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

Redwood

Running time: 1:50 hours without intermission
Nederlander Theatre (208 W. 41st St)
Opened February 13, 2024.

Build a tower on a foundation of schmaltz, and the thing starts to sink as soon as you breathe on it wrong. In this new musical, Idina Menzel plays a successful New York gallery owner grieving the loss of her 23-year-old son. As the anniversary of his death approaches, she goes into a tailspin, stops answering calls and texts from her partner of 20 years, and drives to Northern California. There, in a section of old-growth forest, she emotionally strong-arms two ecological researchers into strapping her into a harness and taking her up into the canopy. She communes with nature (the tree, she asserts, tells her its name is Stella), faces fires both spiritual and conveniently literal, and climbs down a changed woman, ready to head home. Perhaps Menzel, along with Landau and Kate Diaz — who collaborated on the show’s lyrics while Diaz, a newcomer to musical theater, wrote the score — is banking on music’s ability to sweep us along, softening the edges of our need for certain kinds of logic as a river smooths a stone. But if the music exists that could satisfactorily burnish over Redwood’s simultaneous thinness and wonkiness as a narrative, its creators haven’t found it yet.

Gypsy

♻️

Running time: 2:40 hours with intermission
Majestic Theatre (245 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 19, 2024.

The legendary theater mom at the center of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne, and Stephen Sondheim’s 1959 musical megalith always looms large, but in the current Broadway iteration, Gypsy is entirely and inarguably Rose’s show, in ways both compelling and frustrating. Audra McDonald shoulders the big handbag and small dog as she stomps down the aisle at the top of George C. Wolfe’s revival to thrilled applause, and she earns it — the production as a whole, less convincingly so. It’s not that McDonald’s co-stars can’t run with her; they can, especially Jordan Tyson as June and Danny Burstein, who steps into Herbie’s slightly shabby three-piece suits with total ease. (Joy Woods, in the tough title role, makes a softer impression.) But other aspects of this Gypsy are strange and discouraging: Despite its indestructible book and score, the show Wolfe has built never quite hangs together. Its gestures at times feel stock, at other times scattered, and in much of Wolfe’s work with designer Santo Loquasto, there’s a sense of getting stuck somewhere between luxury and scrappiness. Thus Audra’s wracked and regal Madame Rose steps out of decidedly mixed surroundings. Perhaps she would generate even more heat, or a different kind of heat, in a sharper, grittier, more deeply realized world, but even so, her shine is formidable. Fascinating, too: She doesn’t honk, bellow, or rail in the Merman idiom; her honey-golden soprano gleams and resonates. But she also acts the pants off the role. When McDonald tears into “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” the show’s frighteningly upbeat Act One finale, and especially when she arrives at her eleven o’clock number — perhaps the eleven o’clock number to rule them all, the spiky, spiraling “Rose’s Turn” — she gets nasty and furious and brave. It’s chilling and invigorating in equal measure.

➼ Review: Is It Swell? Is It Great? Audra McDonald Takes Over Gypsy

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.

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

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.

➼ Review: When Robots Meet Cute: Maybe Happy Ending

Sunset Boulevard

♻️
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.

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.

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

Cabaret

♻️
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.

➼ 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

The Outsiders

🏆
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.

➼ Review: Return of the Musical Rumble: The Outsiders

& 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.

➼ 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.

➼ 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.

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

Moulin Rouge!

🏆
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

🏆
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.

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

Hamilton

🏆
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
➼ A Long Talk With Lin-Manuel Miranda
➼ Brian d’Arcy James, Jonathan Groff, and Andrew Rannells on Playing Hamilton Fan Favorite King George III
➼ In the Room Where It Happens, Eight Shows a Week
➼ Nerding Out With Hamilton Musical Director, Alex Lacamoire

Aladdin

🍭
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

🏆
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.

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

The Lion King

🏆 🍭
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

🏆 ♻️
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

English

🕗

Running time: 1:40 without intermission
Todd Haimes Theatre (227 West 42nd Street)
Opened January 23, 2025. Through March 3, 2025.

“Sometimes I think you can only speak one language,” says a character in Sanaz Toossi’s English. “You can know two, but…” It’s an especially poignant moment in a play that’s full of them while still maintaining its essential lightness. The story is simple: In a classroom in the Iranian city of Karaj, four adult students are studying for the TOEFL exam. Their teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), is buoyant and elegant, a true believer. Speaking English, she tells her students, is “one of the greatest things two people can do together.” When teacher and students are speaking English, their accents are audible; when they speak Farsi, they, as actors, are still speaking English, but the accents fall away and they blaze and tumble through casual conversation, a whole range of musicality, nuance, and expression restored to them. Though the language shift is at times employed for comedic effect, Toossi’s characters are also acutely aware that it’s not simply their fluency but the way they sound that determines how and where they can navigate the world. The American theater in which their story is playing out is full of laughter, but laughter is also dangerous for them — a sting and a threat. They are reaching for a language that promises opportunity but that has also long been a tool of global oppression, and that tension shimmers at the heart of Toossi’s delicately wrought play.

➼ Review: Freedom in Speech: Sanaz Toossi’s English

Oh, Mary!

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

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?

➼ Review: Oh, Mary! Is Excellently Uncivil

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.

➼ Review: Harry Potter and the Broadway Spectacle
➼ 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

Ghosts Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, March 10 • Vanya Lucille Lortel Theatre, March 11 • Purpose Helen Hayes Theatre, March 17 • Buena Vista Social Club Schoenfeld Theatre, March 19 • Let’s Love! Linda Gross Theater, March 19 • Becoming Eve Abrons Arts Center, March 19 • Operation Mincemeat Golden Theatre, March 20 • Othello Ethel Barrymore Theatre, March 23 • Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, March 25 • The Picture of Dorian Gray Music Box Theatre, March 27 • Glengarry Glen Ross Palace Theatre, March 31 • Good Night, and Good Luck Winter Garden Theatre, April 3 • Boop! The Betty Boop Musical Broadhurst Theatre, April 5 • The Last Five Years Hudson Theatre, April 6 • Miscast Hammerstein Ballroom at Manhattan Center, April 7 • Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, April 8 • Smash Imperial Theatre, April 10 • Eurydice Signature Theatre, May 13 • John Proctor Is The Villain Booth Theatre, April 14 • Floyd Collins Vivian Beaumont Theatre, April 21 • Just in Time Marquis Theatre, April 22 • The Pirates of Penzance Todd Haimes Theatre, April 24 • Real Women Have Curves James Earl Jones Theatre, April 27 • Dead Outlaw Longacre Theatre, April 27 • A Freeky Introduction Atlantic Stage 2, May 16 • Lowcountry Linda Gross Theater, May 29