More than ever, Broadway is 'reflecting who we are' as Americans

NEW YORK ‒ There's something about Mary.

In Cole Escola's irreverent Tony Award-winning comedy "Oh, Mary!" the playwright reimagines first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as a demented drunkard with a song in her heart and a gay president in her bed chamber.

"She has fractured versions of dignity," quips John Cameron Mitchell, who currently portrays the brazen, bratty-curled heroine on Broadway.

But for all its madcap medleys and poison-laced punchlines, "Oh, Mary!" is actually one of the most subversive shows to hit the Main Stem in years. Since 2024, the production has tapped a revolving door of actors across genders and ethnicities to play consequential American icons, with stars including Jinkx Monsoon, Kumail Nanjiani, Tituss Burgess and Conrad Ricamora.

"I just love that it's a celebration of differences, no matter who steps into what role," says Simu Liu, a Chinese Canadian actor and Marvel star making his Broadway debut as Mary's beefcake acting teacher. "It's almost like a subconscious message that diversity is good, and it's welcome and it's fresh."

In many ways, "Oh, Mary!" illustrates just how far Broadway has come in its century-plus history.

The theater has long been a place where America goes to work through the social tensions of its time. And if you want to hear how Americans are feeling in 2026, look no further than the current Broadway season, where myriad plays and musicals are exploring government conspiracy ("Bug"), media sensationalism ("Dog Day Afternoon"), rampant consumerism ("The Queen of Versailles") and the cost of the American dream ("Death of a Salesman").

Musical theater, in particular, "developed principally in America and matured over the course of the middle of the 20th century," says Ben West, a historian and author of The Musical Theatre Report. "This art form is capturing the American consciousness. It is reflecting who we are at any given moment in time."

'Oh, we can be represented on Broadway'

Broadway, in its current definition, consists of just over three dozen venues in New York's Theater District, all containing 500 seats or more. It once encompassed everything from vaudeville to revue to operetta, although today, we primarily think of Broadway as plays and musicals.

Many Black and female composers, such as Bob Cole and Kay Swift, helped pioneer the musical in the early 1900s, as did stars including Bert Williams and Florence Mills.

"Broadway has been inclusive, to an extent, since its beginning," West says. Representation has "not always been steady or at the same level. But in any case, it has certainly been instrumental in contributing to social change."

Tony-winning icon André De Shields, 80, returns to Broadway in March in "Cats: The Jellicle Ball," more than five decades after starring in the original production of "The Wiz." He remembers the musical posted a two-week closing notice on opening night, but word of mouth from the Black community "changed the entire momentum of the show," which went on to run for four years and win seven Tony Awards.

"We changed what was initially an inhospitable terrain for not only Black performers, but for Black audience members," De Shields says. "That opened the door to say, 'Oh, we can be represented on Broadway.' It wasn't the end-all, be-all, but it put a crack in the door."

Legendary actress and choreographer Debbie Allen, 76, is also back on Broadway this spring directing "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." "It couldn't be timelier," she says of the August Wilson play, which explores belonging and identity amid the Great Migration.

Looking back, Allen remembers encountering racism as she auditioned for one of her first Broadway shows just out of college.

Despite out-singing and out-dancing everyone, the director "came over and said to me, 'You are so talented, but we don't need another brunette,'" Allen recalls. "That was his way of saying he didn't need a Black girl in the show."

But she persisted, and proceeded to land leading roles in "Raisin," "West Side Story" and "Sweet Charity" throughout the 1970s and '80s.

"I came into theater from my beginnings in Houston, being the only Black person in 'Aida' when I was 16," Allen says. "But things have changed, and the good thing is the nature of the universe is change. If you can't continue to grow and adjust and adapt, it's likely you'll get left behind or no longer be relevant."

'Going out into the world and having an effect on people'

Long before "Oh, Mary!" came along, Liu dreamed of one day being on Broadway.

"But growing up, theater felt inaccessible to me," the "Barbie" actor says. "With the upbringing that I had – coming from an immigrant background – a lot of theater didn't feel like it was made for me, quite honestly."

That shifted with a Canadian production of "Kim's Convenience," which follows a Korean family in Toronto. "It was like watching the dynamic between me and my father and mother play out onstage so specifically," Liu recalls.

Later, on a senior class trip to New York, he was similarly floored by rock musical "Rent," which follows a diverse group of friends at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and tackles mature topics such as poverty, addiction and loss.

"It did a lot of good work," Mitchell says.

Throughout history, myriad shows like "Rent" have met the current moment, serving as cautionary tales about McCarthyism ("The Crucible"), political apathy ("Cabaret"), social media ("Dear Evan Hansen"), religious dogma ("The Book of Mormon") and intolerance ("South Pacific"). "Into the Woods" and "Angels in America" also drew on the AIDS crisis, while more recently, Kimberly Belflower wrote the cathartic “John Proctor Is the Villain” in response to the #MeToo movement.

In 2009, "Ragtime" actress Caissie Levy starred in a revival of the groundbreaking anti-war musical "Hair," which spawned the rousing protest anthem "Let the Sunshine In." In October of that year, more than 150,000 LGBTQ+ supporters staged the National Equality March in Washington, DC.

"We were fighting for marriage equality at that time in this country, and our cast was able to take that activism we were portraying in the show offstage," Levy recalls. "Our producers canceled a Broadway performance ‒ which never happens ‒ and we got on a bus and went and performed at the Capitol. It was this beautiful moment of what we were doing eight shows a week onstage: going out into the world and having an effect on people."

'The audience wasn't sure this was pretend'

Levy feels identically about this season's critically lauded revival of 1998's "Ragtime," which tells "a really American story" about immigration and racial injustice at the turn of the 20th century.

"It's showing us the lesson we're learning in the news cycle every day, which is the need to listen to one another and to open ourselves up to ideas that might not come naturally to us," Levy says. "Not a word has changed and yet it feels like it's for right now. That's the reason to revive something at all: to have it reflect back what's going on in our world."

While musicals such as “Assassins” and “Hamilton” address U.S. politics head-on, other shows have taken the nation's temperature in unlikelier ways.

John F. Kennedy became irrevocably linked with his favorite musical, “Camelot,” after his 1963 assassination, while a potent stage adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984” took on grim urgency when it opened on Broadway shortly after President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

"It was amazing, the intensity of the reaction from the New York audience," says director Robert Icke, who also helmed political thriller “Oedipus” this season. At one point during the play, a character asks what year it is: "I remember some lady shouted from the mezzanine, 'It's 2017, and it’s (expletive) up!' It’s like the audience wasn’t sure this was pretend.”

Meanwhile, the hit revival of 1988 pop musical "Chess" tells a deceptively complex story of Cold War tensions and geopolitics, with added topical jokes about Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that are met with laughter or silence, depending on the night.

"You'll hear the reactions from the audience change as the state of our world is in such extreme flux right now," actress Lea Michele says. "I speak a lot in my scenes about deportation and that certainly gets a very intense response. Sometimes you can tell that they're very uncomfortable; sometimes they're very angry."

Other moments, too, "have taken on new meaning as things have gotten more and more terrible in our country," costar Aaron Tveit adds. Toward the end of the show, "I basically say: 'Just because our governments have lost their minds, we don't have to ‒ right?' That's gotten even realer for us in this very short run."

'Is there a limit to what we can tolerate of great artists?'

Set in the 1970s, Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” follows a group of women’s rights activists as they debate the costs of progress. The play aims to raise the "consciousness," actress Betsy Aidem says, especially after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and the recent onslaught of the “tradwife” movement.

"We aren't finished with feminism," Aidem says. "People did get complacent; the younger generation doesn't realize what we fought for. There's just so much work yet to be done to make sure women have more equality."

In March, Oscar winner Adrien Brody and Golden Globe nominee Tessa Thompson take their first Broadway bows in Lindsey Ferrentino's "The Fear of 13," which is based on a true story about a man who was wrongfully accused of murder and spent 22 years on Pennsylvania's death row.

"What the play is talking about has real utility," Thompson says. "We have so many flaws in our criminal justice system and the carceral system is so broken, frankly. This play shows us that in a really humanizing way."

Emmy winner John Lithgow is also coming to New York this spring in "Giant," which depicts famed children's author Roald Dahl. Written by Mark Rosenblatt, the play dramatizes the fallout from Dahl's 1983 review of "God Cried," with his remarks deemed fiercely antisemitic.

"I was interested in the political discourse that was bubbling up in 2017, where public debate around Israel-Palestine was being blurred with clearly very antisemitic stereotyping," says Rosenblatt, who is Jewish. "On the one hand, you have meaningful debate; on the other, you have racism, and one is feeding the other."

"Giant" premiered in London's West End last year, but its concerns "are global," Rosenblatt says. "Is there a limit to what we can tolerate of great artists and politicians before we decide we're not engaging with them anymore? It's a play that offers a lot of points of view on some pretty contentious discussions," asking audiences to "think for themselves" about the line between criticism and hate speech.

'We're going to continue to be the revolution'

“Hedwig and the Angry Inch” is a true underdog success story: spawning a feature film, countless community theater productions, and a Tony-winning Broadway outing starring Neil Patrick Harris. But the musical, about a genderqueer punk-rock singer, had to fight tooth and press-on nail to get off-Broadway in 1998, when it premiered in a run-down hotel ballroom.

“All the theaters rejected us,” Mitchell recalls. “We opened and it was the sound of deafening silence. It took critics to say, ‘This is the show you should go to if you don’t like traditional musicals.’ And then people started showing up.”

The gender-bent, unabashedly queer "Oh, Mary!" has similarly become an unlikely phenomenon. "This is a capstone of decades of this kind of theater that never made it to Broadway," Mitchell says. "Now, audiences are discovering old-school drag theater: perfectly done, perfectly written ‒ and moms and dads haven't seen it before."

But even with noted exceptions such as "Oh, Mary!" and Tony-winning robot musical "Maybe Happy Ending," it's increasingly rare for original shows to find an audience and turn a profit on Broadway.

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of the most influential and commercially successful composers of all time, having written classics including “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Evita” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” But even he finds the economics of Broadway to be extremely prohibitive, with the average cost of mounting a new musical ranging from $20 million to $30 million, if not higher.

"Ever since I was a little boy, I've always thought that Broadway is my spiritual home, because Broadway is the home of musicals," Webber says. "It hugely saddens me to see what's happening now. The running costs are so high. Shows aren't recouping. It's no longer a place where new work can really happen. It's very difficult now to get investors to come to Broadway unless they're doing it literally for the joy of it ‒ it's very, very hard."

Now, most projects rely on A-listers to draw in crowds. Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer, for instance, will headline “Joe Turner’s” on Broadway, while Ayo Edebiri (“Proof”), Daniel Radcliffe (“Every Brilliant Thing”) and Luke Evans (“The Rocky Horror Show”) lead other new productions.

"Broadway has always been a business," Allen says. "But now, theater owners want to know who's in it when you come with it. There was a time when most of the people from television were coming from Broadway – not the other way around. Things are changing and we just have to stay inspired to do the work.”

Theater artists are now taking it upon themselves to be the change they want to see, and create a Broadway landscape that mirrors the diversity of the real world.

“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” reimagines Webber’s 1982 feline phenomenon, transporting the musical to the queer ballroom scene. The joyous production is transferring uptown after a sold-out run off-Broadway in 2024.

“Broadway and its survival are now more important than ever,” De Shields says. "'The Jellicle Ball' is an antidote against what's happening across the country. Now, I know that sounds like a big statement. But if you look at the individuals who make up this company, it is a melting pot of ethnicities, races, religions, genders, ages. This is what made America the greatest country in the world: that you could pull together all these seemingly disparate energies, and they would collaborate. What we are doing is creating from a point of view of love.”

For dancer Robert “Silk” Mason, who is making their Broadway debut as the Magical Mr. Mistoffelees, “Jellicle Ball” represents what the future of American musical theater looks like.

"I don't adhere or perform to any gender, and I would like to see more people like me onstage as well: more trans people, more people of color," Mason says. "Our voices need to be heard; our faces need to be seen. It shows everyone that we're not going anywhere and we're going to continue to be the revolution.

“This is our protest,” Mason adds. “We deserve to be here, and this is clearly something that everybody wants – so let’s give it to them.”

Contributing: Ralphie Aversa, Stacy Mello