Lady Jane Grey, aka the “Nine Days Queen,” has been the subject of countless ballads, paintings, and poems since her untimely execution in 1554. But in the fantasy novel My Lady Jane (co-authored by Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand, and Jodi Meadows), Jane gets a new lease on life — and a chance to control her destiny.

If anyone can rival Lady Jane in the tragic heroine department, it’s Shakespeare’s Juliet. And if you love an alternate ending for a girl who didn’t get enough agency in her literary life, & Juliet delivers. The show begins as Shakespeare’s wife convinces him not to kill off his heroine. Freed from the obligation to die for Romeo, Juliet sets out in search of a new beginning.

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Since its release in 2019, Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient has remained on top of Goodreads’s Most Read books year after year. The thriller follows Theo, a psychotherapist who becomes obsessed with his patient Alicia, who killed her husband with no known motive and hasn’t spoken since. Her notoriety makes her a public fascination, and her career as an artist skyrockets while she remains behind bars.

Alicia isn’t the first woman to experience a boom in fame after (allegedly) murdering a lover — just look to Chicago's Roxie Hart. With the help of vaudeville star and fellow inmate Velma Kelly, she realizes she can game the criminal justice system to make her dreams of stardom come true. Though Alicia and Roxie have different approaches to their imprisonment, The Silent Patient fans may be razzle-dazzled by the long-running musical.

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Liann Zhang’s debut novel, Julie Chan Is Dead, became an international bestseller and made NPR’s “Books We Love” list in 2025. The story follows Julie Chan, a down-on-her luck cashier who finds her estranged influencer twin dead and decides to step into her life. In ditching her paycheck-to-paycheck grind, Julie chases the modern American dream: one filled with minimal work, Manhattan high-rises, more free products than anyone could ever use.

But as Julie discovers, the American dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a lesson each generation must re-learn, as Arthur Miller knew when he wrote the now-classic Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman is buried under the weight of expectation, spinning lies and exaggerations to make it seem like he’s living the dream while becoming more and more detached from reality.

Published in 2018, Madeline Miller’s Circe became somewhat of an instant classic. The fantastical novel reimagines the Greek myth of the divine witch best known for turning Odysseus’s men into pigs. But long before Odysseus landed on her shores, she was exiled and left to hone her power, and nurse her injuries, in near-solitude.

Readers who empathized with Circe’s unjust banishment might be drawn to real-life dissenter Galileo. The cosmos may not be magic, but they are magical, and Galileo’s determination to bring the truth to light in spite of the Pope and the Catholic church is not dissimilar from defying the gods themselves. Plus, the scientist's Renaissance-era life comes to Broadway as a rock musical, setting the scene for Galileo’s rebrand as a punk rebel outcast Circe would approve of.

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Dark academia queen R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis is all about a descent to hell. In fact, the title is literally the Greek word for “a journey to the underworld.” Kuang researched mythology stories from all over the world to craft the novel, which means she must have read the famous Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The long-running musical Hadestown is all about Orpheus, Eurydice, and their own journey to hell, brought to life with stunning Broadway magic. If Katabasis fans were moved by Kuang’s portrayal of hell, they will be captivated by Anaïs Mitchell’s unique, jazzy take on the Greek myth that preceded all other stories of couples braving the underworld together.

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Though it was first self-published by author Allen Levi in 2023, Theo of Golden enjoyed a popularity boom after it was republished in 2025. The novel follows a man who moves to a small Georgia town and gets to know the residents by buying portraits from the local coffee shop and returning them to their sitters. Readers have praised the book for its theme of slowing down and enjoying the people in your life for who they are.

In many ways, It’s a Wonderful Life has epitomized the same theme since the release of the 1946 film. With the Broadway adaptation, readers touched by Theo of Golden can revisit a classic story with the same heartwarming message, now performed with a foley artist, Christmas carols, and a star-studded cast.

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Broadway is filled with musical biopics, but there’s something special about Just in Time, based on the life of legendary singer and actor Bobby Darin. Staged as if the theatre is one big nightclub, the show is intimate and personable thanks to the way Darin takes you through his life like a tour guide.

Darin got his start as a songwriter for Connie Francis, with whom he had a romance, and his later Hollywood career led to a stormy marriage with co-star Sandra Dee. Those tumultuous relationships might remind theatregoers of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, in which an aging actress recounts her relationships in and out of showbiz. Fans of drama and romance in Hollywood’s Golden Age will be excited to see it play out on stage.

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One of the most popular new books of 2025, Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon takes readers on a cozy fantasy journey into an alternate world that resembles our own. Cheerful, knowing Hana and reluctant, disbelieving Kei make the perfect push-and-pull couple, growing closer the more they rankle each other.

Maybe Happy Ending may be more sci-fi than fantasy, but Water Moon fans can’t help but see the similarities. Oliver and Claire, two retired robots in a near-futuristic Korea, bicker like only enemies-to-lovers can. They break out of their familiar world into one both magical and dangerous to them, and when they come to the end of their journey, they must take a leap of faith neither could have believed possible. It’s the perfect musical for readers who enjoyed Yambao’s book.

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Who doesn’t love a good fake dating plot? In Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, PhD student Olive and professor Adam decide to make their Stamford colleagues think they’re dating, each with an ulterior motive. The book is more popular than ever thanks to the recent movie and Hazelwood's announcement of a long-awaited sequel.

But no one does fake dating like Shakespeare, the original rom-com master. In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice and Benedick (Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell) pretend to be in love to prank friends who are clumsily trying to set them up. But the joke is no match for the years of flirty banter and chemistry between the pair, who must learn to overcome their pride and admit their very real feelings for each other.

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Andy Weir’s hugely popular 2021 book Project Hail Mary continues to be among 2026's most-read books on Goodreads, partly thanks to the film adaptation. In the book, Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship with total amnesia, unaware he is the last survivor on a last-chance mission to save humanity. Slowly, he comes to realize the impossible task before him: save Earth or die trying.

If you were thrilled with the stakes of Ryland’s life-or-death mission, check out Operation Mincemeat. There’s no sci-fi here, but the true story is almost wilder than fiction. The Tony-winning musical follows British MI5 agents cooking up a bonkers scheme to cover up an Allied invasion during World War II. Like Project Hail Mary, Operation Mincemeat is clever and certainly not afraid to be silly.

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Unhappy families aren't all created equal, but it’s always satisfying to watch them unravel on the page. In Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, the five Flynn family members are all unhappy in different ways. Through marital frustration and identity-searching and more, they all choose to suffer silently.

Other Desert Cities, now in a starry revival, similarly sees a troubled family reunite across coasts and political lines for a tense Christmas. There are many similarities for Lost Lambs fans — such as how Brooke Wyeth’s dedication to memorializing her brother mirrors Harper Flynn’s certainty about local corruption. Both characters end up revealing far more than they bargained for.

Check back for information on Other Desert Cities tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

Rachel Harrison's Play Nice, follows influencer Clio, who inherits the house she grew up in and decides to remodel it for likes, subscribes, and personal catharsis. But she soon finds that the emotional demons she remembers from childhood may also be physical.

For horror fans, there’s something thrilling — and chilling —about a supposedly safe place being malevolent, and that theme also applies to Paranormal Activity. In the stage play, newly married couple James and Lou move from Chicago to London for a fresh start. But it isn’t long before eerie disturbances upend their home, relationship, and sanity.

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Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear took the world by storm when it was published earlier this year — at the time of publication, it’s Goodreads’s most-read book of 2026 — sparking debate about the most essential elements of old-fashioned life. To her millions of Instagram followers, Natalie Heller Mills seems to be living a perfect life on her family ranch — until she wakes up in the 19th century, forced to live the real version of the idealized life she sells online.

If you love a time-travel plot — and one about being trapped somewhere until you learn an important lesson — 2026 Best Musical Tony Award winner Schmigadoon! is for you. Lost in the woods, modern-day couple Josh and Melissa stumble into Schmigadoon, a town straight out of Broadway's Golden Age of musicals from the 1940s and '50s. They find themselves at the center of their very own musical, unable to return home until they figure out their own happy ending.

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Though it’s mainly a romance, Bolu Babalola’s debut novel Honey & Spice also deals in female friendship — the good, the bad, and the ugly. On a college campus, where reputations are at stake and frontal lobes are underdeveloped, making friends can be hard. Protagonist Kiki Banjo must learn to overcome her prejudices and open herself up to love and friendship.

Readers who enjoyed Babalola’s whip-smart writing will find Jocelyn Bioh's School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play just as snappy. The show follows a clique of teenage girls at a Ghanaian boarding school in 1986, and queen bee Paulina wields friendship like a double-edged sword. Like Honey & Spice, School Girls deals with colorism and racism, and the girls’ tumultuous, sometimes cruel, but often moving relationships are the beating heart of the show.

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Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a slow-burn mystery, told from the perspective of a remote summer camp's workers in the days after a teenage girl goes missing in 1975. Moore’s setup exposes the tricky social dynamics around the wealthy Van Laar family, the summer camp kids, and the local town residents are often relegated to the sidelines by the needs and wants of the upper class.

Readers who are drawn to haunted teens, small-town intrigue, and a slowly unraveling mystery in a period setting are the perfect audience for Stranger Things: The First Shadow. This prequel to the popular Netflix series, set in 1950, earned critical acclaim and numerous awards for its special effects, and you don't need prior Stranger Things knowledge to enjoy the play.

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Vampires are having a moment in the sun. The new musical The Lost Boys, which adapts the 1987 cult classic movie about a California vampire gang who targets a newly arrived family, has been one of the season’s biggest hits. Effortlessly cool leader David instantly captivated audiences, with actor Ali Louis Bourzgui winning a Tony for his portrayal of the glam-rock vampire. But before there was David, there was Lestat de Lioncourt.

The Vampire Lestat, book two of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, begins as Lestat awakens in 1984 from a deep sleep, stirred back to life by rock music. He decides to reinvent himself as a modern rock star and tells his story to the world through song. Fans of Lestat will certainly see his influence in David — the two even crossed over when Sam Reid, who plays Lestat in the book's TV adaptation, met up with Bourzgui after a Lost Boys performance.

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Grady Hendrix’s sharp, funny prose mixed and enticingly chilling concepts have made his novels a staple for any horror lover. In How to Sell a Haunted House, readers praised his laugh-out-loud writing and his willingness to get ridiculous, which just feels right for a plot involving creepy haunted puppets.

The Rocky Horror Show could be considered the ancestor of all campy horror that exists today. Written by Richard O’Brien to satirize the sci-fi and B-horror movies of the 1950s, it rocketed into cult classic status thanks, in part, to its immortalization in the 1975 film adaptation. The musical's star-studded new Broadway revival is sure to appeal to Grady Hendrix fans, horror comedy fans, and old and new audiences alike.

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Emily Henry has taken over the romance genre in recent years. Her book Funny Story is no exception — it was voted the top romance book of 2024 on Goodreads. Funny Story follows a pair of opposites, Daphne and Miles, in an unlikely situation who grow to appreciate that they just might be what the other one needs.

For readers looking for a sweet, opposites-attract love story on stage, look no further than Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). In this Broadway musical, easygoing Brit Dougal crosses paths with no-nonsense Robin, a New Yorker who’s got places to be. Like Henry’s books, Two Strangers has all the makings of a good rom-com, with catchy songs to boot. And isn’t all romance made better by a little song and dance?

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