A complete list of current Broadway shows in NYC (2024)

Aladdin: In briefDisney unveils its latest cartoon-to-musical project: the tale of a boy, an uncorked spirit and an aerodynamic rug. Composer Alan Menken adds new tunes to the 1992 original soundtrack, and Chad Beguelin provides a fresh book. Reputed highlights include James Monroe Iglehart's bouncy Genie and the flying-carpet F/X.Aladdin: Theater review by Adam FeldmanWhat do we wish for in a Disney musical? It is unrealistic to expect aesthetic triumph on par with The Lion King, but neither need we settle for blobs of empty action like Tarzan or The Little Mermaid. The latest in the toon-tuner line, Aladdin, falls between those poles; nearer in style (though inferior in stakes) to Disney’s first effort, Beauty and the Beast, the show is a tricked-out, tourist-family-friendly theme-park attraction, decorated this time in the billowing fabrics of orientalist Arabian fantasy. “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” sings the genial Genie (a game, charismatic Iglehart) in the opening song, and that’s the tone of Aladdin as a whole: kid-Oriented.As in the 1992 film, the Genie steals the show from its eponymous “street rat” hero (Jacobs, white teeth and tan chest agleam). The musical’s high point is the hard-sell “Friend Like Me,” in which the fourth-wall-breaking spirit summons wave upon wave of razzle-dazzle to demonstrate the scope of his power. (The number matches the rococo cornucopia of the New Amsterdam Theatre.) Granted three wishes for freeing the Genie from a lamp, Ala

Broadway review by Adam Feldman“Keep it light, keep it tight, keep it fun, and then we’re done!” That’s the pithy advice that the indignant 16th-centuryhousewife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) imparts to her neglectful husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), as a way to improve his play Romeo and Juliet, which she considers too much of a downer. It is also the guiding ethos of the new Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet, a quasi-Elizabethan romp through the chart-toppers of Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin. A diverting synthetic crossbreed of Moulin Rouge!, Something Rotten!,Mamma Mia! and Head Over Heels, this show delivers just what you’d expect. It is what it is: It gives you the hooks and it gets the ovations.Martin is the preeminent pop hitmaker of the past 25 years, so & Juliet has a lot to draw from. The show’s 30 songs include multiple bops originally recorded by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, as well as tunes that Martin wrote—or, in all but two cases, co-wrote—for Pink, NSYNC, Kesha, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Jessie J, Céline Dion, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Ellie Goulding, Demi Lovato, Adam Lambert, the Weeknd and even Bon Jovi. (Notably absent are any of his collaborations with Taylor Swift.) “Roar,” “Domino,” “Since U Been Gone”: the hit list goes on and on. As a compilation disc performed live, it’s a feast for Millennials; its alternate title might well be Now That’s What I Call a Musical!& Julietl | Photograph: Matthew Murp

InBranden Jacobs-Jenkins's trenchant 2014darkcomedy, scattered members of an estranged Arkansas family return to their late patriarch'scrumbling manseto sort through the ugly detritus of multiple generations. In the play's first Broadway production, directed by Lila Neugebauer, Sarah Paulson etches a star performance in acid; the very fine cast also prominently includes Corey Stoll, Michael Esper,Ella Beatty and Natalie Gold. The playmines dysfunctional-family drama to highly entertaining effect, then puts it all in larger perspective in a wild finale that brings down the house.

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanAttending Back to the Future: The Musical is a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion, except for the part about not being able to look away. The star is a vehicle: a gull-winged silver DeLorean in whose image the Winter Garden Theatre has been tricked out with gleaming circuitry, and which—re-engineered into a time machine by the wild-haired inventor Doc Brown (Roger Bart)—transports 1980s teenager Marty McFly (Casey Likes) 30 years into the past, where he must help his father woo his mother. Audience members, meanwhile, may long for a device to jump them two hours and 40 minutes into the future.There have been solid Broadway musicals adapted from hit movies, but this heap seems to have been assembled out of parts from previous film-to-stage flops. Bart played a mad scientist in Young Frankenstein, and Likes wasa music-loving teen in last season’s Almost Famous. Director John Rando tried ‘80s kitsch in The Wedding Singer; Glen Ballard, who co-wrote the score, also co-composed the ghastly Ghost. Like Pretty Woman and Bullets Over Broadway, the script is by the source’s original screenwriter, in this case Bob Gale. And as in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang, the main attraction is a flying car.Back to the Future: The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan ZimmermanWhat no one has remembered to include is the engine, which may explain why the cast is pushing so hard. The ever-present underscoring—drawn from Silvestri’s

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanFrom the 1960s through the early 1980s, at the height of his long career, Neil Diamond shone very brightly indeed. As A Beautiful Noise, the jukebox biomusical based on his life, takes pains to inform us early on, he has had dozens of top-40 hits, and sold 120 million albums. “Biggest box office draw in the world, ahead of Elvis Presley, can you imagine? The King,” Diamond marvels later on. The Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter-showman was sometimes called the Jewish Elvis, and in that regard A Beautiful Noise is a suitable tribute to him; in its biggest numbers it resembles an old-school Vegas-style impersonation show, recreating concert moments for the benefit of an audience that is happy to embark on a musical nostalgia trip.A Beautiful Noise extracts as many pop gems as it can from the Diamond mine. From his early breakthrough as the writer of “I’m a Believer” for the Monkees to more than two dozen of his later hits (such as “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “Song Sung Blue” and “America,” though perhaps understandably not “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”), the show makes its subject’s oeuvre the central focus of attraction and investigation. His most enduring hit, “Sweet Caroline,” is prominently featured as both the Act I finale—when Diamond describes it as a visit from God himself, and Michael Mayer’s staging obliges with a chorus of dancers in gleaming white, à la Jesus Christ Superstar—and in a final send-’em-out-humming reprise after the curtain call,

If theater is your religion and the Broadway musical your sect, you've been woefully faith-challenged of late. Venturesome, boundary-pushing works such as Spring Awakening, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Next to Normal closed too soon. American Idiot was shamefully ignored at the Tonys and will be gone in three weeks. Meanwhile, that airborne infection Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark dominates headlines and rakes in millions, without even opening. Celebrities and corporate brands sell poor material, innovation gets shown the door, and crap floats to the top. It's enough to turn you heretic, to sing along with The Book of Mormon's Ugandan villagers: "f*ck you God in the ass, mouth and c*nt-a, f*ck you in the eye."Such deeply penetrating lyrics offer a smidgen of the manifold scato-theological joys to be had at this viciously hilarious treat crafted by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park fame, and composer-lyricist Robert Lopez, who cowrote Avenue Q. As you laugh your head off at perky Latter-day Saints tap-dancing while fiercely repressing gay tendencies deep in the African bush, you will be transported back ten years, when The Producers and Urinetown resurrected American musical comedy, imbuing time-tested conventions with metatheatrical irreverence and a healthy dose of bad-taste humor. Brimming with cheerful obscenity, sharp satire and catchy tunes, The Book of Mormon is a sick mystic revelation, the most exuberantly entertaining Broadway musical in years.The high q

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanGreat expectations can be a problem when you’re seeing a Broadway show: You don’t always get what you hope for. It’s all too easy to expect great things when the show is a masterpiece like Cabaret: an exhilarating and ultimately chilling depiction of Berlin in the early 1930s that has been made into a classic movie and was revived exquisitely less than a decade ago. The risk of disappointment is even larger when the cast includes many actors you admire—led by Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee of the show’s decadent Kit Kat Club—and when the production arrives, as this one has, on a wave of raves from London. To guard against this problem, I made an active effort to lower my expectations before seeing the latest version of Cabaret. But my lowered expectations failed. They weren’t low enough.Cabaret | Photograph: Courtesy Marc BrennerSo it is in the spirit of helpfulness that I offer the following thoughts on expectation management to anyone planning to see the much-hyped and very pricey new Cabaret, which is currently selling out with the highest average ticket price on Broadway. There are things to enjoy in this production, to be sure, but they’re not necessarily the usual things. Don’t expect an emotionally compelling account of Joe Masteroff’s script (based on stories by Christopher Isherwood and John Van Druten’s nonmusical adaptation of them, I Am a Camera); this production’s focus is elsewhere. Don’t expect appealing versions of the songs in

This John Kander–Fred Ebb–Bob Fosse favorite, revived by director Walter Bobbie and choreographer Ann Reinking, tells the saga of chorus girl Roxie Hart, who murders her lover and, with the help of a huckster lawyer, becomes a vaudeville sensation. The cast frequently features guest celebrities in short stints.RECOMMENDED: Complete Guide to Chicago on Broadway

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanIt’s not easy being Strong. Licking his wounds in the aftermath of a divisive 2021 magazine profile of him, Succession star Jeremy Strong found that he could relate to the maligned and besieged hero of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 social drama An Enemy of the People: Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who discovers that the spa water in his small Norwegian resort town is polluted with deadly bacteria. “Doing Enemy of the People is my response to what I experienced from the New Yorker article,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview, noting that Ibsen wrote the play out of a sense of betrayal by people he trusted. “I’m an actor: I want to channel things that I feel into a piece of work, and that’s why I’m doing this play.”The actor’s aggrieved but steadfastself-imageis asuccesful match for his role in this engrossing new production. Stockmann’s refusal to back down from his findings, even though they could destroy the town’s economy, alienates him from the locals at every level: the managers, led by his stuffed-shirt brother, the mayor (Michael Imperioli, imperiously contemptuous); the industrialists, such as his ornery father-in-law (David Patrick Kelly); the tradesmen, embodied by the chair of the landowners association (a hilariously complacent Thomas Jay Ryan); and the working class, represented by the firebrand editor of a local socialist newspaper (Caleb Eberhardt). Only his daughter—played with luminous composure by Victoria Pedretti—is rel

Broadway reviewby Adam FeldmanThe Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses.The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Evan ZimmermanThe Great Gatsby often sounds great, too. Its lead actors, Jeremy Jordan as the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as his dream girl, Daisy Buchanan, have deluxe voices, and the score gives them plenty to sing. Jason Howland’s music dips into period pastiche for the group numbers—there are lots of them, set to caffeinated choreography by Dominique Kelley—but favors Miss Saigon levels of sweeping pop emotionality for the main lovers; the old-fashioned craft of Nathan Tysen’s lyrics sits comfortably, sometimes even cleverly, on the melodies.In other regards, this Gatsby is less great. Book writer Kait Kerrigan has taken some admirably ambitious swings in adapting material that has defeated many would-be adapters before her. She cuts much of Gatsby’s backstory, and m

Theater review by Adam FeldmanHere’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I meanHadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’sgracefully dynamicstaging—that bring this old story to quivering life.In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) falls for Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a busboy with an otherworldly high-tenor voice who is working, like Roger inRent, toward writing one perfect song. But dreams don’t pay the bills, so the desperate Eurydice—taunted by the Fates in three-part jazz harmony—opts to sell her soul to the underworldoverlord Hades (Patrick Page, intoning jaded come-ons in his unique sub-sepulchral growl, like a malevolent Leonard Cohen). Soon she is forced, by contract, into the ranks of the leather-clad grunts of Hades’s filthy factory city; if not actually dead, she is “dead to the world anyway.” This Hades is a drawling capitalistpatriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them in

Hamilton: Theater review by David CoteWhat is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words.Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening.Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching pamphle

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanReducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form. As though it had cast a Shrinking Charm on itself, the formerly two-part epic is now a single show, albeit a long one: Almost three and a half hours of stage wizardry, set 20 years after the end of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part book series and tied to a complicated time-travel plot about the sons of Harry Potter and hischildhood foe Draco Malfoy. (See below for a full review of the 2018 production.) Audiences who were put off by the previous version’s tricky schedule and double price should catch the magic now.Despite its shrinking, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has kept most of its charm. The spectacular set pieces of John Tiffany’s production remain—the staircase ballet, the underwater swimming scene, the gorgeous flying wraiths—but about a third of the former text has been excised. Some of the changes are surgical trims, and others are more substantial. The older characters take the brunt of the cuts (Harry’s flashback nightmares, for example, are completely gone); there is less texture to the conflicts between the fathers and sons, and the plotting sometimes feels more rushed than before.But the changes have the salutary effect of focusing the story on its most interesting new creations: the resentful Albus Potter (James Romney) and the unpopular Scorpius Malfoy (Brady Dalton Richards), whose bond has been reconceived in a s

Broadway review by Regina Robbins Broadway has been catching up with the News this season. The smoky-voiced, harmonica-playing Huey Lewis and his band racked up a dozen top-10 singles in the U.S. between 1982 and 1991, one of which—“The Power of Love”—was featured in 1985’s biggest movie, Back to the Future. A musical adaptation of that time-travel classic, which has been giving Broadway audiences a nostalgia fix since last summer, includes it alongside another song from the movie, “Back in Time.” Both songs are now also featured in The Heart of Rock and Roll, which goes all in on Lewis, using his catalog—singles and deep cuts, plus one song written for the show—to transport us to a hot-pink version of the 1980s, cheerfully unbesmirched by the Cold War, AIDS or cocaine.At a cardboard packaging company in Milwaukee, Bobby (Corey Cott) is a would-be rocker turned working stiff who channels his ambition into a 9-to-5 job. (Cue “Hip to Be Square.”) Determined to succeed at something, anything—unlike his father, a musician who died years ago—he’s gunning for promotion to the sales team. Also trying to prove herself is the boss’s daughter, Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz), a Princeton grad who crunches numbers but aspires to impress her father (John Dossett) in a leadership role. They may both get their chance at a trade convention in Chicago, where Owen Fjord (Orville Mendoza), a hotshot Swedish furniture mogul, will be the keynote speaker; making a deal with him would give the compan

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanHell’s Kitchen, whose score is drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys, could easily have gone down in flames. Jukebox musicals often do; songs that sound great on the radio can’t always pull their weight onstage. Butplaywright Kristoffer Diaz, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have found the right recipe for this show—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients—and they've cooked up aheck of ablock party.Loosely inspired by Keys’s life,Hell’s Kitchenhas the sensibly narrow scope of a short story. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon—in a stunningly assured debut—plays Ali, a beautiful but directionless mixed-race teenager growing up in midtown’s artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the 1990s, a period conjured winsomely and wittily by Dede Ayite’s costumes. The issues Ali faces are realistic ones: tensions with her protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean); disappointment with the charming musician father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), who yo-yos in and out of their lives; a crush on a thicc, slightly older street drummer, Knuck (Chris Lee); a desire to impress a stately pianist, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who lives in the building.Hell’s Kitchen | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. FranklinThe show’s chain of Keys songs is its most obvious selling point, but it could also have been a limitation. Musically, the tunes are not built for drama—they tend to sit in a leisurely R&B groove

Broadwayreview by Adam FeldmanThe revivals that Kenny Leon has directed on Broadway form something like a syllabus of modern African-American drama, from Loraine Hansberry to August Wilson to Suzan-Lori Parks. Last season, that project brought him to Purlie Victorious, in which a Black man travels to his birthplace in the South to reclaim his place there in triumph; now Leon follows it with a play in which a different rural homecoming seems less happy, at least at first. But don’t give up too fast: Home, after all, is where the heart is.Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles) is a broken man at the start of Samm-Art Williams’s play, which is now at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre. After a long exile—first in prison, then in a big city up north—Cephus is back in his not-so-subtly-named hometown of Cross Roads, North Carolina. In a rocking chair on the porch of his childhood home, he seems to have nowhere to go; his right hand has a tremor, and the noisy local kids think he’s a ghost. (Like all of the roles except Cephus, these taunting brats are played by the gifted duo of Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers, who move among dozens of characters with big swings of affect and voice.)But for Home, which debuted downtown in 1979 under the aegis of the Negro Ensemble Company before moving to a successful Broadway run the next year, Cephus’s weary return after many trials is not a defeat. Like Cephus himself, the play has an abiding faith in the eventual goodness of the Lord above—despite a

Director-designer Julie Taymor takes a reactionary Disney cartoon about the natural right of kings—in which the circle of life is putted against a queeny villain and his jive-talking ghetto pals—and transforms it into a gorgeous celebration of color and movement. The movie’s Elton John–Tim Rice score is expanded with African rhythm and music, and through elegant puppetry, Taymor populates the stage with an amazing menagerie of beasts; her audacious staging expands a simple cub into the pride of Broadway, not merely a fable of heredity but a celebration of heritage.RECOMMENDED: Guide to The Lion King on BroadwayMinskoff Theatre (Broadway). Music by Elton John. Lyrics by Tim Rice. Book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi. Directed by Julie Taymor. With ensemble cast. Running time: 2hrs 40mins. One intermission.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman“Nothing to do except wait,” explains Mary Jane (Rachel McAdams) to Amelia (Lily Santiago), a college student visiting her small Queens apartment. “I’m glad to have your company.” Mary Jane is a single mother with a severely disabled toddler named Alex; he is running a fever, and Amelia’s aunt Sherry (April Mathis), a nurse, is tending to him in the back room. Exactly what they might be waiting for is a question that hangs with gray menace in Amy Herzog’s exquisite and deeply moving Mary Jane: Alex is almost certainly not getting better, and even the best-case scenarios break your heart. Yet the play does not dwell in helplessness; it’s more interested in how people try to help. In addition to Mary Jane, there are eight other characters onstage. Mathis and Santiago reappear as, respectively, a doctor and a music therapist. Brenda Wehle is both Mary Jane’s sturdy superintendent and a Buddhist nun; Susan Pourfar plays two other mothers with disabled children. (The second, a blunt Hasidic woman, adds a welcome dash of comic relief.) There are no villains here, only people doing their best under sometimes crushing circ*mstances.Mary Jane | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyAll are rendered in lovely detail by Herzog and the five women of the cast, directed by Anne Kauffman with characteristic attention to the importance of offhand nuance. Information is revealed in a steady drip of medical jargon, bureaucratic obstacles and personal history; t

Broadwayreview by Adam FeldmanMerrily We Roll Alongis the femme fatale of Stephen Sondheim musicals, beautiful and troubled; people keep thinking they can fix it, rescue it, save it from itself and make it their own. In the decades since its disastrous 1981 premiere on Broadway, where it lasted just two weeks, the show has been revised and revived many times (including by the York in 1994, Encores! in 2012 and Fiasco in 2019). The challenges ofMerrilyare built into its core in a way that no production can fully overcome. But director Maria Friedman’s revival does a superb job—the best I’ve ever seen—of overlooking them, the way one might forgive the foibles of an old friend.As a showbiz-steeped investigation of the disillusionment that may accompany adulthood, Merrilyis a companion piece to Sondheim’sFollies, with which it shares a key line: “Never look back,” an imperative this show pointedly ignores. Adapted by George Furth from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the musical is structured in reverse. We first meet Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff) in 1976, when he is a former composer now leading a hollow life as a producer of Hollywood schlock; successive scenes move backward through the twisting paths on which he has lost both his ideals and his erstwhile best pals, playwright Charley (Daniel Radcliffe) and writer Mary (Lindsay Mendez). The final scene—chronologically, the first—finds them together on a rooftop in 1957, as yetregardless of their doom,

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanThe authorized biomusical MJ wants very much to freeze Michael Jackson in 1992: It’s a King of Pop-sical. The show begins on a note of truculent evasion. Jackson, played by the gifted Broadway newcomer Myles Frost, is in rehearsal for his Dangerous tour—a year before the superstar was first publicly accused of sexually abusing a minor—and the number they run is “Beat It,” a song about the importance of avoiding conflict. “Showin’ how funky strong is your fight,” sings Michael, prefiguring the musical’s approach to his life. “It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right.”When the song is done, Michael speaks with an MTV reporter (Whitney Bashor) who has landed a rare interview with him. “With respect, I wanna keep this about my music,” he says. “Is it really possible to separate your life from your music?” she asks, preempting a question on many minds, and his reply is a slice of “Tabloid Junkie”: “Just because you read it in a magazine / Or see it on a TV screen, don’t make it factual.” And that, more or less, is that. Expertly directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon,MJdoes about as well as possible within its careful brief. In and of itself, it is a deftly crafted jukebox nostalgia trip. Lynn Nottage’s script weaves together three dozen songs, mostly from the Jackson catalog. The music and the dancing are sensational. And isn’t that, the show suggests, really the point in the end? Doesn’t that beat all?MJis manifestly aimed at peopl

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanPaula Vogel has tapped into veins of autobiography throughout her distinguished career, and in her latest work she hits the big one: the mother lode. As its wryly categorical title suggests,Mother Playis an I-remember-mama drama in a time-honored mode; it carries a hint of resignation—as though it were in some sense an act of obligation, a rite through which every playwright must pass. And to drive home its place in the matrilineal succession, the play’s world premiere at Second Stage stars the supreme Jessica Lange, whose two most recent Broadway appearances were as the preeminent ghost moms of American drama: Amanda Wingfield inThe Glass Menagerieand Mary Tyrone inLong Day’s Journey Into Night.Mother Play’s Phylliscombines aspects of both. She’s an impoverished single mother from the South who tries to live up to outmoded standards (and spends a lot of time on the phone); she’s also an addict whose children must ultimately take care of her. A gin-swilling divorcée in thrift-store Chanel who mails dead bugs to her landlord with the rent, Phyllis is a real character—and a character openly based on the real Phyllis Vogel. The play is a slice of life, served raw. It’s a savage but grudgingly loving portrait of two women stuck together with blood: one who never wanted to be a mother, and one who never chose to be her daughter. “It is never over,” as Phyllis says. “It’s a life sentence.”Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions | Photograph:

Theater review by Adam FeldmanRed alert! Red alert! If you’re the kind of person who frets that jukebox musicals are taking over Broadway, prepare to tilt at the windmill that is the gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffedMoulin Rouge! The Musical. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers, this adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.The place is the legendary Paris nightclub of the title, and the year is ostensibly 1899. Yet the songs—like Catherine Zuber’s eye-popping costumes—span some 150 years of styles.Moulin Rouge!begins with a generous slathering of “Lady Marmalade,” belted to the skies by four women in sexy black lingerie, long velvet gloves and feathered headdresses. Soon they yield the stage to the beautiful courtesan Satine (a sublimely troubled Karen Olivo), who makes her grand entrance descending from the ceiling on a swing, singing “Diamonds Are Forever.” She is the Moulin Rouge’s principal songbird, andDerek McLane’s sumptuous gold-and-red setlooms around her like a gilded cage.After falling in with a bohemian crowd, Christian (the boyish Aaron Tveit), a budding songwriter from small-town Ohio, wanders into the Moulin Rouge like Orpheus in the demimonde, his cheeks as rosy with innocence as the showgirls’ are blushed with maquillage. As cruel fate would have it, he instantly falls in love with Satine, and she with him—but she has been promised, alas, to the wicked Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu)

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanHere comes the rain again. Fans of the 2004 movieThe Notebookwill remember its most famous scene: After gathering steam for years, the romance between Noah and Alliecondenses into a downpour, and their drenched bodies fuse together in a passionate embrace. Not since the Bible, perhaps, has a Noah taken better advantage of a deluge.Ingrid Michaelson and Bekah Brunstetter’s Broadway version of Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel (the first of several musicals this season adapted from books that became films) takes pains to get this moment right, and it does. Rain descends in sheets from above, Noah and Allie come through in a clinch, and a significant portion of the audience swoons. A little of the water even splashes onto spectators in the front row; this is a show that wants to make people wet. ThatThe Notebooksucceeds to the extent that it does—at the performance I attended, multiple people were moved to tears by the musical’s final scenes—is a testament to the power of the familiar, and of talented actors to make it seem new.In the movie, Noah and Allie are played at different ages by two pairs of actors; in the musical, there are three pairs of actors, and their stories are interwoven less chronologically. Younger Noah (John Cardoza) and Younger Aliie (Jordan Tyson) fall in love as teenagers but are separated by fate and meddling parents; Middle Noah (Ryan Vasquez) and Middle Allie (Joy Woods) reunite a decade later. We learn of them as O

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanDeep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa—the poor, scrappy Greasers and the rich, mean Socs (short for socialites)—has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage, just as it did in the most recent Broadway revival of West Side Story. The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other.This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers. But it may also be significant that the rumble contains no dialogue or songs. Elsewhere, despite some lovely music and several strong performances, The Outsiders tends to attenuate the characters and situations it draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation. Action, in this show, speaks better than words.The Outsiders | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyLike Hinton’s novel, which she wrote when she was a teenager herself, The Outsiders is narrated by the 14-year-old Po

Broadway review by Raven Snook"In the West you think of Russia as a cold, bleak place," says Boris Berezovsky, the late mathematician turned oligarch turned enemy of the Russian state, in the opening scene of Peter Morgan's Patriots. The same could be said for the first half of Morgan’s unsatisfying new modern-history play, which explores how Berezovsky helped bring Vladimir Putin to power—a miscalculation that leads to his personal and political ruin. The first act is jam-packed with exposition, so director Rupert Goold stages the introductory scenes as farce. But even as Berezovsky, played by an indefatigable Michael Stuhlbarg, juggles business with bullying (via phone calls with his cronies, his kid and his teenage courtesan), the action feels sluggish. The narrative hops around in time as minor characters run up and down the stairs of Miriam Buether's chilly set, and cycle in and out of an imposing door that leads to the corridors of power.Patriots | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew MurphyAs Morgan arranges the facts to serve his Shakespearean ambitions, there’s a lot to keep track of: bombs, betrayals, backroom deals. But it feels exhausting, not exhilarating. It’s when Berezovsky decides to play kingmaker with ex-KGBer and local government lackey Putin (Will Keen, who originated his role in London) that the drama finally kicks in. Act II opens with a hilarious tableau of Berezovsky partying in the Caribbean after Putin becomes President, but his celebration is short-l

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanWho doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? The zingy Broadway musicalSixcelebrates, in boisterous fashion, the union of English dynastic history and modern pop music. On a mock concert stage, backed by an all-female band, the six wives of the 16th-century monarch Henry VIII air their grievances in song, and most of them have plenty to complain about: two were beheaded, two were divorced, one died soon after childbirth. In this self-described “histo-remix,” members of the long-suffering sextet spin their pain into bops; the queens sing their heads off and the audience loses its mind.That may be for the best, becauseSixis not a show that bears too much thinking about. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss wrote it when they were still students at Cambridge University, and it has the feel of a very entertaining senior showcase. Its 80 minutes are stuffed with clever turns of rhyme and catchy pastiche melodies that let mega-voiced singers toss off impressive “riffs to ruffle your ruffs.”The show's own riffs on historyare educational, too, like a cheeky new British edition ofSchoolhouse Rock. If all these hors d’oeuvres don’t quite add up to a meal, they are undeniably tasty.Aside from the opening number and finale and one detour intoSprockets–style German club dancing,Sixis devoted to giving each of the queens—let’s call them the Slice Girls—one moment apiece in the spotlight, decked out in glittering jewel-encrusted outfits by Gabriella Slade that are Tu

Broadwayreview by Adam FeldmanDavid Adjmi’s intimately epic behind-the-music dramaStereophonichas now moved to Broadway after a hit fall run at Playwrights Horizons. At the smaller venue, the audience felt almost immersed in the room where the show takes place: a wood-paneled 1970s recording studio—decked out by set designer David Zinn as a plush vision of brown, orange, mustard, sage and rust—where a rock band is trying to perfect what could be its definitive album. Some fans of the play have wondered if it could work as well on a larger stage, but that question has a happy answer: Daniel Aukin’s superb production navigates the change without missing a beat. The jam has been preserved.With the greater sense of distance provided at the Golden Theatre,Stereophonicfeels more than ever like watching a wide-screen film from the heyday of Robert Altman, complete with excellent ensemble cast, overlapping dialogue and a generous running time: Adjmi divides the play into four acts, which take more than three hours to unfold. This length is essential in conveying the sprawl of a recording process that goes on far longer than anyone involved had planned, but the play itself never drags. As the band cracks up along artistic, romantic and pharmaceutical fault lines—fueled by a constant flow of booze, weed and co*ke, often late into the night—we follow along, riveted by the details and the music that emerges from them. There’s nary a false note.Stereophonic | Photograph: Courtes

Broadway review by Regina RobbinsWhen the women’s-rights activist Alice Paul, the central figure of Shaina Taub’s musical Suffs, starts planning a march down Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration, a fellow protester volunteers to ride a white horse at the head of the procession. Paul and others are skeptical: With everything else on their plates, who has time to find a horse? But when the day arrives, their comrade does lead the demonstration astride a white steed—an amusing and historically accurate flourish in an otherwise earnest scene. This early triumph for the suffragists, however, is followed by a steep uphill climb toward the passage of the 19th Amendment. Their struggle is compounded by political and personal conflicts among women divided by age, race and class; alliances are strained, friendships are tested and blood is spilled for the cause of equality. When the curtain comes down for intermission, the returning image of that young woman on horseback may now put a lump in your throat.Suffs | Photograph: Courtesy Joan MarcusAfterpremiering at the Public Theatre in 2022,Suffsnow marches to Broadway with its intrepid director, Leigh Silverman, still leading the way, and most of its principal cast intact: Writer-composer-lyricist Taub makes her Broadway debut as Paul; the invaluable Jenn Colella is Carrie Chapman Catt, the reigninggrande dameof the suffrage movement, and Nikki M. James is the civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells. These p

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanThe fraying country estate where Uncle Vanya unfolds is peopled, in the main, by thwarted souls. Its characters wallow in regret, especially the loveless Vanya (Steve Carell). He has sacrificed his money and time, and what he believes to have been his great potential—”I could have been a Schopenhauer, or a Dostoevsky,” he sputters—to support his pompous brother-in-law, Alexander (Alfred Molina), an academic who once enjoyed a great reputation. But now, in middle age, Vanya feels that his reverence for the professor was misplaced. His dutiful work has taken him nowhere, and now he has nowhere to go.Uncle Vanya is set in Russia at the end of the 19th century, but it is perhaps the Chekhov play that feels closest to 21st-century sensibilities, and it is sometimes strikingly prescient of today’s concerns: Vanya’s doctor friend Astrov (William Jackson Harper), for example, is an environmentalist who plants trees to replace those mowed down by industrial loggers, and his artwork paints a worrisome picture of impending “total obliteration.” It’s relatable. There is logic, then, to the decision to dispense with fidelity to Chekhov’s period and update the play to a contemporary setting for Lincoln Center Theater's new production, adapted by Heidi Schreck and directed by Lila Neugebauer. To some extent, the gambit succeeds: Many of the production’s most pleasurable moments are connected to this modernization. But it’s also, I think, where the producti

Broadway review by Adam FeldmanStep right up, come one, come all, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up to the greatest—well, okay, not the greatest show on Broadway, but a dang fine show nonetheless. Although Water for Elephants is set at a circus, and includes several moments of thrilling spectacle, what makes it so appealing is its modesty, not glitz. Like the story’s one-ring Benzini Brothers Circus, a scrappy company touring the country in the early years of the Depression, this original musical knows it’s not the ritziest show on the circuit. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in wonder, and it’s pretty wonderful at making things up.Water for Elephants has a book by Rick Elice, who wrote the delightful stage version of Peter and the Starcatcher, and songs by the seven-man collective PigPen Theatre Co., which specializes in dark-edged musical story theater. This team knows how to craft magic moments out of spare parts, and so does director Jessica Stone, who steered Kimberly Akimbo to Broadway last season. Together—and with a mighty hand from circus expert Shana Carroll, of the Montreal cirque troupe the 7 Fingers—they have found the right tone for this adaptation of Sara Gruen’s 2006 romance novel, which operates on the level of a fairy tale.The plot is basic. The impoverished Jake Jankowski (The Flash's Grant Gustin), a sensitive and floppy-haired fellow, is forced by family tragedy to drop out of his Ivy League veterinary school. With nothing

Broadway review by Adam Feldman“I’m a sensation!” declares the title character of The Who’s Tommy when, as a 10-year-old boy, he first stands before a pinball machine. We hear this feeling through narration sung by the grown-up version of Tommy (Ali Louis Bourzgui), because the child version is mute; in a psychosomatic reaction to trauma years earlier, he has become a “deaf dumb and blind kid,” albeit one with an astonishing gift for racking up points in arcades. It may be hard for the audience to relate to Tommy, who spends most of the show in the expressionless mien of a child mannequin. The sensation we experience in the trippy nostalgia of this 1993 musical’s Broadway revival is closer to that of a pinball: batted and bounced from one flashy moment to the next in a production that buzzes and rings with activity.Tommy is based, of course,on the 1969 concept album that Pete Townshend wrote for his band, the Who. The plot of this rock opera is not entirely clear just from listening, so the stage musical—adapted by Townshend with director Des McAnuff—reorganizes a few of the songs and fills out the story in a different way than Ken Russell’s outré 1975 film did. During the overture, we see Tommy’s father (Adam Jacobs), an officer in the Royal Air Force, get captured by the German soldiers. (Between this, Harmony, Lempicka, Cabaret and White Rose, it’s quite a year for Nazis in musicals.) When Captain Walker returns to his wife (the very fine Alison Luff), he winds up kil

This musical prequel toThe Wizard of Ozaddresses surprisingly complex themes, such as standards of beauty, morality and, believe it or not, fighting fascism. Thanks to Winnie Holzman’s witty book and Stephen Schwartz’s pop-inflected score,Wickedsoars. The current cast includesLindsay Pearce as Elphaba and Ginna Claire Mason as Glinda.

Nearly half a century after its original Broadway production, William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls's groovy Black spin on The Wizard of Oz eases down the road once more in a revival directed by Schele Williams (who is also co-directingThe Notebook this season). Newcomer Nichelle Lewis stars as Dorothy, and Kyle Ramar Freeman, Phillip Johnson Richardson and Avery Wilson are her travel companions; Deborah Cox and Melody A. Betts play the witches, and improv wizard Wayne Brady has the slick title role. JaQuel Knight (of “Single Ladies” fame)is the choreographer, and comedian Amber Ruffin peps up the script with new material.

Get details, reviews and tickets for the best shows on Broadway and off, as chosen by Time Out New York’s critics