Haul out the holly and let your holiday playlists rip because it’s officially the most wonderful time of the year! Maybe that primarily looks like evenings on the couch with a tin of peppermint bark and looped screenings of Elf, but leave room for Broadway on your Advent calendars. There are jolly offerings that could become new favorite traditions, plus a few other gems serving up everything from childlike wonder to festive family strife. Whatever kind of holiday spirit you’re looking for, there’s a Broadway show for you. Use our guide below to find your perfect match.
It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Next to A Christmas Carol, there’s no holiday fable more definitive than It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s 1946 film about everyman George Bailey’s search for meaning in small-town America. Jimmy Stewart should keep his slot on your Christmas movie calendar, but this year, save a night for Joe Landry’s live radio play, coming to Broadway for the first time in its 30-year history. Framed as a live performance in a 1940s radio studio, the cast features Broadway mainstays Andrew Rannells as George Bailey, Megan Hilty as Mary Bailey, and Tituss Burgess as the angel Clarence, with power couple Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin rounding out the company. Between the live Foley effects and the double dose of postwar nostalgia, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play will make you yearn for the days before podcasts turned us into solitary creatures.
Blue Man Group – A New Holiday Surprise
Blue Man Group spent more than three decades delighting New York City at the Astor Place Theatre before closing up shop in February 2025. Less than two years later, the azure trio is back in town and moving on up to Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre with its festive show, Blue Man Group – A New Holiday Surprise. This marks the legacy performance troupe’s Broadway debut, and, for the first time ever, the trio is bringing a yuletide twist to its custom instruments and kooky antics. So if you’re in the market for some good old-fashioned entertainment, this might be the year to make it a Blue Christmas.
Dolly: A True Original Musical
We can hold out hope that “Hard Candy Christmas” makes the cut in the Broadway-bound Dolly Parton biomusical, which begins performances December 7 at the St. James Theatre. But regardless of whether any of Parton’s hit holiday tunes are represented, Dolly: A True Original Musical is guaranteed to be an appropriately merry choice. After all, Dolly and Christmastime go hand in hand, and not just because of Dollywood’s famous Smoky Mountain Christmas festival or her classic yuletide collaborations with Kenny Rogers. Parton’s holiday spirit was perennial—a fixed state of radiating comfort and joy. She may have left us this past August, but in true Dolly fashion, she left behind a whole Broadway musical to make sure we didn’t have to muscle through our first December without her.
Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer & Ruthie Ann Miles on The Fantasticks’ New Moms
The longest-running musical…
The Fantasticks
Whether it’s the timeless fable of young love or the half-century of history in New York City, The Fantasticks carries all the same nostalgia that’s baked into the holiday season. Just listen to “Try to Remember,” Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones’s melancholy anthem to life’s simple pleasures and the innocence of youth. The show ran Off-Broadway for a record-breaking total of 50 years, and this winter, it takes its very first steps on a Broadway stage, newly reimagined for paramours Matt and Lewis instead of Matt and Luisa. It’s a limited run, so don’t miss this opportunity to indulge in The Fantasticks’ wistful reverie. After all, “Deep in December, it’s nice to remember.”
Other Desert Cities
’Tis the season for family dysfunction. In Jon Robin Baitz’s living-room drama—a starry Broadway revival with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Lily Rabe, and Joe Keery—long-buried skeletons are exhumed around a magnificent Tannenbaum on December 24. By Die Hard rules, that makes Other Desert Cities a Christmas play. But it’s also the perfect holiday option if you want to see the laughs, tears, and underhanded jabs that happen when a real American family gathers around the hearth.
860
Just when the cynicism threatens to set in, here comes Billy Crystal with an ode to family that will triple the size of any Grinchy heart. In his new solo play, 860, named for the house he lost in 2025 to the Palisades fire, Crystal turns a show-and-tell into a meditation on love, legacy, and the value of all the stuff accumulated in a life well-lived. It’s the life inventory we often find ourselves doing around the new year, but this one will remind you that tears of heartbreak and laughter aren’t mutually exclusive.
Schmigadoon!
If you consider The Sound of Music essential holiday viewing, Schmigadoon! is the show for you. It’s the most wonderful time of the year to cuddle up with any Golden Age musical, and in this mythical land of song, dance, and corn puddin’, no classic escapes Schmigadoon! mastermind Cinco Paul’s loving ridicule. Whether it’s a lesson in female anatomy set to the tune of “Do-Re-Mi” or a homily on “Tribulation” (with a capital T, and that stands for Tony Award), Schmigadoon! is all of a Broadway lover’s favorite things tied up with laughs.
Maybe Happy Ending
This time of year, nothing beats watching opposites attract on an ill-fated road trip. Add a blizzard and some hot chocolate, and Maybe Happy Ending is basically the perfect holiday romcom. The Tony-winning musical tells the futuristic love story of Claire and Oliver, a pair of retired Helperbots who wrestle with their increasingly human feelings on a covert journey to Jeju Island. It offers all the will-they-won’t-they delight of a Hallmark movie, but with some sneaky wisdom about the purpose of human connection and the beauty of life’s impermanence. No matter the temperature in Times Square, you’ll walk away warm.
A Kidman Carol
Feel like bending tradition a little? A Christmas Carol is getting a high-camp Aussie makeover at New World Stages. From the chaotic mind of Kevin Zak (creator of the unhinged Parent Trap parody Ginger Twinsies), A Kidman Carol turns Cate Blanchett (comedian Josh Sharp) into a Hollywood Scrooge. It’s Oscars Eve, and before the red carpet is unfurled, three spirits of Nicole Kidman (Marla Mindelle) are going to teach their fellow actress from Down Under the true meaning of Awards Season. Finally, a holiday parable for the devout media consumer! And not to already undermine the message, but Mindelle is fresh off her Tony-nominated performance as Titanique’s Celine Dion. We can only assume her Nicole(s) will be just as award-worthy.
