Weathering the last five years of pandemic, political horror, and economic woes has been hard, especially for live theater. COVID shutdowns sent audiences online, and they still haven’t come back. The current administration full of hateful philistines gutted National Endowment for the Arts funding, especially for institutions promoting art about diversity and gender identity.
If all the world’s a stage, then our world must be in a bad way.
Despite it all, the Seattle theater scene is still kicking and still recovering. The stages across town are striving for a 2025–2026 season full of life—and one chock-full of productions that can’t help reflecting the times, either directly or through an escapist respite. The purpose of playing, after all, is to hold up a mirror to nature. Or whatever it was Hamlet said.
Seattle Rep
August 28, 2025–May 10, 2026
The Rep’s season starts and ends earlier this year due to next summer’s World Cup. To get people to “want to leave the barbecue” when their season opens Labor Day weekend, the Rep is putting on The Play That Goes Wrong, says artistic director Dámaso Rodríguez. The play follows a theater company putting on a murder mystery, and, just like the title says, things fall apart. “There is something about laughing together in the face of things going wrong and when chaos reigns,” Rodríguez says. “Sometimes that’s what the world feels like, right?”
Though it’s not an official theme, Rodríguez says all the picks for this season embody a kind of resilience. The other big tentpole show is Come from Away, the hit musical about the planes that were grounded in Gander, Newfoundland, after 9/11, which originated as a co-production with the Rep a decade ago. “It’s a play about people finding unexpected light in the darkness,” Rodríguez says. The theater is putting a new spin on Come From Away during the holiday season this year.
Other standouts include Fancy Dancer, an autobiographical play about a half-Lakota half-white woman becoming a professional dancer, and Here There Are Blueberries, a performance crafted around interviews with archivists who discovered family photos from the Nazis living outside Auschwitz.
5th Avenue Theatre
September 13, 2025–May 17, 2026
Finally, after years of trying to get the rights, the 5th Avenue Theatre is putting on Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s one of the two shows the 5th is producing this year. Normally, they aim to produce more shows in-house, but it’s expensive and the economics aren’t allowing it right now.
Before the pandemic hit, the 5th Ave had 22,000 subscribers, executive director Bill Berry says. At the lows of COVID, they had around 7,500 subscribers. Now, they’re gaining back subscribers, but not as quickly as they’d like. They’re currently at about 9,500. To draw those audiences into seats again, Berry has crafted a year full of fun programming and escapism.
“In order to survive the world we live in, it’s important to have spaces where you can laugh and be free,’” Berry says. That’s why Monty Python’s Spamalot is playing this year.
Chicago should draw a crowd. And who doesn’t want to see Elf: The Musical during the holidays? That’s the other 5th Ave–produced show this year. But it’s not all levity. SUFFS, a musical about
the women’s suffrage movement, kicks off the season.
Union Arts Center
September 20, 2025–June 28, 2016
ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company have merged, and they’re birthing a brand-new joint venture. This upcoming season is the first they’re doing together.
All the shows this season have to do with transformation. The season blends contemporary plays and Shakespeare favorites. It starts September 20 with Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. It’s about a doctor who exposes the truth about a contamination in his town, much to the chagrin of the local leaders and community. Prescient.
“The adaptation is so swift and smart,” Elisabeth Farwell-Moreland, interim producing artistic director, says.
They’ll tackle Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in the theater’s own spin with Shrew and bring back A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with spookier fairies. Another must-see is The Aves by Jiehae Park.
“It’s nothing like you’ve ever seen,” Farwell-Moreland says of The Aves. The play is poetic and sparse, but imbued with magical realism. “It’s just a totally different way of telling stories.”
Paramount Theatre
September 16, 2025–July 26, 2026
The Seattle Theatre Group is bringing touring Broadway productions to the Paramount Theatre’s stage, like the Tony-winning play Stereophonic about a band in a recording studio making an album in the 1970s.
“It’s something quite different, something that doesn’t normally show up on tour,” says Josh LaBelle, executive director of Seattle Theatre Group.
LaBelle is especially excited for The Lion King, since STG will be hosting a sensory-friendly performance to enable people, especially families with neurodivergent kids, to see performances together when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
“We turn the Paramount Theatre into a living room,” LaBelle says. If people need to stand up and walk around during the show, that’s fine. If kids need to have a tablet out, sure, go for it. “We encourage it all.”
On the Boards
September 11, 2025–June 6, 2026
Nobody is doing it like Seattle’s home for experimental and contemporary performance, On the Boards. And that’s part of their ethos: What could only come to Seattle if it were at
On the Boards?
The 2025–2026 season includes Inebria Me, a queer telenovela-inspired opera by San Cha, and The Nosebleed, a piece of experimental theater about failure and intergenerational communication, especially around gender identity. “The piece is really tender, but also really funny,” On the Boards
executive director Megan Kiskaddon says.
But the show everyone must see, according to Kiskaddon, is Major, a contemporary performance by Ogemdi Ude, a dancer fixated on majorette dancing. “It’s one of those pieces that anyone would get something out of, because it’s so exuberant,” Kiskaddon says.
Lastly, John Jarboe’s show Rose: You Are Who You Eat is a deeply autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek trans story, which got its name because Jarboe’s relative told her she ate her sister in the womb. Her performance, though weird and funny, is mostly about acceptance. “It’s important to put positive trans stories out into the world right now,” Kiskaddon says.
