Mix and Master

Mix and Master is a new play by Dominique Morisseau about the last record shop in the Bronx and the people who end up fighting over its future. It is an original story rather than an adaptation, and the Broadway engagement is its world premiere. Roundabout Theatre Company is presenting it as the winter production of its 2026–2027 Broadway season at the Todd Haimes Theatre, with Kamilah Forbes directing.

Music is at the heart of the piece, which is staged with live DJ sets. As of October 2026, the announced cast pairs two Tony Award winners, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Kara Young.

The action takes place inside a Bronx record store that is about to close for good, the final shop of its kind left in the borough. A DJ whose career is taking off is determined to keep the music in that room playing, and control of the store becomes the prize in a fight that splits along generational lines.

The music itself fuels the conflict. What starts as a dispute over a single shop widens into larger questions: what one generation hands down to the next, how a place and a culture survive, and how much courage it takes to keep going at all. As of October 2026, two characters have been announced, Red and Lonnie.

Morisseau has described music as a major force in her writing, one that often steers where a script goes. In Mix and Master that idea moves onto the stage, where the music helps drive the story.

Theatergoers who know her earlier work may hear an echo of Paradise Blue, one of the three plays in her Detroit cycle, The Detroit Project. That play also turns on a music business at a crossroads, with a former musician weighing whether to sell his jazz club. Here the setting moves to the Bronx, the questions of legacy and survival play out between generations, and the new play adds the idea of keeping a culture alive by sharing it in person.

Those DJ sets run through the whole performance, and the music draws on hip-hop and jazz, so expect a play to listen to as much as to watch. The Todd Haimes Theatre has 740 seats on two levels.

As of October 2026, Santiago-Hudson is cast as Red and Young as Lonnie. Santiago-Hudson won a Tony Award in 1996 for his role in August Wilson's Seven Guitars, and he directed Morisseau's Skeleton Crew both at its 2016 world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company and on Broadway. Young has won two featured-actress Tony Awards in a row, for Purlie Victorious in 2024 and Purpose in 2025. Her Broadway debut came in Clyde's in November 2021.

Roundabout announced the play on April 16, 2026, as part of its 2026–2027 season, and released the dates on July 21, 2026: the first preview on January 5, 2027, and opening night on January 27, 2027. It is a limited run, scheduled after The Imaginary Invalid, which began the season at the same theater in fall 2026.