2026/27 Season Announcement

Our 2026/2027 season, a bold lineup of world premieres, musical celebrations, family adventures, and American classics that reflects the theater’s growing role as both a national incubator of new work and a cultural home for Baltimore audiences.

This 10-show season, including three world premieres, brings together artists whose work is shaping the contemporary American theater. From intimate plays to large-scale musical events, the season continues BCS’s commitment to developing new voices while producing work that resonates deeply with audiences here in Baltimore and beyond.

“With three world premieres, this season is a reflection of who we are and where we’re going. Baltimore Center Stage is a place where new work is born, where artists take risks, and where audiences get to experience stories at the very beginning of their journey. What excites me most is that this work belongs to the city. We can be a national tastemaker and a hometown theater at the same time, and this season fully lives in that truth.”  — Stevie Walker-Webb

Bocking
Aug 14 – Sept 6, 2026
in association with The New Group
By Preston Crowder
Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb

Be among the first to experience Bocking, a wildly irreverent new comedy making its world premiere at Baltimore Center Stage before transferring to the award-winning Off-Broadway company The New Group in New York.

This scandalous satire begins when two children innocently repeat what they overheard at home, landing their very embarrassed parents in the principal’s office. What follows is a chaotic and hilarious unraveling involving a preacher, a so-called gay exorcism, and a mysterious chicken named Danalana Parmesana.

As the parents scramble to contain the damage, long-buried secrets, personal quirks, and social taboos rise to the surface. Blending sharp humor with outrageous theatricality, Bocking explores the collision between public respectability and private desire, all wrapped in a fast-paced romp that refuses to behave. It is bold, absurd, and unapologetically cheeky. 

Make sure you see it here first, but be warned Bocking contains strong language and very adult behavior. Definitely not for kids—unless you’re trying to end up in the principal’s office.

Bock bock, muthacluckers! 

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares
Sept 17 – 26, 2026

Performer and Writer Laura Benanti
Directed by Annie Tippe
Co-Writer and Music Director Todd Almond

Direct from an acclaimed run at Edinburgh Fringe and two sold-out Off-Broadway engagements comes Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, a one-woman comedy show from the mind of Tony Award® winner Laura Benanti. Known for her dazzling Broadway performances and razor-sharp wit, Benanti takes the stage to share her hilarious, heartfelt, and sometimes brutally honest takes on motherhood, people pleasing and the joys of aging. Blending side-splitting storytelling with original songs, New York Times Critic’s Pick Nobody Cares is a love letter to recovering ingénues, mothers, and anybody working on themselves.

Laura Benanti

Mama I’m A Big Girl Now
Oct 2 – 4, 2026
Performers: Kerry Butler, Laura Bell Bundy, Marissa Jaret Winokur

With 16 Broadway shows and over 300 episodes of television between them, this trio has truly done it all! From Beetlejuice to Big Brother, Mean Girls to Legally Blonde, Dancing with the Stars to Beauty and the Beast, Wicked to Gypsy, and even the Country Music Awards, the three met while originating the roles of Tracy, Penny, and Amber in the Tony Award- winning show Hairspray, the musical set in Baltimore that captured hearts around the world. Now, they return to the city that helped inspire it all, making this performance an especially meaningful homecoming of sorts for Baltimore audiences.

They spend the evening revisiting the show that helped launch their careers and lifetime friendship, all the while singing hits from the shows that made you fall in love with them.

Join these powerhouse performers on a hilarious and meaningful musical journey about their origins, friendships, careers, and becoming mamas themselves. For decades, they performed as teenagers on stage, now see the fully bloomed divas they’ve become in Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!

 A night of Broadway music and stories you will never forget.

Laura Bell Bundy, Marissa Jaret Winokur, and Kerry Butler

Pete the Cat
October 31st & November 1st

CHARMZ: The Other Reindeer
A Motown Inspired Christmas Musical
Nov 13 – Dec 27, 2026 
Music and Lyrics by Nygel D. Robinson
Book by Ken-Matt Martin
Directed by Melody A. Betts & Victor Musoni
Choreographed by Ken-Matt Martin & Victor Musoni

CHARMZ: The Other Reindeer is a new holiday musical that blends heart, humor, and soulful sound. The show follows Charmz, a determined reindeer who dreams of shining just as brightly as Rudolph. Full of warmth and big aspirations, the story celebrates self-belief, friendship, and discovering that your own light is more than enough.

Featuring original songs from Nygel D. Robinson written for a Motown-inspired North Pole, CHARMZ delivers festive joy with rhythm and style. 

Liberation
Jan 16 – Feb 7, 2027
in association with Philadelphia Theatre Company
By Bess Wohl
Directed by Taibi Magar

Ohio in the 1970s, Lizzie gathers a group of women to talk about changing their lives and the world. What follows is a necessary, messy, and bitingly funny exploration of what it means to be free and to be a woman.

In Liberation, Lizzie’s daughter steps into her mother’s memory—into the unfinished revolution she once helped ignite—and searches the past to find the answer for herself. “The best play I’ve seen this season.”—Sara Holdren, New York Magazine 

Tony Award nominee Bess Wohl (Grand Horizons) and Obie Award Winner Taibi Magar directs this refreshingly irreverent and intensely relevant powerhouse of a play about what we inherit, what we forget, and what we’re still fighting to understand.

Betty Buckley in Concert
Jan 22 & 23, 2027
Writer and Performer Betty Buckley

Spend an evening with Tony Award winner Betty Buckley, Broadway’s original Grizabella in Cats and one of the American theater’s most beloved voices. In this intimate concert, Buckley will perform a stunning mix of Broadway classics, American Songbook favorites, and heartfelt storytelling drawn from her extraordinary career on stage and screen.

Betty Buckley

King Hedley II
Mar 11 – Apr 11, 2027
By August Wilson
Directed by Ken-Matt Martin

One of the most powerful and least frequently produced works in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, King Hedley II is a rare opportunity to experience a profound and deeply human American classic on stage.

Set in 1980s Pittsburgh, the play follows King, a man determined to build a future in a world that has given him few tools to succeed. As he struggles to reclaim dignity, stability, and purpose, Wilson lays bare the cycles of survival, love, and violence that shape a community and a nation.

Part of the citywide Baltimore August Wilson Celebration, this production continues Baltimore Center Stage’s enduring commitment to Wilson’s legacy and to stories that illuminate the complexities of Black life in America.

This is a landmark work from one of the greatest American playwrights of all time. Don’t miss it.

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The Musical!
Apr 3 & 4, 2027

Whatever you do, don’t let the Pigeon star in his own musical production! With a script by Mo Willems—creator of the #1 New York Times best-selling and Caldecott Honor–winning Pigeon picture books—and music by Deborah Wicks La Puma (Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!), Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The Musical! from TheaterWorksUSA® is even more fun than staying up late and having a hot dog party.

It’s not easy being the Pigeon—you never get to do ANYTHING! But when the bus driver faces a crisis that threatens to make her passengers (gasp!) late, maybe that wily bird can finally help. Packed with an innovative mix of songs, silliness, and feathers, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The Musical! is sure to get everyone’s wings flapping.

XTRAVAGANZA
In association with 1000% Productions and Broadway Music Group
May 7–June 13, 2027
Book by R. Eric Thomas
Music and Lyrics by Khiyon Hursey
Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb
Choreography by Kyle Abraham
Music Supervision by Bill Sherman 

Before Vogue became a global phenomenon, the Ballroom that birthed it was already alive with artists, underdogs, and chosen families claiming their runway, shaping pop culture, and changing the world forever.

XTRAVAGANZA is a new musical inspired by the legendary House of Xtravaganza and Ballroom pioneers like Angie Xtravaganza, José Xtravaganza, and Venus Xtravaganza, artists whose style, language, and movement helped shape one of the most iconic moments in pop culture history. As choreographers and featured performers in Madonna’s Vogue music video and worldwide tour, House stars brought the energy and vocabulary of Ballroom to a global stage.

This original musical, set in New York City’s Ballroom scene of the 1980s and 1990s, follows the rise of a community of Black and Latinx artists who built a world of chosen families, beauty, resilience, and radical self-expression in the face of marginalization and overwhelming odds. 

Featuring a book by R. Eric Thomas and an original score by Khiyon Hursey, created in collaboration with a powerhouse team of songwriters and producers, XTRAVAGANZA is set to the sounds of Ballroom, House, and iconic ’80s and ’90s pop. Bill Sherman will serve as music supervisor, leading a music team including LA-based producer duo Matthew Campfield and Daniel Klein of Some Randoms.

With direction by Stevie Walker-Webb and choreography by Kyle Abraham, audiences are invited into a community that continues to shape culture long before the world catches on. This is not just the story behind a movement. It is the story of the people who built it, lived it, and refused to be erased.