The top Broadway and off broadway musicals in NYC: complete A-Z list

Disney's latest toon tuner is a tourist-family–friendly theme-park attraction, robed in the billowing fabrics of orientalist Arabian fantasy. As in the 1992 film, the Genie (a charismatic James Monroe Iglehart) steals the show from its eponymous “street rat” hero (Adam Jacobs). Stuffed with glitz, the musical is a carpet with little texture but colorful patterns aplenty.—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-century housewife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) imparts to her husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), as a way to improve his play Romeo and Juliet. It is also the ethos of the new Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet, a quasi-Elizabethan romp through the many pop megahits of the Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin. This show is what it is: It gives you the hooks and it gets the ovations.—Adam Feldman

Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, Boop! is an old-fashioned candy shop of a show, where tasty confections are sold in bulk. Gorge on its candy corn, chew on its high-energy production numbers and, above all, savor this show’s red-hot cinnamon heart: Jasmine Amy Rogers, making a sensational Broadway debut as the titular 1930s animated-short icon, transported through clever design from her own dimension to an only marginally less cartoonish version of modern-day New York. The show delivers what it promises: a big Broadway production that leaves you grinning, and a star performer with the poise, charm and chops to make you believe that what the world needs now might be, of all things, a little more Betty Boop.—Adam Feldman

Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway: To attend this show—Marco Ramirez's fictionalized account of the smash 1997 album that assembled elderly musicians to recreate the music of prerevolutionary Havana—is to enter a world that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know about it already. While you’re there, though, don’t think too hard. Just give yourself over to the atmosphere of the production (which is directed by Saheem Ali and choreographed gorgeously by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck), and especially to the thrilling sounds that pour out from the stage.—Adam Feldman

Eddie Redmayne returns to Broadway as the sinister Emcee of a Weimar Era nightclub in another revival of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff's exhilarating, harrowing 1967 masterpiece. This London import—directed by Rebecca Frecknall and designed by Tom Scutt—emphasizes the material's sordid underbelly in an environmental staging: The August Wilson Theatre will be extensively reconfigured into an in-the-round space, and audience members with money to spare can buy special packages that include preshow dining and drinks. Gayle Rankin, who memorably appeared in the last revival, now costars as the desperate Sally Bowles; Steven Skybell, Ato Blankson-Wood, Natascia Diaz, Henry Gottfried and the delectably tart Bebe Neuwirth.

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 star.—David Cote

This darkly hilarious picaresque musical tells the weirder-than-fiction true story of Elmer McCurdy, a restless criminal who wanted to be somebody but wound up as just some body: a mummified corpse that traveled the nation as a sideshow display before getting painted red for use as an prop in an amusement-park ride. Playwright Itamar Moses and songwriters David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna turn this curiosity into a rollicking look at life, death and fame in America. The protean cast is led by Jeb Brown as the rascally Bandleader and Andrew Durand as McCurdy, whose staggeringly still body stays onstage as a memento mori long after he dies in 1911. That same commitment extends to the whole production: The writing is piquant and sly, the songs have verve and resonance, and David Cromer’s direction blends whimsy with morbid rigor.—Adam Feldman

There’s a big twist at the end of the first act; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. Those are just two of the injuries that two old frenemies inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about the quest for eternal youth. Adapted by Marco Pennette, Julia Mattison and Noel Carey from the 1992 film, and directed by Christopher Gattelli, the show is a catty, campy delight. The terrific Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, two of Broadway’s most gifted musical comedians, make musical-comedy magic together—and musical comedy, when performed this well, never gets old.—Adam Feldman

Jeremy Jordan was most recently seen on Broadway as the star of The Great Gatsby. Now he takes on a radically different 1920s title character: a Kentucky spelunker who became a national sensation when he got trapped underground in what is now Mammoth Cave National Park. More than a quarter century after its Off Broadway premiere, this ambitious cult-favorite musical—with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza) and a book by Tina Landau—finally makes its Broadway debut. Landau, who is also helming Redwood this season, directs the Lincoln Center production; the supporting cast includes Jason Gotay, Lizzy McAlpine, Marc Kudisch and Jessica Molaskey as Floyd's family members, Taylor Trensch as a reporter on the scene, and Wade McCollum, Sean Allan Krill and Cole Vaughan as worried locals.