Signature Theatre sets 2025-26 Off-Broadway season

The nonprofit theatre company's 35th anniversary programming will include two musicals and a New York-premiere play by award-winning writers.

The Off-Broadway nonprofit organization Signature Theatre Company has set its 2025-26 season of three plays and musicals.

First up in the fall is Oratorio for Living Things, composed and created by two-time Obie Award winner Heather Christian and directed by Lee Sunday Evans. This musical theatre piece uses music — namely, a classical oratorio blended with blues, gospel, jazz, and soul — to explore what it means to be alive in time, and how music can contort and unwind our experience.

Oratorio returns to NYC after a critically acclaimed, Lucille Lortel Award-nominated world premiere in 2022, also directed by Evans.

Next in the season is the New York premiere of Mother Russia by Lauren Yee (Cambodian Rock Band). A dark comedy set in 1992 St. Petersburg, the show follows Evgeny, a man working a surveillance job with his old friend Dmitri after the fall of the Soviet Union. Their target is mysterious pop star Katya, whose life ends up intertwining with Evgeny's as he begins to fall for her.

Signature's spring production is the musical Animal Wisdom, also created by Christian and directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant. Described as a "musical séance" and a "ritual," Animal Wisdom blends storytelling, requiem, family mythology, and blues, gospel, and folk music in this show exploring memory, loss, the soul, and the seen vs. the unseen.

Cast and additional creative team members for all three productions have yet to be announced.

Photo credit: Heather Christian and Lauren Yee. (Photos courtesy of Signature Theatre)