Current Broadway Shows in NYC: The Complete A-Z List

Disney's cartoon-to-musical project is the tale of a boy, an uncorked spirit and an aerodynamic rug. Composer Alan Menken added new tunes to the 1992 original soundtrack, and Chad Beguelin provided a fresh book. 

The Vibe: A tricked-out, tourist-friendly theme-park attraction
Highlight: The high-energy, hilarious Genie
Best for: Families and first-time theatergoers
Read the full review here

This quasi-Elizabethan romp through the chart-toppers of Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin is a feast for Millennials. The lovestruck Veronese teenager Juliet no longer offs herself, but finds herself instead. After mourning her dead Romeo in a keening version of "...Baby One More Time," she rounds up her entourage—her West Indian nurse, Angélique, her ambisexual bestie, May, and another friend, April—and heads to Paris, France, to take another shot at love. There they meet a rich military eminence named Lance (the game operatic baritone in a fleur-de-lys codpiece) and his gawky son, François, who becomes the inadvertent side of a romantic triangle.

The Vibe: Bubblegum pop
Highlight: Soutra Gilmour’s scenic design and Paloma Young’s costumes are delightfully creative transhistorical mix-and-matches that float the show in a swirl of unfixed fantasy
Best for: Millennial girly pops
Read the full review here

In this long-running musical comedy, two idealistic young Mormons—one shiny and driven, the other an insecure loser—get in way over their heads on a mission to Uganda. The show is as irreverent and hilarious as you'd expect from its creators: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the pair behind South Park, and Robert Lopez, who cowrote the score for Avenue Q. Many of the songs are very funny, and co-directors Parker and Casey Nicholaw know how to land the jokes. But what's kept the show running since 2011 is the sweetness behind its dark shock humor about warlords, famine and AIDS. Even as it pokes fun at true believers, it retains a basic faith in human goodness.

The Vibe: Exuberant bad-taste comedy with heart
Highlight: The power ballad "I Believe," which exalts some of the Mormon faith's most dubious aspects with the soaring fervor of Starlight Express's "I Am the Starlight"
Best for: Guys with a comic mean streak
Read the full review here

Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway. The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with flashbacks to younger versions of the same characters nearly 40 years earlier.

The Vibe: A tropical getaway set to an excellent soundscape
Highlight: Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s gorgeously fluid and individuated choreography
Best for: Audiophiles and fans of the album
Read the full review here

This thrilling reconception of Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot's musical not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it to unexpected heights. Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch embrace the musical’s inherent strangeness by absorbing it into queerness: The show’s secret ball for cats is now a ballroom runway competition of the kind recently visited by TV’s Pose and Legendary. This concept—let’s call it Paris Is Purring—is ideal for the musical’s revue-like structure, and the show’s wispy plot is clearer than it has ever been; the fur truly flies.

The Vibe: Joyful ballroom realness
Highlight: Original Cats: André De Shields, Chasity Moore, Sydney James Harcourt, Dudney Joseph Jr., Robert “Silk” Mason, Emma Sofia and ballroom elder Junior LaBeija
Best for: LGBTQ+ community and allies; dance fanatics
Read the full review here

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.

The Vibe: Minimalist '20s cabaret
Highlight: The production regularly rotates in new Roxies, so keep an eye out for who is on!
Best for: Fosse fans
Read more about the show here

Two of the very brightest lights on the marquee of modern stage stars—Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf—star as Willy and Linda Loman in another revival of Arthur Miller's 1949 working-stiff tragedy, the third to hit Broadway in the past 15 years. Linda Loman has put out a call of duty to her sons, Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers), who have neglected their father's slide into depression and dementia. Miller never tells us what Willy has been selling on his long road trips for 36 years, but it’s clear he has no business doing it anymore, if indeed he ever did. “I don’t say he’s a great man,” she allows. “But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

Note: The show is on through August 9

The Vibe: Bleak, psychic dreamspace
Highlight: The stacked cast, including Tony Award-winner Laurie Metcalf, Nathan Lane, Christopher Abbott, Ben "Clock Twink" Ahlers, Jonathan Cake and K. Todd Friedman and Jake Silbermann
Best for: Those looking for the best adaptation of the play
Read the full review here

Tracee Ellis Ross (Black-ish) currently stars in Duncan Macmillan's interactive dark comedy about a British person who makes lists of the world's good things, both to ease their mum's depression and to ward off their own. The show ran Off Broadway in 2014 with Jonny Donahoe, who also contributed to the script; this version is co-directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin (Wolf Hall).

Note: The show is playing through August 9

The Vibe: Darkly funny
Highlight: The star's interactions with the audience are peppered with charming improvisation.
Best for: Audience participation
Read the full review here

This adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, brings us back to the Roaring Twenties with caffeinated choreography and pop emotionality. Bondsman Nick Carraway moves to West Egg next the super-rich, but newly moneyed Jay Gatsby Gatsby, who recruits his help to reunite him with Nick's unhappily married cousin Daisy. While Nick and Jordan Baker get to know one another, Gatsby and Daisy rekindle their love. Tragedy ensues.

The Vibe: Glitz and glamor
Highlight: The set is eye candy
Best for: Fans of Eva Noblezada and Reeve Carney, who currently play Daisy and Gatsby
Read the full review here

In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice falls for Orpheus, 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. 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. Meanwhile, Hades’s miserable, tippling trophy queen, Persephone, yearns for the greener pastures of her youth.

The Vibe: Soulful and smoky New Orleans
Highlight: The Grammy-winning score
Best for: Greek myth nerds and jazz hounds
Read the full review here

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 pamphlet. All that industry and drama unfolds in the shadow of a forgone conclusion: Hamilton will die in an 1804 duel with Vice President Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), a longtime rival and, in this Shakespearean reading, his tragic opposite. Whereas Hamilton is about seizing the moment and taking a stand (“I am not throwing away my shot” is his mantra), Burr is a passive, taciturn opportunist whom life passes by.

The Vibe: Polyphonic block-party 
Highlight: Its lyrical brilliance
Best for: History nerds and hip-hop enthusiasts
Read the full review here

Set two decades after the final chapters of J.K. Rowling’s world-shaking kid-lit heptalogy, the two-part epic Harry Potter and the Cursed Child combines grand storytelling with stagecraft on a scale heretofore unimagined. Richly elaborated by director John Tiffany, Harry is weighted with trauma dating back to his childhood, which hinders his ability to communicate with his troubled middle son, Albus; it doesn’t help that Albus’s only friend is the bookish outcast Scorpius Malfoy, son of Harry’s erstwhile enemy, Draco. Despite the best intentions of Harry’s solid wife, Ginny, and his friends Hermione and Ron, things turn dark very fast.

The Vibe: Magical family drama
Highlight: The special effects
Best for: Potterheads
Read the full review here

Director-designer Julie Taymor’s visionary reimagining of Disney’s animated movie is an expedition through gorgeous new terrain. The parts of the show involving comic relief remain tethered to a theme-park aesthetic, but the production is otherwise remarkably beautiful. Through elegant puppetry and stagecraft, Taymor populates the stage with a menagerie of beasts, and surrounds the movie’s mythic plot and Elton John–Tim Rice score with African rhythm and music. Decades after its 1998 premiere, the show is still delighting kids and adults alike; Taymor's staging has expanded a simple cub into the pride of Broadway.

The Vibe: Uplifting family dramedy
Highlight: Taymor's puppetry
Best for: Families and Disney fans

The rebellious, motorcycle-riding Michael (LJ Benet) and his comic book-loving younger and dorkier brother Sam (Benjamin Pajak) moves to Santa Carla with their newly single mother, Lucy (Shoshana Bean). What they don’t know is that this sunny fictional beach town is “the murder capital of the world,” thanks to another group of lost boys: a quartet of undead bloodsuckers led by the platinum-blond David (Ali Louis Bourzgui). In the movie, Michael is tricked into becoming a vampire; in the musical he joins them by choice. Michael is not seeking power; what he really wants is to “surrender control,” because he’s on the run from something monstrous inside himself—an aftershock of the abuse he suffered from his father. And David is drawn to him, in part, because he has his own bad history with a father; there is new depth to the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the two men, as triangulated via Star (Maria Wirries), a young singer torn between them.

The Vibe: Campy and vampy
Highlight: All the vampires flying over the three-story set
Best for: Spectacle seekers and fan-pires
Read the full review here.

Oliver is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James, who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire, a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep?

The Vibe: Heartfelt robot romance
Highlight: An intimate and original story that tugs at your heartstrings
Best for: Pixar fans and hopeless romantics
Read the full review here

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 is in rehearsal for his Dangerous tour—a year before the superstar was first publicly accused of sexually abusing a minor. When the song is done, Michael speaks with an MTV reporter 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?

The Vibe: Nostalgic jukebox
Highlight: The choreo
Best for: People who either believe in Jackson’s innocence or who are able and willing to enjoy his work despite questions about his guilt
Read the full review here

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, 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, on whose patronage the club depends. Also, Satine is dying of consumption, as a classic red-handkerchief moment reveals.

The Vibe: Sparkling melodramatic jukebox musical
Highlight: "Roxanne"
Best for: Pop and rom-com girlies
Read the full review here

In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.

Note: Maya Rudolph plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through June 20, joined by Phillip James Brannon, Cheyenne Jackson and original cast members Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht.

The Vibe: Unhinged
Highlight: The rotating stunt casting for Mary makes for a fresh take each time you go
Best for: Fans of camp and alternate histories
Read the full review here

The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, is a comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II that features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of a homeless man disguised as a downed and drowned pilot in the ocean off the southern coast of Spain. Which is to say: A plane in Spain feigns falling in the main, and the dead man’s briefcase contains supposedly secret plans for an Allied invasion of Sardinia, when the Allies are actually planning to invade Sicily.

The Vibe: Zany but smart
Highlight: Jak Malone's "Dear Bill"
Best for: History buffs who enjoy a comedy with their facts
Read the full review here

The Outsiders draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation set in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two teen gangs—the "Socs" (short for "socials") and the "greasers"—battle it out for superiority. The show is narrated by the 14-year-old Ponyboy, an orphan with two older brothers: the responsible Darrel, who works a blue-collar job to support the family, and the dreamy Sodapop, a gas-station attendant with a sculpted body but a sweetly dim mind. Ponyboy, who quotes Robert Frost, is the sensitive one, though perhaps not as sensitive as his hangdog-puppyish best friend, Johnny.

The Vibe: Gritty brotherhood
Highlight: The second act's rumble
Best for: Young adults and fans of the iconic novel
Read the full review here

The winsome Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) headlines the first Broadway revival of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize–winning 2000 play, in which the daughter of a mentally ill mathematician wrestles to keep her own mind. Thomas Kail (Hamilton) directs the production, whose cast of four also includes the great Don Cheadle—in his long overdue Broadway debut!—as well as ringers Kara Young and Jin Ha.

Note: Chess will close on Sunday, July 19.

The Vibe: Reflective
Highlight: Edebiri and Cheadle
Best for: Family drama fiends
Read the full review here

The show is a vast panorama of American life in the turbulent early years of the 20th century, as illustrated by the intersecting stories of three fictional families—those of a moneyed white businessman, a Jewish immigrant and a successful Black pianist—as well as a clutch of real-life figures from the period, including Goldman herself. 

[Related: An in-depth discussion of Ragtime with director Lear deBessonet on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.]

The Vibe: Minimal stage design with maximal impact
Highlight: Joshua Henry's powerhouse vocal performance as the wronged and vengeful Coalhouse Walker
Best for: Those looking for a sweeping show with historical themes and political statements
Read the full review here

Richard O'Brien's delirious and oddly touch-a-touch-a-touch-a-touching spoof of science-fiction and horror B flicks—a mix of satire, rock & roll and anything-goes queer sensibility— didn't last long in its 1975 Broadway debut, but it spawned a film that became the fairy godmother of all midnight movies and attracted a rabid cult following that continues to this day. Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!) directs the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival, which features a high-wattage and appropriately eclectic cast. British heartthrob Luke Evans stars as the show's strutting, lingerie-clad "sweet transvestite" antihero: the alien mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, whose idea of Frankenstein's monster is a blond muscle boy. His extended entourage includes Juliette Lewis, Amber Gray, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Josh Rivera and Harvey Guillén; Stephanie Hsu and Andrew Durand are the squares who get stranded in their midst, and the lovable Rachel Dratch serves as narrator.

The Vibe: Star-studded raunch
Highlight: Luke Evans, duh!
Best for: Fans of the cult-classic movie and other queer theater

Cinco Paul's delightful and tuneful Apple TV series, a loving spoof of Golden Age musicals, makes a bold leap from the small screen to the Broadway stage in a production directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli (Death Becomes Her). Alex Brightman and Sara Chase, reprising roles the originated last year at the late Kennedy Center, star as the show's central couple: a pair of modern normies who stumble upon a village governed by tropes of yesteryear. The talent-loaded cast also include Ana Gasteyer, Brad Oscar, Isabelle McCalla, McKenzie Kurtz, Max Clayton, Ivan Hernandez and—repeating her TV role—the tasty Ann Harada. And it just won four Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations!

The Vibe: Big nostalgic fun
Highlight: The act two opener "With All Of Your Heart"
Best for: Fans of classic musicals and the Apple TV show
Read the full review here 

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. It won Best Original Score at the 2022 Tonys.

The Vibe: Poppy and powerful
Highlight: The now-viral "Haus of Holbein" number
Best for: Feminist history fans
Read the full review here

It is 1943, and the U.S.S. Eldridge is the subject of a secret experiment by a government outpost that I regret to inform you is named “Project Rainbow base Marquis.” The goal is to make the Eldridge invisible, but instead it moves to a different plane, as though tearing through a timespace map of the known world. Here be dragons, or rather demogorgons: slinky monsters with faces that open like carnivorous flowers. The ship’s captain stares into the Abyss, and the Abyss stares back. When this cold open ends, a Stranger Things logo appears and we move to 1959 in Hawkins, Indiana, Broadway, population 33. Henry Creel is a troubled teen who will grow up to become the franchise’s primary baddie but at this point is more like a boy Wednesday Addams: morbid and unsettling. Henry’s father and mother have relocated to Hawkins from Arizona—where, rumor has it, Henry blinded a neighbor—in hope of a new start. 

The Vibe: Real life thriller
Highlight: The incredible special effects that won it the 2025 Tony
Best for: Fans of the show who want more insight or be put into that universe
Read the full review here

The songs of Québécois nightingale Celine Dion are the stately vessel—or are they the iceberg?—in this campy spoof of James Cameron's 1997 romantic disaster film, written by Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli with director Tye Blue. After more than 1,000 performances Off Broafway, the ship now sails onto the Main Stem; Mindelle and Rousouli are newly flanked by Jim Parsons (!) as meddling mother Ruth Dewitt Bukater and Deborah Cox as the ever-unsinkable Molly Brown. 

The Vibe: Zany and irreverent
Highlight: The rollicking Tina Turner–style number for the Iceberg (Layton Williams)
Best for: Celine Dion enthusiasts and camp followers

The latest small British musical to hop the Pond is Jim Barne and Kit Buchan's two-person romcom about an Englishman in New York for his estranged father's wedding and the sister of the bride assigned to pick him up at the airport. Directed by Tim Jackson, the show received warm reviews in London last year. In the NYC edition, original star Sam Tutty—who won on Olivier for Dear Evan Hansen—makes his Broadway debut opposite King Kong survivor Christiani Pitts.

The Vibe: Feel-good
Highlight: The super-cool rotating and transformational set
Best for: Fans of Maybe Happy Ending and smaller
Read the full review here

Wicked divided critics when it opened in 2003, but it's still transporting audiences today. A revisionist prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the show traces the radicalization of the green-skinned outsider Elphaba in a land where propaganda and repression are on the rise. Winnie Holzman's book, adapted from Gregory Maguire's much darker novel, smartly focuses on our witchy heroine's unlikely friendship with her more socially capable schoolmate, Glinda. Joe Mantello's direction is appropriately wondrous, and when Stephen Schwartz's pop-Broadway score flies, it flies high.

The Vibe: Magical school days with big stakes
Highlight: "Defying Gravity," of course
Best for: Fans of the film and those open to Wizard of Oz spinoffs