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

Illinoise

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Running time: 90 minutes without intermission
St. James Theatre (246 W. 44th St.)
Opened April 25, 2024. Through August 10, 2024.

The moment I realized there would be no spoken dialogue in Illinoise was the moment I knew that the co-creators, Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury, were taking us somewhere wonderful. While it’s natural enough for a choreographer with Peck’s training and pedigree to anchor a piece in movement (he’s a Tony winner, he choreographed Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and he danced with the New York City Ballet, where he’s now resident choreographer), it takes a special confidence for a playwright, even one with a Pulitzer, to say: You know what? No need for words. This is tanztheater, and though it hews closer to navigable plot than some of the masterworks of the tradition, it’s still functioning from a place of ecstatic faith in the body. That and the music—a glorious live rendering of Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 indie album Illinois—will tell us everything we need to know. Stevens’s songwriting reaches for a sense of worship and possibility that eschews labels, limits, and exclusions, and Peck has turned it into theater that dances, literally and figuratively, with joyful abandon.

➼ Review: Feeling the Illinoise, This Time Through Movement

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

The Heart of Rock and Roll

Running time: 2:20 with intermission
James Earl Jones Theatre (138 W. 48th St.)
Opened April 22, 2024.

The core ethos of The Heart of Rock and Roll might be best expressed in an early scene by the musical’s exasperated head of HR, played by Tamika Lawrence, who accedes to its peppy hero’s scheming by shrugging and saying, “Fine! What the hell. It’s the ’80s.” There’s a lot to unpack in that exchange alone. The Heart of Rock and Roll is about a cardboard-box company where the head of HR is a crucial character. And it’s really set in the ’80s, in the way that the French portion of EPCOT resembles actual Paris: There are tons of prop Walkmen, a profusion of crimped hair, and more shoulder pads than a Margaret Thatcher impersonator convention. The songs are all Huey Lewis and the News. The plot is a baroque fantasia of ’80s movie tropes. It also helps that The Heart of Rock and Roll is the funniest new musical of the season — not a high bar to clear, considering the generally dour and/or self-serious competition, but an achievement nonetheless. (Our hero, Bobby, used to be an aspiring rock star but has given it up to work at a cardboard-box factory; I’m pretty sure the choice of product is to justify an assembly-line take on “It’s Hip to Be Square.”) The proto-Lean In lessons of Working Girl, shenanigans of Risky Business, hedonism of Cocktail, and even the greed of Wall Street have all been jammed into a blender (though all those films’ seediness has been strained out). Tucker pursues Cassandra with the ominous single-mindedness of someone who used to be in an a cappella group. He happens to have recently left a job in Tokyo, because “I finally figured out what’s truly important in life: private equity.” That’s one of many groaners you just have to respect for their audacity. And it’s fine! What the hell. I had fun.

➼ Review: Don’t Think Too Hard About The Heart of Rock and Roll

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.

➼ 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

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

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.

➼ Review: Living Is Harder: Suffs and Grenfell

The Wiz

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Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Marquis Theatre (1535 Broadway)
Opened April 17, 2024.

This revival of the The Wiz is playing to audiences that both know the show and yet are hungry to see it done full out—and crucially, to hear it. Certainly the score, full of funk, R&B, gospel, and more, will still thrill and delight you. Boy, can this cast sing—especially Nichelle Lewis, the 24-year-old discovery making her debut as Dorothy who can riff into the heavens. The cast and especially the dancers, whether swirling around as tornados or showing off an eclectic collection of quotes from contemporary styles as the chic crowd in Emerald City, deliver. But although the talent is all over the stage, it’s also trapped in confused and even ugly packaging. This revival traveled around the country before coming in New York, and indeed it looks like a cheap touring production rather than something that was honed and improved. The sets, by Hannah Beachler (contrasting with her beautiful Black Panther film work) are thin and garish, while the costumes (by Sharen Davis) have winking touches—Scarecrow dances in Timberlands; the Emerald City’s populace wears a variety of sci-fi silhouettes—that are realized with dull materials and fabrics. (The creative team said it aspired to designs that reference Black history and Afrofuturism, so it may be simply that the budget fell short.) Everything takes place in front of a giant video backdrop (by Daniel Brodie) of the kind that has come to make the experience of watching too many musicals—Spamalot and Almost Famous, in recent memory—feel like standing in the TV aisle at Best Buy. In The Wiz’s case, there are fantastical renderings of Oz that, while clever more often reminded me of weightless video-game loading screens or the resting page of Roku City. Instead of immersing us, the big screen makes the stage seem smaller and emptier.

Those deficiencies cramp a show that, for all its musical advantages, already faces an uphill battle against its book. William F. Brown’s original rewiring of the story of The Wizard of Oz is a dated clunker, and so Amber Ruffin has stepped in to give it a fresh pass. Her work is light and mischievous, and although the jokes are good, they undermine the Oz’s inherent and necessary scariness as they pile up, shooing it all away. A show like The Wiz needn’t be a horror movie—it’s got upbeat, joyous qualities, especially as a Black American narrative without a significant trauma plot—but if you subtract what’s ominous from Dorothy’s journey you also risk losing the adjacent sensations of awe and wonder. There should be something a little mysterious and chilling about a fantastical trip into another world, which neither The Wiz’s punched-up book nor its shrunken-down staging manages to access.

➼ Review: The Wiz Rolls Back Into Town

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

The Who’s Tommy

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Running time: 2:10 with intermission
Nederlander Theatre (208 W. 41st St.)
Opened March 28, 2024.

Who doesn’t want to headbang when that “Pinball Wizard” guitar riff starts? At the same time, and for all its zealous energy, the Who’s heady rock opera can’t help feeling like a curio: The album is from 1969, Pete Townshend and director Des McAnuff’s stage musical first hit Broadway in 1993, and this revival marks the latter’s 30th birthday. The album and the musical are interested in whom we worship and why, be it holy men or rock stars, and in the ways worship dehumanizes even as it elevates. Here, its first act is a pretty consistent rush, ending — with “Pinball Wizard” as its climax — on an exultant, smash-the-guitars high note, and the second act struggles to refind that sense of momentum and sheer musical euphoria, perhaps because now it has to start making sense. Moments that could be aurally understood in a more slippery and figurative way suddenly have bodies enacting them. When Tommy’s fans crowd around him on the couch that hasn’t changed position since he was 4 and time rockets forward (noted by projected dates on the backdrop), is he now … 84 years old? And if so, why do his parents look the same? Or have we moved into an allegorical space, where Tommy is ageless, his celebrity a kind of divinity? But then how does that square with a bunch of actual people, playing actual Tommy maniacs, hanging out in his actual house? I had questions — but also, I’m not really that bothered. Especially not when Bourzgui has the stage: He has something about him that feels un-modern-Broadway in a completely exciting way.

➼ Review: Always Gets a Replay: The Who’s Tommy, Revived

Water for Elephants

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

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

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

Merrily We Roll Along

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Hudson Theatre (141 W. 44th St.)
Opened October 10, 2023. Through July 7, 2024.

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s backward-through-time musical — an epic flop in 1981 despite its gorgeous score, well-wrought characters, and run of world-class songs — is mythic among musical-comedy enthusiasts: When on earth will this show get the production it deserves? When Maria Friedman’s production ran last year at New York Theatre Workshop, starring Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe, most signs suggested that it could finally be the one (especially because of Mendez, who was excellent as the saddening, difficult Mary Flynn). The hype was legit, and Friedman and her ensemble render the show exquisite. The cynicism and jadedness that have tended to hang in a sour cloud around the backwards-told story of the gradual selling out (or not) of three big-dreaming artistic friends — they’ve mellowed into honest heartache. Something has shifted, a key has subtly but significantly changed, and the show’s bitterness has been lovingly infused with sweet.

➼ Here’s to Them. Who’s Like Them? Damn Few.
➼ Review: What’s to Discuss, Old Friends? Merrily We Roll Along Is Back.

Back to the Future

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

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?

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical

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Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Broadhurst Theatre (235 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 4, 2022. Through June 30, 2024.

A Beautiful Noise is the latest in a run of bio-musicals about singer-songwriters that seem to say, Have no fear — if you tire of the plot, please know that the songs you recognize will be coming soon. The whole experience is framed by conversations between an older Neil and his psychologist, who is pressuring him to open up by analyzing his lyrics. There’s poignancy to seeing a cloistered, depressive man like Diamond try to articulate how metaphorical storm clouds descend upon him whenever he’s not onstage. But because the focus here is really on the hits, there’s only so deep these analyses can go. And do they lead us around to “Sweet Caroline”? Oh yes, they do. Twice.

➼ Review: I Am, I Said (I Guess): A Beautiful Noise

& 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!

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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.

➼ 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

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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
➼ 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

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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.

➼ 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

🏆 ♻️
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. Currently, Ariana Madix rules the stage.

➼ The Name on Everybody’s Lips Is Jinkxie

Mother Play

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Running time: 1:45 without intermission
Helen Hayes Theater (240 W. 44th St.)
Opened April 25, 2024. Through June 16, 2024.

The title Mother Play is so good you can understand why the playwright Paula Vogel held onto it for a decade and a half. Yet, like many theatrical matriarchs, it’s awfully hard to live up to, which is also what Mother Play struggles to do The story takes place over the course of five evictions, as Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and her children Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger, the Vogel stand-in, also looking back from approximately the present) bounce through apartments in and around Washington, D.C. Their father, as Martha explains in her opening monologue, had a habit of not paying rent, so they’re used to moving, but when the action kicks off he’s abandoned Phyllis and the kids — Martha is 11, Carl 13 — and they’re fending for themselves. Vogel’s script asks for a high theatricality from a director — “by the way: this play is not naturalistic,” she writes in her introduction — but the distancing flights of fancy need to be anchored by a strong sense of intent. Her script assembles the contradictions that make up her mother, but it doesn’t provide a route through them. Phyllis is resourceful and ingratiating, especially when she needs something from men, but can also become helpless and dependent on both men and alcohol. She’s cold and cutting, especially to Martha, whom she decides early on has little potential and may be gay, and supportive and exacting, especially to her beloved son Carl, her golden child (though she’d rather not think about his sexuality). Good material not yet fully refined and processed. Phyllis emerges as a fearsome, complicated, even pitiable figure, someone it must be hard to write about, but she never comes into full focus.

➼ Review: The Evictable Menagerie: Paula Vogel’s Mother Play

Uncle Vanya

♻️ 🕗
Running time: 2:45 with intermission
Vivian Beaumont Theater (150 W. 65th St.)
Opened April 24, 2023. Through June 16, 2024.

Heidi Schreck’s new translation of the second of Chekhov’s Big Four is entering a busy playing field — Vanya is so hot right now! This one’s got major names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun, Alison Pill plays Sonya, and William Jackson Harper is Astrov) and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity. Unhappily, it’s also an example of how these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. “I’m bored!”; “She’s so bored she’s just staggering around”; “God, I really am dying of boredom”; “You know why you and I are such good friends, Vanya? Because we’re both such boring, tedious people.” So say Schreck’s versions of the characters, and if there’s a principal trap that American productions of Chekhov tend to hurl themselves into, it’s taking all this talk of boredom at face value. A Chekhov play is a constellation of spires, minarets, and domes, their tips peeking up through the surface of a desert after a civilization-burying sandstorm. Envisioning and, crucially, enacting the limitless subtextual architecture of the plays is the great task, but here, Lila Neugebauer’s actors feel unrooted. They’re playing the uppermost level of the text, which makes for a drifting, sleepy feeling — whence the ancient and misguided, but all too often theatrically justifiable, complaint that in Chekhov “nothing happens.” Like its luckless hero, this Vanya shoots and misses.

➼ Review: The New Uncle Vanya’s Aims Are Off

Mary Jane

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Running time: 90 minutes without intermission
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (261 W. 47th St.)
Opened April 23, 2024. Through June 30, 2024.

When Mary Jane takes her son to the hospital, it’s as if she descends through the ground into another world. Literally: the walls of Mary Jane’s modest Queens one-bedroom rise halfway into the rafters, though they don’t disappear from view. Her furniture and appliances — a foldout sofa, the kitchenette, a fridge speckled with magnets and reminder notes — hang over the white and gray of the pediatric intensive-care unit. That gesture is typical of the understated yet gutting quality of this production of Mary Jane, which cuts the quotidian open to get to the bone of the existential. Amy Herzog’s script introduces Mary Jane when she’s more than two years into a medical nightmare: Her son, Alex, was born with cerebral palsy, among other chronic illnesses. Herzog’s script, guided by director Anne Kauffman’s eye for detail, shifts the focus away from the inevitable end to the moments of grace, as well as frustration and mystical oddity, that occur in the course of taking care of someone. The tonal balance that requires—neither too grim nor too mawkish—is delicate, and it asks a lot, specifically, of the actress playing Mary Jane. Rachel McAdams turns out to be more than up for the task. She’s making her Broadway debut, but as she often does onscreen, McAdams works in ways that tend toward the understated, yet precisely observed. Crucially, she and Kauffman don’t treat Mary Jane as too much of a saint; in fact, she plays the part as someone who’s well-meaning but a flibbertigibbet. I was struck, at the end of the play, by her haunted stillness.

➼ Review: Rachel McAdams Fights — and Finds — Reality in Mary Jane

Patriots

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Running time: 2:35 with intermission
Ethel Barrymore Theatre (243 W. 47th St.)
Opened April 22, 2024. Through June 23, 2024.

Peter Morgan is interested in rehumanizing that most dehumanizing of forces: power. Total authority, extreme wealth and privilege — these things turn human beings into symbols, abstract entities even to themselves. (There’s a reason that Morgan’s big hit Netflix drama is called The Crown and not The Queen, and it’s not just because Morgan already wrote that movie in 2006.) He’s has made a career out of imagining the hidden wants and griefs of his country’s rulers while simultaneously depicting the lavish ceremonial padding that surrounds them. It’s an addictive formula with ambivalent politics, and a similar combination of moral reticence and fascination with super-high status pervades Morgan’s new play Patriots, which shifts its writer’s lens from his native England to the hulking enigma of Russia. “In the West you have no idea,” says Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg, deprived of hair but vibrating with energy), the real-life Russian oligarch who was found dead in London in 2013. The circumstances around Berezovsky’s death remain a mystery, and Morgan isn’t here to clear anything up for us. His project is to complicate—and perhaps for many, simply inform—our picture of the country that has grown more and more dangerous, isolated, authoritarian, and brutal under the termless presidency of Vladimir Putin (here played by a reptilian, adenoidal Will Keen, taking a wider stance in every scene). Patriots is a present-day history play — intellectual, at times witty, and always distanced from judgment. Though Morgan is plenty perceptive about character, there’s something cool at the center of Rupert Goold’s flashy production that begins to chafe as the play nears its end. This is not a Russian play; it’s a very British play about Russia, and Morgan’s Berezovsky is perhaps righter than even he knows. In the West, we have no idea.

➼ Review: Putin Has a Lean and Hungry Look in Patriots

Stereophonic

🕗
Running time: 3:10 with intermission
John Golden Theatre (252 W. 45th St.)
Opened April 19, 2024. Through August 18, 2024.

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.

➼ Review: Stereophonic Moves to Broadway, and Thunder Happens

An Enemy of the People

♻️ 🕗
Running time: 2:00 without intermission
Circle in the Square Theatre (235 W. 50th St.)
Opened March 18, 2024. Through June 23, 2024.

In Sam Gold’s staging of the Henrik Ibsen play, translated into contemporary English by Amy Herzog, the space between performers and spectators is naturally, potently blurred. We are all, always, in this together, but we’re not always made to recognize the fact. And that, among other choices, clears away any period-piece fustiness and draws out Enemy’s inherent muscularity. As the brothers locking horns at the play’s center — the principled Dr. Thomas Stockmann and the political animal Mayor Peter Stockmann, caught up in the revelations of an environmental scandal — Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli both bring a vigorous contemporary affect to the material, too. You can feel the toughness and tension, the roiling potential energy, of their more modern characters flexing within their costumes. They find a uniquely American tone that, rather than creating dissonance, only highlights the play’s fundamental solidity. Imperioli seems casual, becoming more and more insidious as the show goes on; Strong’s Dr. Stockmann is unexpectedly guileless and earnest. At the play’s climax, as a town meeting descends into rageful rabidity and Strong’s character becomes the target of real violence, both he and Victoria Pedretti, as his daughter, Petra, shine with a delicate new light.

➼ Review: Ibsen, Translated Into American: An Enemy of the People

Appropriate

🕗
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Belasco Theatre (111 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 18, 2023. Through June 23, 2024.

Lila Neugebauer sensitively directs a top-notch cast in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2013 Obie-winning play about a white family gathering in Arkansas to auction off the former plantation that was home to their recently deceased father. The Lafayette siblings—played by Michael Esper, Corey Stoll, and the absolutely fearsome Sarah Paulson—bring more than enough of their own combustible baggage onto the stage to power a three act play, but we know from the beginning that the clamor of their bickering will be dwarfed inside a greater symphony of nightmarish uproar. Their patriarch’s old homestead has blood in the floorboards, in the lake, in the trees — and when one of their kids finds an old photo album full of pictures of lynchings, the characters start scrabbling as a moral sinkhole opens beneath them. After a decade of cultural shift, Jacobs-Jenkins’s play still feels devastatingly credible. It lives entirely and electrically in the space of “and”: Its characters are complicated and they’re blinkered, monstrous and pitiable, trying and failing, not individually hateful and also collectively matured in a slow-cooker of unexamined bias and malice. Stoll rationalizes and equivocates while fury seeps from Paulson’s porese, and Elle Fanning makes her Broadway debut as a sage-burning, part-time vegan chef named River (Ella Beatty has since taken over the role). Yes, it’s also a comedy — one that smolders and burns.

➼ Review: An Estate That Divides: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate

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

Staff Meal

🕗 ⌛️
Running time: 1:40 without intermission
Playwrights Horizons - Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 W. 42nd St.)
Opened April 28, 2024. Through May 24.

If you watch The Bear (or work at a restaurant), then you already know, but a digital marquee above the set fills us in: “STAFF MEAL: A meal that a restaurant serves its staff outside of business hours, free of charge.” So, Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal is, in part, a play for the people who make plays. It’s also a quietly surreal shapeshifter with a tilted sense of humor and a generous, sorrowful heart. The show’s light, alinear movement circles around a restaurant — and also the idea of one. “It’s a specific concept, this restaurant,” says a server (Jess Barbagallo) with scholarly confidence. “You have to know what you’re in for.” Carmen Herlihy, as another server, isn’t so sure. “But how many people are really into it?” she muses. “Like if you make this restaurant, and you know it’s awesome, and your co-workers know it’s awesome, and rare, and special … but most of the customers—the people who are actually like, supposed to eat at the restaurant—aren’t really that into it, is it really a good restaurant?” The metaphorical leap to theater isn’t hard to make. Koogler finished the first draft of Staff Meal just as theaters and restaurants shut down in the spring of 2020, and without recourse to literalism, he conjures the quintessence of those months — the absurdity and fragility, the aimlessness and mental rabbit holes, the forgetting how to talk to other people, listening to yourself and thinking I sound like an alien in a person suit. Staff Meal feels like a portal: We tumble through its funny, eerie evocation of the moment that made—is still making—our present, and we come out the other side feeling, for all the play’s ebb toward emptiness, full.

➼ Review: Staff Meal Deserves Five Stars on Yelp

Oh, Mary!

Running time: 80 minutes without intermission
Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher Street)
Opened February 8, 2024. Closed May 12. Transferring to Broadway July 11.

Midway through Oh, Mary!, as Mary Todd Lincoln climbs onto a desk in the Oval Office in a fit of passion and fury, flinging her hoop skirt up at the audience, there they are: white and red boxers, the hoariest of visual gags. The moment is typical of the berserk approach of Cole Escola, who has made their name in alt-comedy and cabaret acts with a distinctive concoction of diva worship, queer aesthetics, and scatology but is only now making their Off Broadway debut. If you’re already an Escola fan — the type is, generally, queer coastal medicated comedy snob — you’re probably also familiar with their maniacal twinks on Difficult People and Search Party or their parodies of true crime and western TV kitsch like Little House on the Prairie. Escola tends to pop up on the margins of other people’s screen projects or in smaller, low-budget work. In Oh, Mary!, however, they have constructed a star vehicle for themselves, and it’s a work of deranged beauty: a version of Mary Todd Lincoln told (as the press release teases it) “through the lens of an idiot,” played with all the verve and severity of Bette Davis on bath salts. Escola tears down the façade of legitimate theater to reveal that it’s all greasepaint underneath, or perhaps elevates it to the level of pure bedazzled sensation.

➼ Review: Oh, Mary!: The Play Was Hilarious, Mrs. Lincoln

Home Todd Haimes Theatre, June 5 • Oh, Mary! Lyceum Theatre, July 11 • Once Upon a Mattress Hudson Theatre, August 12 • The Roommate Booth Theatre, September 12 • McNeal Vivian Beaumont Theatre, September 30 • Yellow Face Todd Haimes Theatre, October 1 • Our Town Barrymore Theatre, October 10 • Maybe Happy Ending Belasco Theatre, October 17 • Sunset Boulevard St. James Theatre, October 20 • A Wonderful World Studio 54, November 11 • Tammy Faye Palace Theatre, November 14 • Death Becomes Her Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, November 21 • Eureka Day Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, November 25 • English Todd Haimes Theatre, January 23 • Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, March 25 • The Pirates of Penzance Todd Haimes Theatre, April 24