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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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