Do you have a burning Broadway question? Dying to know more about an obscure Broadway fact? Broadway historian and self-proclaimed theatre nerd Jennifer Ashley Tepper is here to help with Broadway Deep Dive. BroadwayWorld is accepting questions from theatre fans like you. If you’re lucky, your question might be selected as the topic of her next column!
This time, the reader question was: Is it rare for an off-Broadway musical to return off-Broadway like Heathers?
Heathers is currently playing to sold out crowds at New World Stages, the off-Broadway complex on 50th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. It’s a New York City return for the teen musical with a relatively short turn-around time since the original off-Broadway premiere of Heathers opened in 2014. Eleven years later, a new cast is taking on the tale of troubled teens who take things too far, based on the cult favorite film of 1988.
The musical adaptation, which has book, music, and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe (Bat Boy) and Kevin Murphy (Reefer Madness), has gained a huge amount of steam since its first off-Broadway run. With multiple hit UK productions and a huge fanbase thanks to the cast recording now under its belt, it’s probable that the off-Broadway revival of 2025 will have a longer run than the New York premiere which played just a little over four months in 2014.
While the current revival of Heathers is playing Stage V at New World Stages, the original played Stage I. This makes it perhaps the off-Broadway musical to travel the shortest distance for a revival, since the new production is playing only a few dozen feet away from where the original premiered, within the same theatre complex!
How often does an off-Broadway musical return to off-Broadway for a revival?
Later this year, New York City Center’s Encores! will present the first New York City revival of the musical Bat Boy. Like Heathers, Bat Boy also counts O’Keefe as one of its writers, and also like Heathers, Bat Boy is returning to off-Broadway rather than making the jump to Broadway in its return.
Several beloved off-Broadway musicals have received major New York revivals at the gorgeous main stage theater at City Center, which seats over 2,000 patrons. Technically considered off-Broadway, New York City Center has also revived off-Broadway musicals for limited runs like I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On The Road, A New Brain, Gone Missing, Promenade, Songs for a New World, Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Road Show, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Really Rosie, and The Wild Party. Some of New York City Center’s programming of off-Broadway musical revivals has been part of their Encores! Off-Center series rather than their regular Encores! series.
Bat Boy as well as influential off-Broadway musicals tick, tick…BOOM! and The Last 5 Years all might have had longer initial runs with different timing. All three shows played off-Broadway in the months immediately following September 11th, 2001. With theatergoers extremely hesitant to return to downtown off-Broadway spaces, all three musicals closed more quickly than they might have otherwise. tick, tick… BOOM! has been revived twice off-Broadway since then: once at Encores! and the other time by the Keen Company. The Last 5 Years has also been revived twice in New York: once off-Broadway by Second Stage and the other time in a commercial Broadway production this past season.
In addition to tick, Keen Company also revived off-Broadway’s Ordinary Days. The original off-Broadway production of Adam Gwon’s original musical was in 2009 at Roundabout and Keen brought the four hander known for its joyful and heart-rending score back in 2019.
Like Heathers, bare: a pop opera also had an off-Broadway revival at New World Stages. Also a dark teen musical, bare first played at the American Theatre of Actors on 54th Street in 2004 for a short but much-buzzed about run. Rumored for a transfer that never materialized in the years to follow, bare finally found its way back to off-Broadway in a new production in 2012, this time branded as bare: the musical. Unlike the majority of the productions named above but also like Heathers, this was a commercial production intended for an open-ended run.
Scene from bare
Another off-Broadway musical that returned off-Broadway recently is Vanities. A three-hander about female friendship, adapted from the play of the same name, Vanities premiered at Second Stage’s off-Broadway space in 2009 and was revived by the York Theatre Company off-Broadway in 2023.
The shows above are some of the most prominent examples of musicals that have premiered off-Broadway this century and then returned to off-Broadway for a revival. But there have also been a handful of popular musicals that premiered off-Broadway in the 20th century and returned to New York later on in an off-Broadway home, rather than making the move to Broadway.
The longest running of these is of course The Fantasticks. The humble tale played off-Broadway for 42 years, from 1960 to 2002. A new production opened just four years later and ran from 2006 to 2017. Prevailing sentiment is that the delicate The Fantasticks never would’ve had such success on Broadway. Looking at the example set by The Fantasticks has inspired many producers of smaller shows to plant their feet off-Broadway rather than on.
Other off-Broadway musicals of the 20th century that later returned to off-Broadway and have never been on Broadway include Starting Here, Starting Now (1977, 2016), Marry Me a Little (1981, 2012), Closer Than Ever (1989, 2012), Hello Again (1994, 2011), and John & Jen (1995, 2015). With the exception of Hello Again which has a cast of ten, these musicals have an average cast size of fewer than three people.
Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown are in a unique category historically since these shows premiered off-Broadway, eventually did play Broadway, and then were revived again off-Broadway. One could surmise that when an intimate musical enters the canon and becomes extremely popular to the degree that these shows have, whether they’re revived on or off-Broadway just depends on the vision of the given production. In the cases of Godspell and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the properties have been revived on Broadway too.
In recent years, an increasing number of off-Broadway musicals have come to Broadway in their New York revivals like The Last 5 Years or Little Shop of Horrors did. Other examples of off-Broadway musicals that returned and opened on Broadway include Assassins (1990, 2004), Dames at Sea (1968, 2015), Floyd Collins (1996, 2025), Gutenberg (2006, 2023), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998, 2014), and Violet (1997, 2014). But still, off-Broadway musicals return off-Broadway even more frequently than they launch to Broadway.
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