fan bases.

A Farewell to Beaches: Broadway’s First Tony Casualty Closes on 24 May

The closing of Beaches: A New Musical at the Majestic Theatre on Sunday 24 May 2026 — after just 38 regular performances and 28 previews — has become the defining story of the season’s Tony casualty narrative. The production, which had been announced to run through 6 September, closed more than three months early following its complete shut-out from the Tony nominations on 5 May.

As Playbill’s pre-Tonys analysis had noted, the producers were almost certainly counting on at least one Tony nomination — most likely for Jessica Vosk’s widely praised portrayal of Cee Cee Bloom — as a commercial lifeline. When none arrived, the production’s already struggling box office (posting around 44 percent capacity and $441,484 per week in its final performances) became unsustainable at the Majestic Theatre’s operating costs.

Vosk responded to the Tony shut-out with characteristic grace, posting a social media video in which she described waking up at 8 a.m. with anxiety, learning the news, and then heading out for a bagel “because I believe I deserve carbohydrates.” The video generated enormous warmth and sympathy across the theatrical community. The Drama League and Outer Critics Circle had both nominated her for her performance. In her closing statement, she said it had been “my great joy to originate a role for the very first time on Broadway with Cee Cee Bloom.”

A national tour, produced by Crossroads Live, remains planned for 2027. Beaches becomes the 2025-26 season’s most high-profile early closing — though industry observers note that the show’s trajectory was not entirely different from that of several well-reviewed productions that have found larger audiences on the road than they did in New York.

Dog Day Afternoon: The Bear’s Reunion Heats Up at the August Wilson Theatre

One of the spring’s most-discussed new plays is fully open and running at the August Wilson Theatre, and it is generating the kind of palpable audience excitement that comes with genuinely unexpected celebrity star power. Dog Day Afternoon — Stephen Adly Guirgis’s stage adaptation of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 crime classic — officially opened on 30 March 2026 and runs through 12 July 2026.

Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — Emmy Award-winning co-stars from the hit FX series The Bear — are making their Broadway debuts as Sonny Amato and Sal DeSilva respectively, in roles inspired by the characters originally played on screen by Al Pacino and John Cazale. The production is directed by two-time Olivier Award winner Rupert Goold, who previously helmed the acclaimed West End productions of Ink and King Charles III.

The show is adapted from the true story of the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery by John Wojtowicz — a Vietnam veteran and gay rights activist whose three-hour hostage situation at a Chase Manhattan branch in Gravesend became one of the defining New York City tabloid stories of its era. Guirgis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Between Riverside and Crazy, brings his characteristic combination of street-level authenticity and moral complexity to material that has always been, at its heart, a story about desperate people caught in a system that was never designed for them. The production has earned three Tony nominations — including Best New Play — and is playing to strong houses throughout its limited run.

The show has also launched a digital lottery and rush ticket policy for last-minute audiences, following the interest generated by Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach’s combined social media following. Both actors have been doing a considerable amount of press, and their genuine friendship — forged over multiple seasons of The Bear — communicates itself through the chemistry of their performances in ways that critics have found particularly compelling.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball: Broadway’s Most Radical Reimagining Is Here and It Has Nine Tony Nominations

The production that has generated the most pure theatrical conversation of the spring is unquestionably Cats: The Jellicle Ball — the drag and ballroom culture-inspired reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic musical that transferred to the Broadhurst Theatre from a celebrated Off-Broadway run in summer 2024.

Directed and choreographed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, the production reimagines the Jellicle Cats as participants in New York City’s underground ballroom scene — the vibrant, explicitly queer and trans community that emerged in Harlem in the 1970s and 1980s and that was documented in the celebrated 1990 film Paris Is Burning. The casting is led by Tony and Grammy Award winner André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy — in a performance that critics have described as one of the great theatrical presences of the current season — alongside Ken Ard as DJ Griddlebone and an ensemble that combines theatrical training with genuine ballroom culture expertise.

The show officially opened on 7 April 2026 and has received nine Tony Award nominations, including Best Revival of a Musical. The nominations have been seen as a significant validation of a production that takes considerable creative risks: removing the show’s traditional staging entirely and replacing it with a visual vocabulary derived from voguing, runway competition, and the specific rituals of ball culture. Lord Webber himself has expressed enthusiasm for the reimagining — a welcome creative endorsement that has added to the production’s cultural momentum.

More May 2026 Broadway News: Oh, Mary! Records, Megan Thee Stallion, and Shakespeare in the Park

Last Chance: Shows Closing in Late May and June 2026

The end of May and the beginning of June will see a significant reshuffling of the Broadway landscape, with several Tony-season productions concluding their runs. Here is a complete guide to what is closing and when.

Off-Broadway Roundup: Closings, Awards and What to Watch

The Off-Broadway scene in late May 2026 is equally active, with the conclusion of the annual Lucille Lortel Awards cycle marking the high point of the smaller-scale theatrical calendar.

The Lucille Lortel Awards — the Off-Broadway community’s equivalent of the Tony Awards — were announced at the beginning of May, recognising outstanding productions at venues below the 500-seat threshold. Natalie Venetia Belcon of Buena Vista Social Club took the Outstanding Lead Performer in a Musical award for her Off-Broadway work, a recognition that contributed to her Tony win earlier in the season. The ceremony, held at NYU Skirball, celebrated a season of Off-Broadway work that has been notably strong across a wide range of venues.

The Pushover, a new play described as featuring “three bad-ass women who collide and collude at a spa in New Mexico, and a bare-bones Asian restaurant in Queens,” closed Off-Broadway on 2 May after a well-reviewed run. The show, which BroadwayWorld singled out for its distinctive voice and its specific engagement with the language and psychology of women of colour on the margins, received considerable attention from producers looking for work to develop further.

Mother Russia, Lauren Yee’s new play at the Pershing Square Signature Center, continued its run through May to strong reviews. Set in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg, the play features New York theatre veterans Steven Boyer, Adam Chanler-Berat, Rebecca Naomi Jones, and David Turner in a story about two friends, a former pop singer, and a mysterious past — exactly the kind of character-driven, actor-forward new work that the Signature Center specialises in developing.

At Playwrights Horizons, the late May programming features new work in the development pipeline for next season, with several workshop productions generating early buzz among the theatrical community. Details on next season’s full Off-Broadway schedule are expected in late June.

The Shakespeare in the Park announcement (detailed above) has also generated considerable Off-Broadway-adjacent interest, with the Public Theater’s summer programming now confirmed as including both the central park Romeo & Juliet and a series of complementary programmes at the Public’s downtown Newman and Martinson venues. Full details of the summer 2026 schedule at the Public are expected within the next two weeks.

Looking Ahead: New Productions Announced for Fall 2026 and Beyond

The end of the current Broadway season is also the beginning of announcement season for the next one, and May 2026 has seen a flurry of reveals about what will be coming to Broadway in fall 2026 and through 2027.

The most discussed of the upcoming announcements is undoubtedly the Jamie Lloyd production of Much Ado About Nothing, which is bringing two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most beloved stars to Broadway. Tom Hiddleston — best known as Loki but with a substantial theatre career including a Tony-nominated Broadway debut in 2019 — and Hayley Atwell — making her Broadway debut — play Benedick and Beatrice in what London reviewers have called a “disco-tastic” party of a production. The show received strong reviews in its London premiere in 2025 and is expected to be one of the most commercially anticipated Broadway productions of the 2026-27 season.

Galileo — a new musical about the Italian scientist and astronomer, with music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak and Michael Weiner and a book by Danny Strong (whose book for the Chess revival also appeared this season) — stars the reliably extraordinary Raúl Esparza, whose Tony-nominated career makes him one of Broadway’s most anticipated leading men whenever he announces a new project. The musical premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2024 and its Broadway transfer, directed by Michael Mayer, represents one of the most keenly awaited new work arrivals of the coming season.

Inter Alia, the new drama by Australian playwright Suzie Miller (whose Prima Facie was a landmark recent Broadway event), brings Rosamund Pike to the Music Box Theatre — the Pike’s Broadway debut and a reunion of Miller with the New York theatrical community that greeted Prima Facie with such enthusiasm. The play follows a London Crown Court judge whose family is rocked by an unthinkable personal crisis, and early word from workshop readings has been strong.

Industry News: IATSE and the Kennedy Center, Beanie Feldstein Expecting, and More

The State of Broadway at the End of May 2026: A Summary

The end of May 2026 finds Broadway in a condition that might be described as energetic uncertainty — the particular mixture of excitement and anxiety that characterises the peak of awards season, when everything is in motion simultaneously. The Tony nominations are in, the winners are not yet determined. The biggest productions of the season are beginning their final weeks, and their replacements are already being announced. The star transitions are generating media attention and audience enthusiasm. The industry debates — about economics, union relations, and the sustainability of Broadway’s current business model — are ongoing and unresolved.

What is clear, from the extraordinary volume of activity and the quality of the nominations list, is that the 2025-26 Broadway season has been one of genuine artistic ambition. The presence of The Lost Boys, Schmigadoon!, Ragtime, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Liberation (the Pulitzer winner), and The Balusters in the Tony nominations reflects a season that has taken significant creative risks — with new musicals, radical reimaginings, and ambitious new plays — and that has been rewarded, at least by the nominators, for doing so.

The 7 June Tony ceremony will be the season’s final punctuation mark. Until then, get your tickets quickly to whatever is on your list — because in the final weeks of May and the first weeks of June, Broadway’s most exciting season in years is preparing to take its bow.

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