Premieres, stars on tap for Goodman Theatre’s centennial season
For its 2025-2026 centennial season, Goodman Theatre will welcome stage and screen stars, internationally acclaimed musicians, celebrated writers and favorite directors, including former artistic director Robert Falls. He returns to helm Richard Greenberg’s world-premiere adaptation of “Holiday,” Phillip Barry’s romantic comedy about wealth, privilege and love that inspired the classic 1938 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Other artists tapped to help Goodman usher in its second century include: Emmy Award-winner Megan Mullally (“Will and Grace”); Jenna Fischer (“The Office”); musician, composer and Talking Heads co-founder David Byrne (“Here Lies Love”); playwright/actor Dael Orlandersmith; Libertyville’s Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave) and actor Harry Lennix (“The Blacklist”) among others.
Six of the 11 productions announced Tuesday by artistic director Susan V. Booth and executive director John Collins are world premieres, two of them musicals.
Chicago’s largest not-for-profit resident theater launches its yearlong celebration on Sept. 6 in the Albert Theatre with the premiere of “Ashland Avenue,” Lee Kirk’s drama about a struggling Chicago TV and video store starring Fischer and Steppenwolf Theatre’s Francis Guinan with Booth directing.
Greenberg’s “Holiday” runs Jan. 31-March 1, 2026, in the Albert followed by Goodman resident director Chuck Smith’s revival of August Wilson’s Chicago-set “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (March 28-April 26, 2026) with Lennix serving as associate director and music director.
The Albert’s season concludes with the premiere of “Iceboy! or The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write The Iceman Cometh” (June 9-July 19, 2026) by composer/lyricist Mark Hollman (“Urinetown”) and lyricist/book co-writer Jay Reis (“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”). It’s about a 1930s Broadway star (Mullally) who adopts a 40,000-year-old Neanderthal discovered frozen in the Artic, who thaws and becomes a Broadway sensation. Three-time Tony Award-winner Kathleen Marshall directs and choreographs.
The Owen Theatre’s season begins Oct. 4 with the premiere of “Revolution(s)” a punk/metal/hip-hop musical by composer/lyricist Morello and writer Zayd Ayers Dohrn about a young artist finding his voice and young radicals inspired by love.
Marco Antonio Rodriguez’s stage adaptation of Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” has its world premiere on Feb. 21, 2026, in the Owen. Wendy Mateo directs the play about a nerdy, unlucky-in-love Dominican college freshman who sets out from New Jersey to Santo Domingo in a quest to find love and reverse the curse that has plagued his family for generations.
The Owen season concludes with the premiere of Orlandersmith’s “Blood Money” (May 2-31, 2026), a solo work that asks whether a person should, at a time when forces encourage division between people, “lean into discomfort, or retreat to the safety of your own beliefs”?
Special events include Goodman’s 48th annual production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” starring Christopher Donahue as Ebenezer Scrooge; Dennis Watkins’ “The Magic Parlour”; and the 21st annual New Stages Festival showcasing in-development works.
Additionally, Goodman will present “Theater of the Mind” (dates to be determined) at the Reid Building, 333 N. LaSalle St., Chicago.
Byrne and Mala Gaonkar, head of SurgoCap Partners investment firm, created “Theater of the Mind,” described as a theatrical experience inspired by historical and neuroscience research that offers “an intimate and immersive journey inside how we create our worlds.” Andrew Scoville directs.