With most South Florida theatre companies having announced their 2025-2026 seasons, we thought it a great time to spotlight just a handful of the selections we’re most excited about experiencing. Mark your calendars for these plays and musicals from our first-rate regional-theatre powerhouses—and check out the rest of their schedules while you’re at it.
Misery, Oct. 26-Nov. 9 at Maltz Jupiter Theatre
This theatrical adaptation of one of Stephen King’s most notorious novels arrives just in time for Halloween. If you’ve read the harrowing page-turner or seen its Oscar-winning 1990 film adaptation, then you know the broad contours of its plot: Paul Sheldon, an author of historical romance novels, is injured in a car crash in the remote, snowed-in town of Sidewinder, Colorado. He awakens to find himself in the care of ardent fan Annie Wilkes. But what initially seems like a period of grateful convalescence becomes a waking nightmare for Paul, as the psychotic Annie, ravenously eager for the next book in the author’s series, will do anything to keep her charge bed-ridden and under her control. Unlike its various other forms, playwright William Goldman’s stage version of “Misery” jettisons any scenes of the outside world, confining the action entirely to Annie’s remote cabin—thereby enhancing the story’s inherent claustrophobia and amplifying its menace. If the play does its job, you’ll never hear Liberace quite the same way again.
The Seafarer, Dec. 12-28 at Dramaworks
The Faustian myth is one of the most durable in all of literature and art, having first appeared in a chapbook in 1857. It is most famously associated with blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who claimed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical skill. Conor McPherson’s acclaimed 2006 drama “The Seafarer” plays into this Mephistophelian mythos, this time through an authentic Irish brogue. It’s set on Christmas Eve in a coastal suburb north of Dublin, where prodigal son Sharky Harkin has returned after falling on hard times. A recovering alcoholic settling into his role as caregiver for his disabled and irascible brother, Sharky has to contend not only with a hard-drinking atmosphere but with a ghost from his past, metaphorically and literally, in the form of a mysterious Mr. Lockhart. As we learn through McPherson’s patented cocktail of working-class and magical-realist language, Sharky once won his freedom in a poker game against Mr. Lockhart, and the latter his returned for his revenge. But at what savage cost? See this sure-to-be-riveting production to find out.
The Cher Show, April 30-June 7, 2026 at the Wick
As has been its custom, the Wick Theatre will close out its 2025-2026 season with a pop-music-themed production, this one fresh off numerous Broadway tours. From her theatricality and soaring pipes to the sequined and phantasmagorical Bob Mackie dresses she sports, everything about Cher has long seemed tailored for Broadway; inevitably, somebody would put two and two together. That somebody is Rick Elice, who wrote the books for Broadway’s “Jersey Boys” and “The Addams Family” and, in “The Cher Show,” celebrates another cultural touchstone. Three actresses, referred to in the show as Babe, Lady and Star, portray different eras of Cher’s life, and occasionally interact with each other, temporal logic be damned (she did write “If I Could Turn Back Time,” after all). The music, 35 songs deep, is nearly all Cher’s, and Mackie himself contributed the show’s dazzling costumes, which won “The Cher Show” a Tony in 2019.
Eureka Day, May 15-June 14, 2026 at GableStage
This satirical broadside from playwright Jonathan Spector premiered in 2018 and has only grown more relevant with each passing year. It concerns the debate between parents and educators of a prestigious day school in Berkeley on whether to mandate an MMR vaccine after a local outbreak of mumps. A little over a year later, of course, vaccine debates would begin to assume life-or-death consequences in the real world with the transmission of COVID-19. And this year, vaccine hesitancy is again at the forefront of a measles outbreak that has seen 1,024 confirmed cases as of May 15. But as far as we’re concerned, the best sort of theatre is the kind that holds up mirrors to real life. Through five characters representing various ideological leanings and cultural dispositions, Spector’s play targets both the overcorrections of the left, with its policing of language, and the conspiratorial rabbit holes of the reactionary right, finding that neither side has an ultimatum on truth and logic.
Jagged Little Pill, June 13-28, 2026 at Slow Burn Theatre at Broward Center
After seeing the Broadway tour of “Jagged Little Pill” last year, I accurately predicted which local theatre company would be the first to produce it once the rights became available: The musical is so firmly entrenched in Slow Burn Theatre’s wheelhouse that it may as well as have originated there. Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album of the same name has become a Gen-X touchstone, selling upwards of 33 million copies and continuing to find new audiences for its creator’s upbeat but angst-driven pop-rock. Recognizing that Morissette’s lyrics might lend themselves to something more grandiose than just an album, she and the LP’s producer, Glen Ballard, reworked the songs into this jukebox musical, complete with a witty and humane script by Diablo Cody (“Juno,” “Young Adult”). Spotlighting the underbelly of suburban America, this national tour of the 15-time Tony-nominated musical follows a family riven by opioid and pornography addiction, and disputes over gender identity and sexuality, with Morissette’s iconic tunes adding depth, color and a rock pulse.
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