In today’s newsletter: why this season is bringing an artistic and audience frenzy not seen in years. Plus:

Helen Shaw
Shaw has been the magazine’s theatre critic since 2022.

Not since before the pandemic have we had a theatre season this simultaneously frenetic and artistically compelling. Last year was strong with “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” and the still-running “Gypsy,” but this one is nuts: shows have obliterated box-office records while they were still in previews. Drawn by Hollywood superstars such as Denzel Washington (in a disappointing “Othello”), Kieran Culkin (in a sturdy “Glengarry Glen Ross”), and George Clooney (in an impassioned “Good Night, and Good Luck”), audiences have been willing to fork over crazy sums, with some ticket prices nearing the thousands. Sometimes there’s money to be made on Broadway, but what’s surprising is that this year’s plums are plays, not musicals. A hullabaloo over Mamet? Over Shakespeare? It feels like the old days.

To get a sense of this spring’s abundance, you should try to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s biting comedy about a famous but failing Black dynasty, “Purpose,” or head to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to catch Chekhov’s masterpiece “The Cherry Orchard,” Benedict Andrews’s propulsive modern adaptation starring “Tár” ’s Nina Hoss and a shattering Adeel Akhtar. If you have time, you might want to hurry to Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” the playwright’s tribute to her mother’s feminist consciousness-raising group, which closes on April 6th. Andrew Scott’s solo version of Chekhov’s “Vanya” at the tiny Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village is this year’s unmissable show, though, admittedly, it’s a challenge to get tickets—happily, the filmed London version might be coming to a theatre near you, or perhaps you could stream it through the National Theatre at Home series. Uptown, Sarah Snook from “Succession” is taking her own solo virtuosic turn, playing all twenty-six characters in an exquisite multimedia adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” If you can see only one new piece this season, make it this perception-altering adaptation, directed by Kip Williams, an Australian megatalent exploring the cutting edge of onstage video.

For the musically inclined, or if you loved the camp ludicrousness of “Oh, Mary!”—Cole Escola’s gleefully under-researched portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln—you should try “Operation Mincemeat,” a gender-playful take on the true story of a caper during the Second World War, from the British fringe company SpitLip. Despite its rampant goofiness, “Mincemeat” contains the saddest and loveliest song in New York right now, sung by an M.I.5 secretary writing a letter to a dead man. There will be more lovely songs to come, surely, since the Broadway season still has several weeks of openings ahead, many of them musicals. But we’re already in a time of artistic bounty; the crocuses are up, and our theatre is blooming again.