What to See on (and Off)(and Off–Off) Broadway

Death Becomes Her

Running time: 2:30 hours with intermission
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (205 W. 46th St)
Opened November 21, 2024. 

Death Becomes Her is a relentlessly eager-to-please adaptation of the 1992 horror-comedy film, the cruelest and campiest example of a cruel-and-campy boomlet seen onstage this year, and it begs you to laugh with and at its dueling lead actresses. The film unintentionally became a gay classic thanks to the commitment of Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep (here, Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, both excellent) to its catfight premise in the vein of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The appeal lies in the uneasy overlap between empowerment and bitchiness, and while you can certainly chide the impulse to be entertained by this stuff, and you can also appreciate it as a fun-house-mirror expression of love and devotion. Either way the worship and the blood sport go hand in hand. But the show doesn’t dig deep into those questions and feelings. It’s simply a better-than-usual IP play: the score is a few cuts above the de rigueur movie-to-musical standard, and the songs are usually patter-forward, though they go gothic and Phantom-ish with their music for Viola Van Horn, the mysterious woman who offers Madeline and Helen eternal beauty in a glowing pink vial. She’s played by Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child, and she sings beautifully, though her attempts at comedy are so uncertain they become jaggedly fascinating. While the show, like the film, tends to keep the softer emotions at a distance the songwriters Julia Mattison and Noel Carey have also delivered Hilty a “Rose’s Turn�-style cri de cœur that gives her the chance to perform in many registers in quick succession. The result is virtuosically impressive, if not emotionally gripping. You can feel the moment tiptoe away from asking your full sympathy when the show has Madeline shout “give me your skin!� at a Gen-Z valet.

âž¼ Review: Divas at Dusk: Death Becomes Her as Broadway Camp

Swept Away

Running time: 1:30 hours without intermission
Longacre Theatre (220 W. 48th St)
Opened November 19, 2024.

John Logan’s book for the new musical directed by Michael Mayer weaves its way through songs from Mignonette, the 2004 album by the North Carolinian folk rockers the Avett Brothers, while dipping heavily into the rest of their catalog along the way. That album musicalizes an 1880s naval tragedy in which an English ship of the same name sank, stranding four crew members in a lifeboat, to be rescued 19 days later only after three of them had killed and eaten the fourth. It’s heavy source material, and Logan, along with Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford, has chosen “salvation and redemption� as the play’s big idea, but its deployment is telly not showy — we hear a lot about it, but our pulses never really rise with the stakes. The show—with an Americanized storyline set in the waning years of the Northeastern whaling trade—aspires to but never quite touches Melvillian metaphysical grandeur. At the same time, the character who needs redeeming—known only as “Mate� and played by John Gallagher Jr.—is a tough man to get on board with. Gallagher, even as he sings well and moves well, is more Mephistophelean than human, with a glinting leer and a backwoods dialect cranked up so high that it makes the score’s banjo part feel downright sinister. We don’t see much of the suffering soul within — instead he’s wicked and sly, if not happily then still committedly so, all the way up to the end. As his crewmates Big Brother and Little Brother, Stark Sands and Adrian Blake Enscoe bring the conscience and the vulnerability to Swept Away that Mate lacks, along with, in Enscoe’s case, a sparking vitality that boosts the play’s engines. The show’s also got a trick up its big wooden sleeve for the eventual shipwreck, and when it comes, Mayer, set designer Rachel Hauck, and their whole team pull off a piece of staging that does indeed summon the terrible and sublime. For a moment, the sea’s Melvillean “devilish brilliance and beauty� pours through the space. It’s temporary, but at least for a moment we’re swept up.

âž¼ Review: Out to Sea and Back With Swept Away

Elf

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Marquis Theatre (1535 Broadway)
Opened November 17, 2024.

Elf, now making its third November-to-January flight through New York since 2010, has the primary goal of being as palatable and inoffensive as possible. The aim of conveying an actual idea in musical form is secondary. Its cast members are generally working hard and making little headway: As our hero Buddy the Elf—a human man raised on the North Pole, looking for his birth father in New York City, in case you’re unfamiliar with the 2003 film—Mean Girls and Shucked’s Grey Henson is zagging toward fey whimsicality where Will Ferrell played something closer to an unbridled id. Many of his co-stars perform with a similar level of commitment that edges toward mania: Kayla Davion’s love interest belts her one big number so hard it’s like she’s trying to test if people can hear her outside the theater. (On the opposite end of the spectrum, Sean Astin does low-key double duty as Santa.) But the odd thing about the Elf: the Musical, as we noted during its first at-bat in 2010, is that the show itself is two steps more ambitious than it needs to be. The 90-minute movie executes its premise at a breakneck pace; the musical, with its book by the pedigreed pair of Annie’s Thomas Meehan and The Drowsy Chaperone’s Bob Martin, stretches the story to two and a half hours with material that’s ultimately well-crafted filler. This Elf isn’t about anything much other than general niceness and that more people need to believe in Santa so his sleigh can fly. That’s a thin bough on which to hang a lot of better-than-necessary tinsel.

âž¼ Review: Elf: The Musical, Where They Sing Really Loud for All to Hear

Tammy Faye

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Palace Theatre (160 W 47th St)
Opened November 14, 2024. Through December 8, 2024.

The splashy new musical about the life of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker—imported from the U.K. and engineered by a Brit-heavy team including Rupert Goold directing, James Graham on book, and none other than Elton John on music—was destined for a rocky landing whenever it got here. But this is, well, quite a moment. Yes, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart are are the bad guys of the show, and, yes, much of it is an innuendo-slinging campfest, and still: The last thing we need right now is to watch the architects of our current Christian Nationalist fascism do jazz squares. And if Tammy Faye is, in its heavy-on-the-hairspray-and-dick-jokes way, making a bid for its namesake’s redemption and canonization (an idea that hinges on her comparatively non-hateful gay-rights stance), Goold’s antiseptic, generically contemporary-looking production isn’t helping. Bunny Christie’s set is wrapped in white curtains and backed by a towering gray wall of screens: The dominant vibe is Apple Store blankness, the predictable canvas for the digital-imagery-happy modern director. With Sunset Boulevard just a few blocks away, Goold is also punching out of his weight class: Just like Sunset, Tammy Faye’s second act begins with live footage of its star — Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier for the role in London, is doing her makeup backstage, and she’s projected on that hulking screen-wall before making her big entrance. Even if you want to throw every live-feed camera in the Hudson, there’s a million ways of doing the trick. If Jamie Lloyd is a Houdini of the form, Goold ends up looking a bit more like Gob Bluth.

âž¼ Review: Christian Nationalism, But Make It Fun: Tammy Faye

Maybe Happy Ending

Running time: 1:40 without intermission
Belasco Theatre (111 W. 44th St.)
Opened November 12, 2024.

What’s more ’90s than a road-trip rom-com, especially one where you’ve got to whip out the tissues at the end? That’s the genre Maybe Happy Ending is going for, and it’s got the formula pegged. Our protagonists can’t like each other too much at the start: Oliver (Darren Criss, as shellacked as a brunette Ken doll, with similarly hinged joints) is a Helperbot 3, an older model of a popular line of humanoid robots that are essentially Jeeves powered by battery. Oliver used to work for a human called James (Marcus Choi), but these days he lives in a compound of efficiency apartments reserved for decommissioned Helperbots on the outskirts of a not-too-far-in-the-future Seoul. Soon enough he has a meet-cute with Claire, a Helperbot 5 who lives across the hall. Oliver is frazzled (“I really hate to be surprised,� he stammers) and also immediately supercilious: Of course Claire needs to borrow his charger (Fives, for all their shiny updates, are notoriously more breakage prone than Threes). Things are, per forma, cool and snippy at the start, until Claire suggests a road trip and a tentative robot romance blossoms. There are a few moments where Maybe Happy Ending shows hints of something beyond the purely cozy, but mostly it does what it sets out to do, and the question is whether that’s what you come to theater for, or even just whether it’s what you’re craving on a given day. It’s sweet, it’s got jokes and wit, and, at times, it’s beautiful.

âž¼ Review: When Robots Meet Cute: Maybe Happy Ending

A Wonderful World

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Studio 54 (254 W. 54th St)
Opened November 11, 2024.

Louis Armstrong comes marching into Broadway aboard an overstuffed bio-musical, playing all the expected notes, several times over. Aurin Squire’s book brackets his life into four sections, each set in a different city and built around Louis’s four marriages. All tend toward Wikipedia-subhed levels of condensation, especially the final ride, from the 1940s to the 1970s, when he ends up with the Cotton Club dancer Lucille Wilson, navigates the civil-rights movement, has a run-in with organized crime, and has a big comeback by way of “Hello, Dolly!� The concept might sound good in a pitch meeting, but it’s both rushed and stop-start on an actual stage. James Monroe Iglehart’s performance is a fine bit of mimicry, and it’s most compelling when they’re challenging the common image of Armstrong as a naïvely good-humored character who was compliant with the racist expectations of the entertainment industry — in brief glimpses, we see someone more canny and more troubled (as he in fact was in life) than pure eternal optimist. Yet Iglehart’s performance is subject as much as everything else here to those constricting generic expectations of the form, because he has to give a bio-musical performance, which means broadcasting, in quick succession, a series of emotional peaks and valleys, via what can feel like a grab bag of historical trivia, all encased in restrictive mythos.

âž¼ Review: A Wonderful World Is Also a Familiar One

Sunset Boulevard

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Running time: 2:35 with intermission
St. James Theatre (246 W. 44th St)
Opened October 20, 2024.

If you spend any time at all following the hypes and hysterias of theater and its accompanying Twitterverse, it will hardly surprise you to hear that this Sunset is more of a solar flare, sometimes quite literally blinding its audience. Jamie Lloyd’s aggressively, expensively stripped down take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 megamusical picked up seven Olivier Awards this spring, including Best Director for Lloyd and Best Actor and Actress for its leads, Tom Francis as the jaded screenwriter Joe Gillis and Nicole Scherzinger as the majestically delusional silent-film star Norma Desmond who turns Joe into her kept boy. While Scherzinger’s ravenous performance provides a great part of this revival’s adrenaline, the show is also jolted into new life by the collision of the spartan Lloydiverse with all the plush and purple of Lloyd Webber’s score. The director and his team have crafted a spare, echoing dungeon, girded by towers of LEDs. Jack Knowles’s lights slice through the haze at menacing, noirish angles, and video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom keep towering, lurid live-feed images of the casts’ faces constantly looming. Inside this charged-up, sweat-slicked cage, Scherzinger prowls. With no armor to depend on (I kept wondering if she’s cold, barefoot in that little black sheath she wears), her Norma is gargantuan and almost feral. She’s not dignified — she’s so big that she seems to be ripping her own seams. But she’s also got a wily little sense of humor, a giggling, contemporary-coded bounce and wiggle that come out especially when the cameras are around: Here’s a woman who may have lost the better part of her mind, but not the part that’s entirely aware of how the kids are telegraphing sexiness these days, even as those kids have no idea who she is.

➼ Review: A Madly Showy Sunset Blvd.

Once Upon a Mattress

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Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Hudson Theatre (141 W. 44th)
Opened August 12, 2024. Through November 30, 2024.

Once Upon a Mattress exists under the longest of long shadows. It’s a trifle of a show, one that would likely be forgotten except that the lead role of Princess Winnifred was, in 1959, the breakthrough for Carol Burnett—and who on earth would dare invite comparison to her? That would be Sutton Foster, whose chops are the justification on which this production hangs, at least commercially. And she’s good. She mugs and leans in and leans out and does a funny little loose waggle with her hips in between lines. She is not quite the whooping-and-bellowing presence that’s the Burnettian ideal of Winnifred—Foster is, as a performer, a little more eager and ingratiating than she is devil-may-care. Burnett as a comic often seemed to be leaping and then looking, like Wile E. Coyote going off the end of the cliff; Foster sometimes seems to steal a peek first. But most of what makes this role is simply playing it as big as you can, and she does. She’s not the only one running with the throttle wide open, either: Ana Gasteyer, Michael Urie, Brooks Ashmanskas, Daniel Breaker, and David Patrick Kelly would, if they were surrounded by weaker co-stars, all be relentlessly stealing scenes. Instead it’s balanced, strength on strength. Given the limitations of the show itself, this may be about as well-wrought a version of it as there can be.

âž¼ Review: Sutton Foster Brings Some Bounce to Once Upon a Mattress

The Great Gatsby

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Broadway Theatre (1681 Broadway)
Opened April 25, 2024.

Under Marc Bruni’s jazz-hands-happy direction, this adaptation of Gatsby—the first of many to come, now that the novel’s gone into the public domain—feels like it belongs on a cruise or in a theme park. It would make a good fit if Epcot’s pavilions expanded to include time periods as well as countries. Poor James Gatz, victim of his own disguise. A century on, retellers of his story, like his hordes of party guests, remain distracted by the spectacle. Here, Bruni and his designers lean into the roaring garishness almost to the point of cartoon, with Technicolor sequins, monstrous Deco-meets-digital projections, and gilded panels that never stop sliding back and forth and up and down (set pieces were still clunking into place as the show’s leads, Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada as Gatsby and Daisy, started into the delicate opening of their big first-act closer). The glut of overwrought background video quickly becomes absurd: As Nick (Noah J. Ricketts) sat center stage in one of the production’s two huge cars, driving from Long Island into the city with the Ivy League “brute� Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski, absolutely walking away with the show) and his peroxide-blonde mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Sara Chase), I watched the set’s enormous screensaver roll by in the background, and I suffered for the actors. So much bling to disguise the fundamentally static, silly picture in which they were trapped.

âž¼ Review: Can You Teach an Old Sport New Tricks? The Great Gatsby on Broadway

Cabaret

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Running time: 2:45 with intermission
August Wilson Theatre (245 W. 52nd St.)
Opened April 21, 2024.

Before this Cabaret begins, the audience is directed down a covered alley and in through the theater’s back door, past dark drapes and beaded curtains, flickering neon, ushers who hand you shots of schnapps, and signs that say LOOK, DON’T TOUCH. The downstairs lobby at the August Wilson has been transformed into a louche, luxe speakeasy, where performers dance on pedestals and people buy expensive themed cocktails. Atmosphere is all in the loose hustle and bustle of a pre-show, but in a play proper, it can only carry you so far, and the warm-up is a better time than the show. Director Rebecca Frecknall has put a lot of energy into giving Cabaret a glow-up—Sleep No More mood board, Eddie Redmayne in a party hat—but she hasn’t provided the show underneath the makeover with sufficient focus or muscle. As the American narrator, Cliff Bradshaw, Ato Blankson-Wood is doing his best to bring vulnerability, sincerity, and even some dignity to the part; and as the strung-out Kit Kat Club singer, Sally Bowles, Gayle Rankin is making every effort to leave her guts on the stage, but she’s not getting any help. They’re both reaching for something, and are visibly supporting each other — but as the Emcee, Eddie Redmayne is on his own look-at-me planet. His singing voice never leaves a plugged-up, somewhat Muppet-y place behind his nose, and his physical palette is all coyly twirling fingers and hunched-up, leering Gollum poses. It all reads as affectation, never as the crucial combination of things the Emcee—and through him, the whole show, however accessorized—has to be: both charming and dangerous.

âž¼ Review: Dancing on the Surface in Cabaret and Orlando

Hell’s Kitchen

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Shubert Theatre (225 W. 44th St.)
Opened April 20, 2024.

It’s worth being wary of any musical that positions itself as a love letter to New York City: Remember the lessons of last season’s tourist brochure that was New York, New York, or of Alicia Keys’s famous hook to “Empire State of Mind,� which arrives with thudding inevitability at the end of her musical Hell’s Kitchen: New York is a “concrete jungle where dreams are made of� because there’s “nothing you can’t do / now you’re in New York.� As an anthem, it’s awfully rousing, especially when Keys — or her musical’s stand-in, Ali, played by Maleah Joi Moon, a virtuoso discovery who also appears surprised and delighted by her own talent — extends the “e� and “o� of “New York� over that roil of drum and piano. Hearing that refrain at the Shubert Theatre, where the bass has been cranked up enough to trigger a seismograph, you understand why the song has staying power. But as a piece of storytelling, “Empire State of Mind� doesn’t get far past generalities, and Hell’s Kitchen’s director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have thrown all the rousing energy they can into the grand finale, but the pizzazz covers for an under-defined core. Why does Ali love this concrete bunghole? Why is an Obama-era-recession banger closing a musical set in the 1990s? Why is this all happening in front of a montage of New York landmarks that looks like a Real Housewives segue?

➼ Review: Hell’s Kitchen Is the WE 🖤 NYC of Musicals

Suffs

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Music Box Theatre (239 W. 45th St.)
Opened April 18, 2024. Through January 5, 2025.

It’s all but impossible to talk about Suffs — Shaina Taub’s musical about Alice Paul, her fellow suffragists, and the passage of the 19th Amendment — without mentioning a show you might have heard of. Not simply because, like the writer of the Public Theater’s last Broadway-bound foray into American political history, Taub is a multi-hyphenate powerhouse who wrote her show’s book, music, and lyrics and also plays its protagonist — but because, taken together, Hamilton and Suffs provide a split portrait of two moments in time. In one half of the frame: a bunch of guys dressed as presidents, looking fly and having a great time. In the other: a bunch of women, trying like hell to be hopeful against truly spirit-crushing forces of darkness while simultaneously holding themselves accountable to a different decade’s set of standards. Alice Paul — the pioneering suffragist played by Taub — was highly imperfect, wavering under pressure from wealthy Southern women to segregate a pivotal march on Washington in 1913. This painful fact takes central importance in Suffs, where, playing the great activists Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, Nikki M. James and Anastaćia McCleskey, respectively, create a deeply felt counterpoint to Paul, who must shoulder a certain amount of shame for the rest of the show. The refrain that Taub’s characters hurl at each other in moments of strife — “Why are you fighting me? I am not the enemy!� — feels so sharply familiar it makes you wince. But for all its seriousness, Suffs is full of nerve and spark. Under the steady direction of Leigh Silverman, the show’s large ensemble glows with the gutsiness and visible affection that come from a good-faith process.

âž¼ Review: Living Is Harder: Suffs and Grenfell

The Outsiders

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Running time: 2:25 with intermission
Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre (242 W. 45th St.)
Opened April 11, 2024.

In its new musical form — with a score and lyrics by the folk duo Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay, known as Jamestown Revival, along with Justin Levine — The Outsiders is taking a real swing at being the strongest entry in this season’s wave of singer-songwriter outings on Broadway. If it sometimes traffics, perhaps unavoidably, in cliché, it makes up for it with tenderness and muscle, in its songs and in its performances. In Adam Rapp’s book (co-written with Levine), Ponyboy (Brody Grant) is our 14-year-old narrator, born and raised, as the novel’s teenaged author S.E. Hinton was, in Tulsa. It’s 1967, and Ponyboy and his two older brothers, Darrel and Sodapop, played by Brent Comer and Jason Schmidt respectively, live alone after the death of their parents. Darry works, while Ponyboy and Soda spend most of their time with their chosen family, one of the town’s two rival gangs: the Greasers. “You’ve got Greasers and Socs,� Ponyboy sings to us, “that’s how it’s always been / And that’s probably how it’s always gonna go.� (“Soc� is short for “socialite�—the plural is two syllables, like cloches—so you can guess which gang comes from which side of the tracks.) Since Ponyboy holds the literal pen and paper, it’s doubly his story. But The Outsiders is best on the inside of its narrator’s frame, when it embraces the community of its title. Joshua Boone is especially excellent as the charismatic alpha Greaser, Dallas Winston, and Sky Lakota-Lynch gives a poignant reading to the story’s most persecuted young sufferer, Ponyboy’s best friend, Johnny Cade. The Outsiders has long been a favorite for speculation about romantic undertones between its characters, and despite Hinton’s denial that anyone in the story is anything other than straight, there’s a delicacy in the musical’s approach to Johnny that feels like it leaves things open in a truthful way. These are all kids — who they are is shifting every second, and what they haven’t been able, or allowed, to articulate about themselves yet is a vast wilderness. The tragedy lies in never being able to find out.

âž¼ Review: Return of the Musical Rumble: The Outsiders

Water for Elephants

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Running time: 2:40 with intermission
Imperial Theatre (249 W. 45th St.)
Opened March 21, 2024. Through December 8, 2024.

We begin with an old man, dreamy-eyed, sitting in the empty stands of a traveling circus. “Show’s over, sir,� the owner tells him. “We’re breaking it down and hauling out.� The sentimental frame is the show’s weak point — yet if, like me, you are highly susceptible to sawdust and tinsel, then much of Water for Elephants will delight on the basis of spectacle alone. We’re soon flashed back to the Great Depression, where young Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin), grieving the death of his parents, abandons his vet-school studies and hops a train. Soon enough he’s adopted by the “kinkers� and “rousts� of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Though the show puts its weight in the places that make narrative sense, they aren’t always the most rewarding ones. We never really get to see much of the extraordinary zoo of puppet animal creations. Instead, we spend the bulk of our time with the creature of the title, an elephant named Rosie (team-puppeted by Caroline Kane, Paul Castree, Michael Mendez, Charles South, and Sean Stack). Rosie — who gets a possibly unhelpful amount of build-up before her eventual appearance — is both lovely and slightly underwhelming, and the same might be said of certain broader stretches of Water for Elephants, though the production, especially in the acrobatics of its ensemble of carnies, also contains real flashes of astonishment and grace.

➼ Review: Water for Elephants Is Best When It’s Behind the Times

The Notebook

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Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre (236 W. 45th St.)
Opened March 14, 2024. Through December 15, 2024.

Any self-respecting musical of the celebrated 2004 cinematic weepie The Notebook (itself adapted from Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel) has got to guarantee literal showers of at least the scattered variety on stage, and this one is also capitalizing on its audience’s emotional precipitation by selling souvenir boxes of tissues in the lobby. But if I had to take bets on how many actual tears The Notebook The Musical manages to jerk — well, I wouldn’t advise anyone to bring a bucket. With prosaic direction and a strangely heavy and sterile aesthetic sense that feels, despite Schele Williams’s presence as a co-director, all too similar to Michael Greif’s other productions this season, as well as a surprisingly beige slate of songs by the folk-pop artist Ingrid Michaelson, the show disappears from memory almost moment to moment. It’s built not around revelation but around our pretty much immediate understanding of its premise and the continuous increase of our heartache over time. We’re supposed to see everything coming, long for it to come, and revel in how agonizingly bittersweet it is, just as we knew it would be, when it does. Take all this and package it up in musical-from-movie form, and the sentimental anticipation factor increases tenfold. Sure, perhaps not everybody in the theater is here because they remember how good the heartbreak felt in 2004, but that doesn’t change the fact that the engine of the whole machine is nostalgia.

âž¼ Review: Love and Brains, Dull and Sharp: The Notebook and The Effect

Back to the Future

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Running time: 2:40 with intermission
Winter Garden Theatre (1634 Broadway, nr. 49th St.)
Opened August 3, 2023. Through January 5, 2025.

The three Back to the Future films are completely infused into American moviegoers’ consciousness. The musical and its actors labor under that weight, and instead of commenting on the originals, they deliver a beat-by-beat translation of its set pieces. Big projection screens dominate the set, providing for cuts between Doc and Marty, the score is basically the one you know, and the actors are really there only to sit in a car and on a ledge and shout lines you’ll recognize. But let’s be clear: Ticket sales, in the early going at least, took off like a flying DeLorean.

➼ Review: You Made a Musical … Out of a DeLorean?

& Juliet

Running time: 2:30, with intermission
Stephen Sondheim Theatre (124 W. 43rd St.)
Opened November 17, 2022.

We all know Juliet dies at the end of Romeo & Juliet, but what if she didn’t? If you were to take that idea and infuse it with the feeling of getting day-drunk on cheap rosé, you’d get & Juliet. The aggressively effervescent musical endeavors to wash you away in the blushy delights of pop feminism and hit singles and middle-school-level Shakespeare jokes. When someone belts the chorus of “Since U Been Gone� at you, it is impossible not to feel intoxicated. In other moments, such as when any character tries to explain any part of the show’s plot, you may feel as if the world has started to spin desperately out of control. You’ll have that ephemeral thrill of being alive on a dance floor and end up with a hangover.

âž¼ Review: In & Juliet, Verona Goes Pop!

MJ

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Neil Simon Theatre (250 W. 52nd St.)
Opened February 1, 2022.

Is it possible to make a show about a man whose memory dwells under deep shadow? Of course. But you have to make it good. MJ, the Michael Jackson bio-musical, is on the defensive the entire time, making a pretense of telling the singer’s story while loudly and pointedly bracketing which parts of the story are available for sale. Jackson’s lyrics often contain complaint and justification, and the show picks up his frustration with the tabloids while using MTV journalists to frame and structure the story. The “plot,� so much as it exists, involves documentarians overhearing troubling conversations about Michael’s dependence on painkillers and their decision to use this information. Oh? It’s important to include the dark sides of a man’s character when you tell his story? The irony is so ripe here it has rotted.

âž¼ Review: MJ Exists in a Hyperbaric Chamber of Denial

Six

Running time: 1:20, no intermission
Lena Horne Theatre (256 W. 47th St.)
Opened October 3, 2021.

Henry VIII’s sextet of wives perform in a battle set up like an American Idol competition in which the wife who suffered the most will win. To curry audience favor, each sings a song steeped in the style of one or more pop icons, like Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne. In the process, they attempt to claw back their history from that of their shared rotten husband. The political message is a little Easy-Bake, a little shallow, a little wishful — claim your power, ladies! Even if your reality is the headsman’s block! — but nobody’s going to this show to ponder the complexity of history. The point of Six is its escapism, and even its sheer brightness is cheering. This is one liberation in which you don’t have to lift a finger. Queens are doing it for themselves.

âž¼ Review: Pop Renaissance! Six: The Musical Fans Lose Their Heads Over Broadway Opening

Moulin Rouge!

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Running time: 2:45 with intermission
Al Hirschfeld Theatre (302 W. 45th St.)
Opened July 25, 2019.

For all its splashy, glittery, high-kicking, butt-cheek-baring, sword-swallowing maximalism, Moulin Rouge! is something more unsettling than not good. There’s a shapelessness about it, a weird enervation underneath the flash and bang. The show veers broadly away from its beloved-by-millennials-everywhere source material, which in itself is no crime. But the path its creators have taken is one long trip through the Kingdom of Pandering with multiple pit stops in the Meadows of Cutesiness and the Forest of Flat Characters. Everywhere it should be filthy, it’s scrubbed aggressively clean, yet somehow it’s still a hot mess.

➼ Review: Moulin Rouge! Is Broadway’s Biggest Karaoke Night

Hadestown

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Running time: 2:25 with intermission
Walter Kerr Theatre (219 W. 48th St.)
Opened April 17, 2019.

Like so many of its mythic antecedents, Hadestown is the product of much metamorphosis: It began as Anais Mitchell’s suite of songs intertwining the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone and grew into this production in collaboration with director Rachel Chavkin. The Broadway current manifestation is lush, vigorous, and formally exciting — and, in certain moments, witchily prescient. The show may read to some as a protest musical, and at times its stalwart “Do You Hear the People Sing?� earnestness is under-rousing. But as an intricate and gorgeous feat of songwriting, as a vehicle for dynamite performances, as a visionary and courageous experiment with form, Hadestown is cause for celebration. Reeve Carney recently wound up his seven years’ journey as Orpheus through its Canadian tryout and London and Broadway stints, replaced by Jordan Fisher; Ani DiFranco joined the production this February.

âž¼ Review: The Songwriting and Storytelling Tours de Force of Hadestown
➼ Jordan Fisher Will Look Back as the New Orpheus in Hadestown
âž¼ Ani DiFranco Is Heading Way Down to Hadestown on Broadway
âž¼ 126 Minutes With Ani DiFranco

Hamilton

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Running time: 2:55 with intermission
Richard Rodgers Theatre (226 W. 46th St.)
Opened August 6, 2015.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s immense 2015 hit, reimagining the story of the American Revolution with mostly nonwhite actors and a unique and delicious cocktail of hip-hop and show tunes, is already a period piece—not of the late 18th century but the Obama era, when one could semi-seriously suggest that America’s racial wounds were healing. But even if its edge no longer gleams as it once did, and minus the uniquely talented original actors to whom the writing was custom-fitted, it’s still a breakthrough with a canonical set of songs and a closing number that reliably brings audiences to tears.

➼ Review: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton Already Feel Like They’re From Another Time
âž¼ A Long Talk With Lin-Manuel Miranda
➼ Brian d’Arcy James, Jonathan Groff, and Andrew Rannells on Playing Hamilton Fan Favorite King George III
âž¼ In the Room Where It Happens, Eight Shows a Week
âž¼ Nerding Out With Hamilton Musical Director, Alex Lacamoire

Aladdin

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
New Amsterdam Theatre (214 W. 42nd St.)
Opened March 20, 2014.

For Aladdin, Disney’s team built on the take-no-chances, take-no-prisoners lessons of its Broadway predecessors to all but guarantee a quality hit. And Aladdin, for all its desert emptiness, plays by the rules. The trademark Disney tone is established as soon as the gorgeous curtain disappears, when Genie — a Cab Calloway type in spangly harem pants — arrives to host what amounts to a variety act at the Sands. (“Come for the hummus, stay for the floor show!�) Within seconds, the song “Arabian Nights� is setting the scene in the city of Agrabah (where “even the poor look fabulous�), introducing the main characters (urchin and princess), offering a plot synopsis (urchin loves princess), and demonstrating the Disney trick of kicking down the fourth wall with anachronistic jokes that bypass the kiddies on their way to adults.

➼ Review: Disney’s Same Old World, Back in Aladdin

The Book of Mormon

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Eugene O’Neill Theatre (230 W. 49th St.)
Opened March 24, 2011.

Elder Price, a seemingly perfect young Mormon man, gets teamed up with the dorky and clingy Elder Cunningham for their mission assignment — an odd couple that proselytizes together. They practice ringing doorbells (the bravura introductory song “Hello�) to share the beliefs of the Latter Day Saints, but when they get shipped to Uganda, they find that they’re extremely unprepared for the (a) local warlord, (b) local indifference, and (c) local AIDS epidemic. Created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park and Robert Lopez, who wrote Avenue Q, the show at first occasioned questions about whether it was hostile to Mormonism; in fact it’s quite generous to the LDS church, though it has not aged well in another regard. Until the plane lands in Uganda, the show is still hilarious, but the sequences in Africa are grimly unfunny, especially as black actors are forced to sell jokes about curing AIDS by sodomizing babies.

➼ Review: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton Already Feel Like They’re From Another Time
➼ Andrew Rannells Is Happy to Play Gay Men (As Long As They’re Not Too Relatable)

Wicked

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Gershwin Theatre (222 W. 51st St.)
Opened October 30, 2003.

Stephen Schwartz’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz, with a book by Winnie Holzman from Gregory Maguire’s novel, turns out to have been not only a cash machine (still at or near capacity most weeks, 20 years in) but also unlocked a winning formula that so many new Broadway musicals have followed: It’s threaded through with themes of girl power and friendship that hit a young, mostly female audience at an atavistic level. Knock it if you will for its showy glitz, but you’ll need a pretty hard heart not to be won over by “For Good� or “Popular,� let alone not to be swept up when “Defying Gravity� comes roaring out at you.

âž¼ Still Popular: Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel Talk Wicked on the 20th Anniversary

The Lion King

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Minskoff Theatre (200 W. 45th St.)
Opened November 13, 1997.

The rare kids’ show that adults can feast on, mostly because of the wonders wrought by Julie Taymor, who designed and directed. The animals, large and small, are re-created with unparalleled imagination, underpropped by costumes that artfully blend realism with fantasy: The prancing giraffes and leaping antelopes, the nodding elephant and barreling warthog, all keep you marveling despite the really pretty basic story line and by-now-ultrafamiliar tunes, principally by Elton John and Tim Rice.

Chicago

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Ambassador Theatre (219 W. 49th St.)
Opened November 14, 1996.

The John Kander–Fred Ebb–Bob Fosse musical, a modest success on its first run in 1975, became a juggernaut on its second try two decades later. Since Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth got the revival going in 1996, the slinky dances and arch dialogue about cheerily amoral murderesses in the Prohibition era have been reinhabited a hundred times over, turning the show into something of a parade of stars in short-turn stunty gigs (for a limited time, see Jennifer Holliday! Here’s Michael C. Hall! How about … Pamela Anderson?). Last year, Drag Race’s Jinkx Monsoon stepped in as Mama Morton, to big applause. Later this summer, Ariana Madix will return to rule the stage.

➼ The Name on Everybody’s Lips Is Jinkxie

Left on Tenth

Running time: 1:40 without intermission
James Earl Jones Theatre (138 W. 48th St)
Opened October 23, 2024.

In Left on Tenth, the play by Delia Ephron based on her memoir, when Julianna Margulies’s version of the author starts flirting via email with Peter Gallagher’s therapist character, you may feel a comforting return to the world and framing of You’ve Got Mail, which Ephron wrote with her sister Nora. But while the situation may seem familiar, it’s in the extended messaging that the script’s essential flaw becomes apparent: There is almost no friction or tension. He’s who he appears to be; she’s who she appears to be. You are in for an evening that—even as the plot itself touches on losing her sister, losing her husband, and her own life-threatening illness—is altogether too pleasant for its own good. Everyone Delia meets tends toward the kind and supportive with a pearl of wisdom or two to offer, and no one is ever cutting or cruel — except representatives from telephone companies. There’s seeing the world with rose-tinted glasses, and then there’s just refusing to paint with shades other than pink.

âž¼ Review: Left on Tenth Goes Right Down the Middle

Romeo and Juliet

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Running time: 2:25 with intermission
Circle in the Square Theatre (235 W. 50th St.)
Opened October 24, 2024. Through February 26, 2025.

Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler star in a Gen-Z-ified version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Don’t believe us? It has music by Jack Antonoff, aka the producer behind Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter’s new album. Directed by Shakespeare revivalist veteran Sam Gold, the play offers a modern take on the tragedy while including musicial moments to show off Zegler’s vocal range.

âž¼ Review: Kissing by the Book: Connor and Zegler in Romeo & Juliet

Our Town

Running time: 1:50 without intermission
Ethel Barrymore Theatre (243 W. 47th St.)
Opened October 10, 2024.

Kenny Leon’s new Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s American classic isn’t painful, but it’s far from revelatory. In certain ways it treads safely down the middle of the road — gets in, gets on with it, gets it over with, and gets out. But Leon also seems to be reaching for gestures to make this visit to Grover’s Corners new and different, and the flourishes wind up feeling tentative or hodgepodge-y, never coalescing. (At the end of the show, he even goes so far as to pipe the smell of bacon into the auditorium — the Cinnabon version of an innovation David Cromer made with the play back in 2009.) Wilder was adamant that his play needed “only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.� The man knew what he was about. Start adding icing and you’d better know, too. Here, the icing comes before the cake. Leon’s production begins not with the stage manager (Jim Parsons) but with the town organist, the suffering alcoholic Simon Stimson (Donald Webber Jr.), leading the company in a sung prologue with a pat religiosity that feels like a misreading of Wilder’s cosmic vision. Then, there’s the conspicuous fact of all that celebrity. At times, the “town� on display feels as if it is, in fact, the weird bubble of contemporary Broadway, where TV stars like Zoey Deutch (playing Emily Webb) and Katie Holmes (as her mother) rub up against old hands like Richard Thomas — who first acted on Broadway in 1958 — or natural-born stage performers Billy Eugene Jones. As the play’s two fathers, Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb, Jones and Thomas are a high point. They both ride Wilder’s rhythms and personalize them, nailing the “continual dryness of tone� the playwright asked for in his notes. Holmes, meanwhile, seems a little lost, and while Deutch is more in control of Emily, she keeps her bright as a bell. Even in the crucial final scenes, her performance never really drops., At the center of it all is Parsons, reining himself in a bit, wearing a serious beard. His Stage Manager is, more than anything else, brisk — he keeps things moving, givingthe mawkishness that can be Wilder’s death knell a wide berth. He may not quite ring the great gong that lies inside the part’s New England tartness, but he’s a good companion and a wry, steady guide. Watching him, I thought about how much Wes Anderson owes to Wilder. Then I started dreaming of that production.

âž¼ Review: Stage, Managed: A TV-Star-Driven Our Town

The Hills of California

Running time: 2:45 with intermission
Broadhurst Theatre (235 W. 44th St.)
Opened September 29, 2024.

The last time Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes rode into Broadway on the back of a big-boned new play, smothered in five-star reviews and Olivier awards, there were geese, and babies, and bunnies. This time, there’s no livestock, only a broken jukebox and an out-of-tune piano in an old guesthouse in the north of England — a place called Seaview where there is no sea view. The Johnny Mercer tune that provides the play’s title is all glowing, crooning mid-century dreaminess, a life of sunny days and glamorous blue Pacific nights. But at Seaview, those hills are as distant and untouchable as the horizon, and the play they loom over is heavy with death. The result is that Butterworth—who puts plays together like machines, calibrated for passion or pathos at the pull of a certain lever—has less to hide behind. The sheer exuberant maximalism of The Ferryman went a long way toward obscuring, even at times absolving, the show’s overdependence on some pretty trite types and twists. In The Hills of California—which tells the story of four sisters living with the trauma of their glamorous, maniacal mother’s attempt to turn them into a star singing group when they were children—Butterworth’s calculations are exposed. He’s cooking with the same stock, but the soup has gotten unappetizingly thin.

The Roommate

Running time: 90 minutes without intermission
Booth Theatre (222 W. 45th St.)
Opened September 12, 2024.

Under Jack O’Brien’s direction, Jen Silverman’s 2015 odd-couple comedy The Roommate begins as its stars walk in side by side, and a projection on the back wall shows us their names in pink letters almost as tall as they are: MIA FARROW & PATTI LUPONE. They half-smile politely. They receive applause. They leave. Lights up, music down, they come back, and the play gets going. One could argue that O’Brien is simply dealing with the inevitable: People are going to clap, so let’s just get it over with. But this gesture sets us up for a superficial encounter: Appreciate the presence of these two famous actors, laugh when they say something funny, and leave it at that. Farrow and LuPone are fun to watch — especially Farrow, whose church-mouse character gradually blossoms with the demurely unhinged glee of a midwestern Mephistopheles — and Silverman has written a good number of funny things for them to say. But the truth is that a surface-level variety of engagement is all that The Roommate can really withstand. There’s something weird and sour going on in Silverman’s play that precludes uncomplicated enjoyment of its comedy but never quite touches anything really profound. Beneath its veneer, The Roommate is in an on-again, off-again relationship with its own conscience. It doesn’t know quite what it wants to do or say or, crucially, exactly how bad it wants to break. —Sara Holdren

âž¼ Review: The Roommate Barely Unpacks Its Own Boxes

Oh, Mary!

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Running time: 80 minutes without intermission
Lyceum Theatre (149 W. 45th St.)
Opened July 11, 2024. Through January 19, 2025.

When Cole Escola says “Laugh,� we say, “How loud — and with how much danger of peeing a little?� Their Oh, Mary!, now transferred uptown, is unstintingly hilarious and, underneath the mayhem, both rock-solid in structure and sneakily moving. It’s confident enough in its own skin to have resisted any sort of unnecessary Broadway makeover, and though it’s possible to enjoy it purely as a wild and wily romp packed with zany twists and shameless cackles, Oh, Mary! isn’t about nothing. What is has to say (beneath the “bratty curls,� bouncing hoop skirts, and spit-take-inducing jokes about inbreeding) is that you’ve got to find your parade, as freaky or frightening as it might be, and refuse to let anyone rain on it. It is, in essence, a liberation story for Cole Escola’s Mary Todd Lincoln — the suffering wife of the 16th president, driven by the ruthless tedium of her life to alcoholism and diabolical abusing of her goody-goody companion, Louise (Bianca Leigh, wonderful, just like everyone in the cast). When Mary announces her life’s great passion (“Cabaret!�), or reminds her husband (the excellent Conrad Ricamora) that “people traveled the world over for my short legs and long medleys,� or — as she begins acting lessons with a worrisomely hunky teacher (James Scully, also great) — launches into a burring, lisping, writhing delivery of iambic pentameter that makes her sound like “a horny snake,� she is, for all her diegetic disempowerment, in total control of us. Her play is a celebration of funny girls of all stripes, of self-actualization beyond the oppressive confines of social normativity and cultural — big air quotes — “legitimacy.� Go see it. After all, what good is sitting alone in your room?

âž¼ Review: Oh, Mary! Is Excellently Uncivil

Stereophonic

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Running time: 3:10 with intermission
John Golden Theatre (252 W. 45th St.)
Opened April 19, 2024. Through January 12, 2025.

We’re in a recording studio in Sausalito, California, evoked in gorgeous detail, down to the smallest dial, the scuzziest beanbag chair and crocheted throw. The year is 1976, and an unnamed band, hovering on the verge of serious fame, is recording an album. They’ve been at it for months. The air is clogged with cigarette smoke and marijuana smoke and tension as viscous as Marmite. David Adjmi’s Stereophonic is an echo-portrait of Fleetwood Mac and the hard birth of Rumours; it’s also a stunning feat of scoring by Adjmi — whose hypernaturalistic script captures the ebb and flow of overlapping speech both inside and outside the studio’s sound room — and by director Daniel Aukin and composer Will Butler. Aukin and the show’s stellar cast play Adjmi’s rigorously constructed, deceptively casual prose with as much exactness and audacity as the actors, all playing their instruments live, pour into Butler’s songs: Smart, well-crafted tunes that blend the folk and blues and prog vibes of the ’70s with the soaring indie yearning of Butler’s former band, Arcade Fire. (There’s a cast album on the way.) The show is part concert and part breakup drama, part sound-design marvel and part beautifully observed period piece. But in its bones, it’s a love song, bittersweet and wounded and ferociously loyal, to the act of making art — specifically, art that requires that most exhausting, infuriating, transcendent element: collaboration.

âž¼ Review: Stereophonic Moves to Broadway, and Thunder Happens

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Running time: 3:30 with intermission
Lyric Theatre (213 W. 42nd St.)
Opened December 7, 2021

Mostly set 22 years after the end of the final novel in J.K. Rowling’s series, Cursed Child finds Harry a 40-something, overworked Ministry of Magic official, married to Ginny Weasly with three kids, working for his eternally type-A buddy, Hermione Granger. Packed with breakneck plot twists, mind-bending spectacle, and, perhaps more surprisingly, moments of theatrical whimsy that feel, amid the high-tech sorcery, delightfully simple, The Cursed Child is a remarkable and fitting addition to the Potter canon: It effectively weaves serious themes with bouncy adventure narrative, it’s heartfelt and sometimes a touch hokey, it could have used a more rigorous editor, and you’re probably willing to forgive its shortcomings as it sweeps you along in a rush of rip-roaring, good-natured imagination.

âž¼ Review: Harry Potter and the Broadway Spectacle
âž¼ How Imogen Heap Conjured Her Magical Tracks for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
➼ How Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s Anthony Boyle Builds Sympathy for a Malfoy

Cult of Love Hayes Theater, December 12 • Eureka Day Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, December 16 • Gypsy Majestic Theatre, December 19 • The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux] New York Theatre Workshop, January 4 • I Assume You Know David Greenspan Atlantic Stage 2, January 8 • Grief Camp Linda Gross Theater, January 9 • English Todd Haimes Theatre, January 23 • Redwood Nederlander Theatre, February 13 • Vanya Lucille Lortel Theatre, March 11 • Buena Vista Social Club Schoenfeld Theatre, March 19 • Let’s Love! Linda Gross Theater, March 19 • Operation Mincemeat Golden Theatre, March 20 • Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, March 25 • Boop! The Betty Boop Musical Broadhurst Theatre, April 5 • The Last Five Years Hudson Theatre, April 6 • John Proctor Is The Villain Booth Theatre, April 14 • Smash Imperial Theatre, April 10 • Floyd Collins Vivian Beaumont Theatre, April 21 • The Pirates of Penzance Todd Haimes Theatre, April 24 • Lowcountry Linda Gross Theater, May 29 • A Freeky Introduction Atlantic Stage 2, May 16