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The Lion King
Photograph: Courtesy Joan MarcusThe Lion King

Complete A-Z listing of Broadway shows in NYC

Want to see a Broadway show in NYC? Here’s the complete list of plays, musicals and revivals running now.

Adam Feldman
Written by
Adam Feldman
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David Cote
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Broadway shows are practically synonymous with New York City, and the word Broadway is often used as shorthand for theater itself. Visiting the Great White Way means attending one of 41 large theaters concentrated in the vicinity of Times Square, most of which seat more than 1,000 people. The most popular Broadway shows tend to be musicals, from long-running favorites like The Lion King and Hamilton to more recent hits like Hadestown and Moulin Rouge!—but new plays and revivals also represent an important part of the Broadway experience. There’s a wide variety of Broadway shows out there, as our complete A–Z listing attests. And for a full list of shows that are coming soon, check out our complete list of upcoming Broadway shows.

RECOMMENDED: Find the best Broadway shows

Broadway shows A–Z

Aladdin
  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Aladdin: In brief Disney 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 Feldman What 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

  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

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-century housewife 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

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In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's dark comedy, which made its NYC debut at the Signature back in 2014, scattered members of an estranged Arkansas family return to their late patriarch's plantation to sort through the detritus and long-suppressed stories of multiple generations. Ryan Murphy muse Sarah Paulson stars in Second Stage's Broadway production, which is directed by Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery); the cast also prominently includes Corey Stoll, Michael Esper, Elle Fanning and Natalie Gold.

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  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Attending 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 was a 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 Zimmerman What 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

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  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  From 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,

  • 5 out of 5 stars
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  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

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: "Fuck you God in the ass, mouth and cunt-a, fuck 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

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  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

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

  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
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Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Days of Wine and Roses, a musical treatment of alcoholism, raises a toast that ends in shattered glass. “Magic time” is what Joe (Brian d’Arcy James) calls drinking, and soon he has Kirsten (Kelli O’Hara) caught up in its spell. He’s a Korean War vet who works in the shadier nooks of public relations in the 1950s, greasing the social wheels for his superiors; she’s his boss’s pretty secretary, fresh from the farm and eager for danger. He teaches her to drink—she’s a quick learner—and at first the bottle’s genie grants their wishes: happiness, love, professional success. But beware the gifts of spirits.  Days of Wine and Roses reunites composer Adam Guettel with playwright Craig Lucas; as in their previous collaboration, 2005’s The Light in the Piazza, the result is ambitious, artful and musically sophisticated. But whereas Piazza delivers a sweeping romantic breadth of Florentine airs, this piece is more intimate and interior in scope, at times claustrophobic. Joe and Kirsten are very nearly the only people in this 105-minute musical who sing at all—their daughter (Tabitha Lawing) has a few lines in the second half—in keeping with the increasingly small world they share. “What about our secret language?” she wails, betrayed, when he decides to go sober. “Who will I talk to?”  Days of Wine and Roses | Photograph: Joan Marcus Guettel’s score has the feel of a chamber opera. For moments of drunken euphoria, it dabbles in cocktail jazz: Passages

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown West

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and as strong as certainty,” preaches the charismatic Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) in the sermon that begins John Patrick Shanley’s gripping 2005 drama Doubt: A Parable. The forward-thinking priest teaches religion and physical education at a Bronx elementary school in 1964, and his speech may or may not reflect unspeakable personal struggles. Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan), the school’s disciplinarian principal, is convinced that Flynn has sexually abused a 12-year-old boy named Donald, her first black student. When a younger teacher, the malleable Sister James (Zoe Kazan), waffles about his guilt, Aloysius scolds her naiveté: “Innocence could only be wisdom in a world without sin.”  But is suspicion, based largely on intuition, any better? In refusing innocence, is this nun the wiser? For Sister Aloysius, a staunchly conservative Catholic, the responsibility to protect a child from violation—even by moving from vigilant to vigilante, outside the Church’s patriarchal chain of command—is a pious calling, despite conflicting with her vows. “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you move away from God,” she says, “but in His service.”  On its surface, Doubt is an odd kind of mystery, less a whodunit than a wasitdunnatall. More profoundly, it’s an epistemological mystery play, religious not merely in setting but in theme: an interrogation of faith itself, of choosing what to believe for reasons beyond evidence.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
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Broadway review by Adam Feldman  It’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 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 steadfast self-image is a succesful 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 reliab

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, 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’s gracefully dynamic staging—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 in Rent, 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 underworld overlord 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 capitalist patriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them in

Hamilton
  • 5 out of 5 stars
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  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What 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

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
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  • Drama
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Reducio! 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 his childhood 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

  • 5 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Sixteen is not sweet for the heroine of the bruisingly joyful new musical Kimberly Akimbo. Adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own 2001 play, with music by Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change), the show has a central conceit that verges on magical realism: Kimberly Levaco suffers from an unnamed, “incredibly rare” genetic disorder that makes her age at a superfast rate. Played by the 63-year-old Victoria Clark, she is physically and psychically out of place among her high school peers, who have more conventional adolescent problems like unrequited crushes. “Getting older is my affliction,” the usually mild-mannered Kimberly sings in a rare burst of confrontation. “Getting older is your cure.”   Life at home in New Jersey with her boozy, incompetently protective father (Steven Boyer) and her pregnant, hypochondriacal and self-absorbed mother (Alli Mauzey) is even less appealing. But as Kimberly stares into a cruelly foreshortened future—the life expectancy for people with her illness is, yes, 16—two agents of disruption reframe her perspective. The first is her aunt Debra (the unstoppable Bonnie Milligan), a hilarious gale force of chaos who blows into town and quickly recruits her niece into an elaborate check-fraud scheme. The other is Seth (the winsome and natural Justin Cooley), a gentle, tuba-playing classmate with an affinity for anagrams that suggests, to Kimberly, that maybe he could shake her up and rearrange her too. Kimberly Aki

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Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown) directs Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould's original biomusical portrait of the Polish-American Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, whose adventurous life spanned most of the tumultuous 20th century. Powerhouse vocalist Eden Espinosa plays the title role, and Raja Feather Kelly is the choreographer; the cast also includes Amber Iman, Andrew Samonsky, George Abud, Natalie Joy Johnson, Zoe Glick, Nathaniel Stampley and Beth Leavel.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

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 Broadway  Minskoff 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.

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
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  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown West

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Merrily We Roll Along is 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 of Merrily are 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, Merrily is a companion piece to Sondheim’s Follies, 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 yet regardless of their doom,

  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
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Broadway review by Adam Feldman The 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, MJ does 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? MJ is manifestly aimed at peopl

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • price 4 of 4
  • Hell's KitchenOpen run

Theater review by Adam Feldman Red 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 overstuffed Moulin 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, and Derek McLane’s sumptuous gold-and-red set looms 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)

  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Here comes the rain again. Fans of the 2004 movie The Notebook will remember its most famous scene: After gathering steam for years, the romance between Noah and Allie condenses 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. That The Notebook succeeds 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

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Greaser's the word for the young Tulsa toughs in this musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton's seminal 1967 young-adult novel and Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film version of it. Music supervisor Justin Levine (Moulin Rouge!) also cowrote the script with Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter) and the score with the folk duo Jamestown Revival. Like Coppola's movie—which launched the careers of C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez—the stage production, directed by Danya Taymor (Pass Over), features a cast of unfamous actors, mostly in their Broadway debuts.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Who doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? The zingy Broadway musical Six celebrates, 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, because Six is 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 history are educational, too, like a cheeky new British edition of Schoolhouse 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 into Sprockets–style German club dancing, Six is 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

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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Broadway review by Adam Feldman In the extremely funny 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the British comedy troupe’s lampoon of Arthurian legend, there is only one fully fledged musical number: a cutaway to the roundly ludicrous knights of Camelot, who dance in armored kicklines and describe themselves in such ridiculous rhymes as “We sing from the diaphragm a lot” and “We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot.” The very thought of it prompts the questing King Arthur to question his plans. “On second thought, let's not go to Camelot,” he decides. “It is a silly place.” Cut to the 2005 musical Spamalot, which expands the spirit of that 65-second sequence into a two-act Broadway show. It is a silly piece. Adapted by Eric Idle from the Holy Grail screenplay—with help from composer John Du Prez, and a handful of loaners from other Python sources (notably the Life of Brian song “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life”)—this tongue-in-cheeky pageant still tells the episodic story of King Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart) and his entourage in search of a vaunted relic. But jokes about medieval legend now take a back seat to metatheatrical tomfoolery about musical theater as a genre. Winking at Broadway conventions in a succession of zanily oversold numbers, it is essentially an ongoing parody of itself—so much so that when Gerard Allesandrini spoofed Spamalot for his Forbidden Broadway series, he simply had his actors perform an actual song from the show, “The Song That Goes Like Th

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Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster are now playing the leading roles.] Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 Sweeney Todd may well be the greatest of all Broadway musicals: an epic combination of disparate ingredients—horror and humor, cynicism and sentiment, melodrama and sophisticated wit—with a central core of grounded, meaty humanity. But while the show’s quality is baked into the writing, portion sizes in recent years have varied. Sweeney Todd’s scope makes it expensive to stage; its 1989 and 2005 Broadway revivals (and the immersive 2017 Off Broadway incarnation) presented the show with greatly reduced casts and orchestrations. Not so for the thrilling version now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail: This production features a 26-piece orchestra and a cast of 25 led by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. It’s a feast for the ears.  Groban plays the title role: a Victorian barber, né Benjamin Barker, who returns to London after serving 15 years of hard labor for a crime he didn’t commit, hoping to reunite with his beloved wife, Lucy, and their young daughter, Johanna. But as he learns from his practical neighbor Mrs. Lovett (Ashford)—who operates the squalid meat-pie shop below his old tonsorial parlor—Lucy poisoned herself after being assaulted by the same lecherous judge (Jamie Jackson) who sent him away, who is now the guardian of the teenage Johanna (Maria Bilb

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Grant Gustin (The Flash) plays a young man who runs away to join the circus in an original musical based on Sara Gruen's 2006 bestseller. Adapted by Rick Elice (Peter and the Starcatcher) and featuring a score by the fanciful collective PigPen Theater Co., the show blends musical theater with puppetry and circus performance (overseen by Shana Carroll, of the exceptional Montreal neocirque troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main). Jessica Stone (Kimberly Akimbo) directs a cast that also includes Isabelle McCalla, Paul Alexander Nolan, Stan Brown, Joe De Paul, Sara Gettelfinger, Wade McCollum and Broadway lifer Gregg Edelman.

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Des McAnuff directed the original Broadway production of the Who's 1969 rock opera, which he adapted for the stage with its composer, Pete Townsend. Now, more than 30 years later, he revisits the story in an all-new production that stars Ali Louis Bourzgui in the title role of a traumatized Helen Keller–like boy who becomes a sensational at pinball. The supporting cast comprises John Ambrosino, Bobby Conte, Adam Jacobs, Alison Luff and Christina Sajous.  

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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This musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz addresses 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, Wicked soars. The current cast includes Lindsay Pearce as Elphaba and Ginna Claire Mason as Glinda.

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