The Best Reviewed Broadway Shows of 2025
Which Broadway shows got the best reviews in 2025?
By: Sidney Paterra Dec. 30, 2025
37 Broadway shows opened in 2025, and while not all of them were loved by the critics, there were plenty of standouts all year long. We're breaking down the best Broadway shows of 2025 by month, as reviewed by New York City theatre critics and rounded up right here at BroadwayWorld.
Review them all below and don't forget to check out year-end favorites and study up on what's coming in 2026!
Note: No Broadway shows opened in May and July.
January: English
Opening Night: January 23, 2025
Greg Evans, Deadline: Absolutely nothing gets lost in the translation of Sanaz Toossi’s English as the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a group of Iranians longing for the West finally makes its Broadway debut, two years after its Off Broadway bow garnered critical raves and regional stagings won over audiences with its unfailing wit, grace and compassion.
February: Redwood
Opening Night: February 13, 2025
Jesse Green, The New York Times: Except that we don’t in fact want silence from a musical, and “Redwood” would make a dreary play. Happily, whenever its book drifts into familiar tropes of the genre, the songs pull it back to its wild and unsettled heart. Diaz’s rangy, propulsive music has immediate curb appeal but with a scary, questing quality that provides the necessary big endings without pat resolutions — a combination that hits Menzel’s sweet spot over and over. The other characters also get strong defining numbers, all beautifully sung.
March: Buena Vista Social Club
Opening Night: March 19, 2025
Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Fortunately, the plot is just a hanger for the musical numbers, which is where Buena Vista Social Club comes to thrilling life. The show makes no attempt to rope its score into character work; all 15 songs, of which 10 were part of the original 1996 recording sessions, are presented as performances in nightclubs or studios, sometimes heightened by the six excellent dancers who execute Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s gorgeously fluid and individuated choreography. The lyrics are untranslated, but that hardly matters. The music itself is the story.
April: Dead Outlaw
Opening Night: April 27, 2025
Patrick Ryan, USA Today: In the staggering “Dead Outlaw,” death is both commodified and desensitized; a cruel fact of life that we are pummeled with repeatedly throughout the musical. (“Your friends are dead / your dog is dead / and so are you,” Brown growls in the cheeky, name-dropping finale.) But in facing our bleak mortal coil with a laugh and a song, McCurdy’s hair-raising, pulse-racing resuscitation helps us all feel a little more alive.
June: Call Me Izzy
Opening Night: June 12, 2025
David Finkle, New York Stage Review: What Max has written—the outcome of which won’t be divulged—is a study of a woman, perhaps like millions of other women, in a society where their resources, other than as efficient homemakers, are regularly and sometimes cruelly repressed. The playwright appears convinced that the feminist movement (possibly as a feminist himself, in a happy marriage) has had an effect but so far a limited one.
August: Mamma Mia!
Opening Night: August 14, 2025
Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times: Despite being slightly downscaled for the road — most notably in a set that feels a little flimsy — this is a fine iteration of “Mamma Mia!” It certainly is sprightlier than it was the last time I saw the show, dejectedly limping toward the end of the first Broadway run. The band, under Will Van Dyke’s direction, was percolating with precise energy at the performance I attended, and the cast members had a spring in their step moving through Phyllida Lloyd’s staging and Anthony Van Laast’s choreography.
September: Punch
Opening Night: September 29, 2025
Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: Punch dramatizes the circumstances surrounding the fateful moment when a drunk and stoned 19-year-old Dunne, itching for a fight, accidentally killed a man with one punch. The play delivers a message of forgiveness that we desperately need right now.
October: Little Bear Ridge Road
Opening Night: October 30, 2025
Johnny Oleksinki, The New York Post: It’s a hard-hitting, hard-laughing show that combines topics that you arrive at the theater not itching to confront — the COVID pandemic, meth addiction, health insurance, shift pay — into an absorbing story you leave wanting much more of.
November: Oedipus
Opening Night: November 13, 2025
Alexis Soloski, The New York Times: Critic's Pick. Icke’s change in timeline trades catastrophe for suspense, ontological disaster for down-to-the-cuticles nail biting. Is this a fair exchange? Maybe. Is it electrifying? God, yes. The results are slick, sleek, mordant. It’s a spine tingler, if not quite the ethics tangler of the original.
December: Marjorie Prime
Opening Night: December 8, 2025
Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Much of the pre-opening press about this revival has revolved around the 96-year-old Squibb, who might be the oldest actor ever to play a principal role on Broadway. She merits that attention with a remarkable performance that combines frostiness and fogginess into a firm coat of rime. But the other actors are equally good. Burstein, who radiates human tenderness, is perfectly employed as the play’s kindest character, and his final scene is devastating; Lowell finds the appropriate levels of stiffness and charm for his faux Walter. And Nixon is simply the best I’ve ever seen her onstage: As Tess labors to connect with her mother—or alternatively to give up any hope of connecting with her—Nixon invests her testiness with complex underlying notes of bitterness and exhaustion.
Honorable mentions:
Liberation: 89.3%
Purpose: 84.8%
The Picture of Dorian Gray: 83.8%
John Proctor is the Villain: 83%
Ragtime: 82.4%
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