This next theater season in San Francisco is shaping up to be a good one, with several Broadway hits and new works coming our way.

The 2025/26 season announcement came out Wednesday from ACT (American Conservatory Theater), and it joins earlier announcements from BroadwaySF and SF Playhouse to fill out what appears to be the fullest and most exciting season of theater since the pandemic hit.

The big headline is that ACT is co-presenting the SF tour stop of Tony-winning play Stereophonic with BroadwaySF, which will be playing October 28 to November 23 at the Curran Theatre, next door to ACT's Toni Rembe Theater. The play by David Adjmi, featuring original music by Will Butler of Arcade Fire, centers on a Sausalito recording studio and the process of recording one band's seminal 1970s album — and the situation and the makeup of the band, while fictional, seems decidedly similar to Fleetwood Mac and their Rumours period.

Casting for the Stereophonic tour has not been announced, but the play closed on Broadway in January, and it seems possible some of the Broadway cast will reprise their roles — including, possibly, Bay Area native son Will Brill, who took home the Tony last year for Featured Actor in a Play.

Tickets for Stereophonic are currently only available through subscribing to the ACT season, or the BroadwaySF season.

Other hits from recent Broadway seasons that are coming to town include the Tony-winning musicals Shucked (September 9 to October 5), Suffs, and Hell's Kitchen, as well as the return of Monty Python's Spamalot, and the Tony-nominated musical adaptation of The Notebook. Last year's Tony winner for Best Musical, The Outsiders, is now scheduled to come to town as part of the 2026-2027 season.

ACT, as announced with their current season, will be bringing a new production of Ins Choi's 2011 play Kim's Convenience to the Toni Rembe Theater from September 18 to October 19. The play, which inspired the later Netflix series of the same name, is inspired by Choi's Korean immigrant parents who ran a corner store in Canada, and ACT Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon tells the Chronicle that the long lead time for the production allowed them to organize a companion photography exhibit focused on first-generation-owned businesses around the Bay. Details on that are still TBA.

ACT's theater will be dark while Stereophonic runs next door, but will come back to life January 21, 2026 with A Streetcar Named Desire. This stripped-down, four-person production of the Tennessee Williams classic comes from The Streetcar Project, which has been performing the play in various unconventional spaces, as well as theaters, for the past two years. Creators Lucy Owen and Nick Westrate's production, directed by Westrate, uses Williams' unabridged text, and zero set or props.

A spooky new play, Paranormal Activity, is coming in February, based on the Paranormal Activity films, first written and directed by Oren Peli. This is a North American premiere that's being done in a co-production with three other regional theaters, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Center Theatre Group, and Shakespeare Theatre Company. ACT promises only that the play "will haunt you long after the lights go out."

MacKinnon tells the Chronicle that ACT saw last year that there was an audience for genre pieces like this when Christopher Chen’s mystery play The Headlands became a modest hit, so this looks to be a sure money-maker for all four of the theater companies involved.

Rounding out the season will be a new play by Eisa Davis, the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Bulrusher (which played at Berkeley Rep last season), titled ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||, which is set in Berkeley. And the US premiere of Hamnet, a stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel about William and Agnes Shakespeare losing their son, Hamnet, and the play of a similar name that Shakespeare ultimately wrote after his son's death.

Over at SF Playhouse, several Broadway classics are on the docket, starting with the backstage farce Noises Off, starting Septemebr 25. Their fall and holiday season will be anchored by a production of Into the Woods, which begins previews November 20.

Winter and spring 2026 will see productions of M. Butterfly; the comical Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really; and Candrice Jones's new play from 2023 Flex, about high school girls basketball players.

SF Playhouse's season will finish out next summer with the rollicking modern classic musical Hairspray.

Still to come this season is Parade from BroadwaySF, which opens May 20; Bay Area-based hip hop tech musical Co-Founders at ACT; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at SF Playhouse; and their summertime show this season is My Fair Lady, which begins July 3rd.

Currently playing in repertory at ACT are The Acting Company's productions of August Wilson's Two Trains Running (which opens tonight), and Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

Top image: The cast of Stereophonic. Photo by Julieta Cervantes