City Center Unveils 2025-26 Musical Season Featuring Bat Boy Gala and All-Black LA CAGE With Billy Porter

New York City Center is doubling down on daring revivals and fresh perspectives for its 2025-26 musical-theatre slate. Announced this week, the programme pairs cult favourites with golden-age classics, anchoring the season in themes of acceptance and reinvention. The line-up also marks the first full season curated by newly appointed Vice-President & Artistic Director of Musical Theater Jenny Gersten.

“These shows span pop-rock to glorious traditional orchestrations, but every one of them asks us to understand and respect our differences. That feels urgently right,” Gersten said in the season announcement.

A Tabloid Legend Opens the Season

The curtain rises 29 October with the annual gala production of Bat Boy: The Musical, directed by two-time Tony winner Alex Timbers. The off-beat 2001 pop-rock spoof (book by Keythe Farley & Brian Flemming, music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe) runs through 9 November, capped by a Ziegfeld Ballroom dinner honouring Broadway producer Bee Carrozzini of Ambassador Theatre Group.

Encores! Series Mixes Wit, Jazz, and Ghosts

City Center’s celebrated Encores! series follows with three limited-run revivals:

• High Spirits (4–15 February 2026) — Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit reimagined as a fizzy 1964 tuner by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray, staged by Jessica Stone.

• The Wild Party (18–29 March 2026) — Michael John LaChiusa’s jazz-age fever dream, directed by Lili-Anne Brown.

• La Cage aux Folles (17–28 June 2026) — Robert O’Hara directs, with guest music director Joseph Joubert, for the show’s first all-Black cast, headlined by Emmy-Grammy-Tony winner Billy Porter as Albin.

A Milestone for Representation

The all-Black LA CAGE breaks new ground for Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s 1983 crowd-pleaser. Porter—who won the 2013 Tony for Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper’s Kinky Boots, reunites with Fierstein in a production poised to refract the show’s core message of chosen-family pride through a fresh cultural lens.

Gersten’s First Season at the Helm

Gersten steps into the artistic-director role after a decade producing at City Center and at major nonprofits nationwide. She inherits stewardship of the Tony-honoured Encores! brand with a charge to champion rarely heard scores while broadening the canon’s reach.