Complete A-Z listing of Broadway shows in NYC

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

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

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

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,

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

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 Feldman  What’s that merry racket at the Helen Hayes Theater this summer? By George, it’s the sound of a lark! An English lark! Sandy Rustin’s The Cottage has no pretensions to seriousness: It’s a brazenly straightforward drawing-room farce, created for light amusement and delivered on a platter by a properly silly cast of six. The year is 1923, the setting is a country hideaway in the Cotswolds, and the subject is made clear on the drop curtain, which includes a rutting pair of squirrels and a brassiere suspended from the branch of a tree. “Romance, my dear, is for fairy tales,” says the suave Beau (Eric McCormack) to his mistress Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), who is also his sister-in-law. “This is not a romance. This is sex.” Sylvia, though, has other ideas. For some time, the couple has been conducting a steamy extramarital affair, meeting once a year at Beau’s family cottage. But Sylvia has now decided to go public with their relationship—and has rashly done so in telegrams to their respective spouses: Beau’s forbidding and very pregnant wife (Lilli Cooper) and his stuffy brother (Alex Moffat). This love rectangle is further complicated by the staggered arrivals of Beau’s doe-eyed auxiliary mistress (Dana Steingold) and her menacing ex-husband (Nehal Joshi).  The Cottage | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The Cottage may look like a throwback to the tony sauciness of Noël Coward’s plays in the 1930s—in a nod to the Master, Beau’s secretary is named

The hilarious original stars of The Book of Mormon, Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, reunite to star in Scott Brown and Anthony King's goofy musical comedy, in which a pair of would be musical-theater writers play dozens of characters as they pitch a show about the invention of the printing press. Hitmaker Alex Timbers (Here Lies Love), who directed the show's Off Broadway production in 2006, returns to helm its Broadway premiere. 

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: 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

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

Broadway review by Adam Feldman   The groundbreaking, floor-shaking Here Lies Love makes space for itself like no Broadway show ever has. David Byrne’s concept musical about the rise and fall of the former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos was a hit in its 2013 run at the Public Theatre, but those who saw that immersive production may have wondered how it could possibly translate to a traditional proscenium theater. The trick, it turns out, was to remake the venue instead of the show: Director Alex Timbers and set designer David Korins have revolutionized and radicalized the capacious Broadway Theatre into a gleaming dance club, walled by dozens of video screens, where audience members—often literally standing in the middle of the action—get swept up in the shifting tides and undertows of history.  Proscenium houses have been reconfigured before; the Broadway Theatre got remade twice in the early 1970s (for the infamous Dude and the marvelous Candide), and other venues have been been reimagined more recently in productions like Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and Timbers’s own Rocky. But Here Lies Love takes this idea to a flashy new level: With much of the audience moving throughout the 90-minute show, guided around an ever-shifting set of platforms, it barely feels like it's in a theater at all. (The rest of the crowd is mostly seated in what used to be the mezzanine, now just a few feet from the extended stage; there are also slim rows of seats on three sides

The Ghanaian-American performer and writer Jocelyn Bioh (School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play) makes her Broadway playwrighting debut with an ensemble piece set among the West African employees of a hair-braiding salon in Harlem. Jazz star Somi Kakoma, who played Miram Makeba in last year's biomusical Dreaming Zenzile, leads the mostly female cast of ten as parlor owner Jaja; Whitney White (Our Dear Dead Drug Lord) directs the world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club.

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

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.

Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez do exceptional work as three old friends whose paths diverge in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's rueful and tuneful cult-fave 1981 musical flop, whose brilliant score is melded to a tricky back-to-front narrative about lost ideals. Director Maria Friedman’s revival was a sold-out smash at New York Theatre Workshop last season, and now the production moves to Broadway for a limited run; the supporting cast includes Reg Rogers, Katie Rose Clarke and Krystal Joy Brown. Read the full Off Broadway review here.

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

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)

Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton) plays the title role in Ossie Davis's raucous 1961 comedy about a traveling preacher who returns to his hometown in the Jim Crow South to claim an inheritance, integrate a local church and ease the labors of workers on a plantation. The expert Kenny Leon (Topdog/Underdog) directs the play's first Broadway revival, whose supporting cast includes Kara Young as the ingenue and Jay O. Sanders as the Old South villain, along with Bell Calloway, Billy Eugene Jones, Noah Pyzik, Noah Robbins, Heather Alicia Simms and Bill Timoney.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Ian Shaw was four years old in 1974, when his father, the British actor and alcoholic Robert Shaw, filmed his role as the weather-beaten hunter Quint in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The elder Shaw died four years later; now, the junior is portraying him in the diverting The Shark Is Broken, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Jaws on location at Martha’s Vineyard. The play, co-written with Joseph Nixon, strands Shaw at sea with his fellow lead actors—Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell)—then invites us to spy on their booze-soaked clashes, bonding and petty mutinies as they wait to be called to action. Played well by his son, who bears a striking resemblance to him, this Shaw is as tempestuous as Quint. On one hand, he is a classical thespian who threads Shakespeare into his dialogue—Hamlet, Lear, Sonnet 29 in full—and flaunts his contempt for the movie they are making: “It’s bread and circuses, chums.” But on the flip side of that same hand, he’s a dipsomaniacal terror who hides flasks of liquor all over the set and mercilessly goads the softer, thinner-skinned Dreyfuss. (If that’s his chum, is Shaw the shark?) The even-keeled Scheider, meanwhile, is caught between his co-stars’ different strains of vanity—not that he’s wholly immune to that particular sin. (When he has a moment to himself, he strips down to tan with a foil reflector.) The Shark Is Broken | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy If not for our on

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The jokes pop like corn on a cast-iron stove in the musical Shucked. They pour out in a ceaseless succession of happy little bursts, one after another—pop! pop!—to be buttered and salted by a game and endearing cast. Are those cobs in the actors’ pockets, or are they happy to see you? Both. And if a few kernels fail to inflate, they’re forgotten amid the bounty: Before you know it, you’re gorged to satisfaction on a big, tasty bag of Broadway puff.   Shucked was originally conceived as an adaptation of the long-running TV variety show Hee Haw, and although it is no longer connected to that property, it embraces its roots in tele-vaudeville. Set mostly in the ultra-rural enclave of Cob County—whose cheerfully inbred residents, fenced off from the rest of America by a wall of corn stalks, have not left its confines in generations—the show tells a “farm to fable” tale that pits the slickness of the city against the hickery of the sticks. A pair of narrators, played by Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley, help guide us through the maize maze of the story. But the plot is essentially a framework, as sturdy but hole-ridden as Scott Pask’s tumbledown set, for Shucked’s primary selling point: laughs, and plenty of 'em. The country-fried score, by the accomplished Nashville songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, includes rollicking comedic numbers and a sprinkling of sincere character songs. The latter fall to the central romantic couple, Maizy (Car

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

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Some Like It Hot is a well-aimed throwback: a jubilant, oldfangled, crowd-pleasing musical comedy. Like many recent Broadway tuners, it is adapted from a well-loved movie—in this case, Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 sex-and-sax farce about a pair of Prohibition-era musicians, on the run from the mob, who pose as women in an all-girl traveling band. The musical version reheats this story with abundant production values and canny attention to modern sensibilities. If it wobbles a little in its borrowed heels at first, it finishes in the confident stride of a hit.  Directed and choreographed with zest by Casey Nicholaw, Some Like It Hot taps into a classic vein of musical theater, and I do mean taps: This show doesn’t stint on the clickety-clack of shoe against stage. Its central characters, best friends Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), are not just instrumentalists but also perform a side act as the Tip Tap Twins. (Joe is white and Jerry is Black but, as they sing, ”We’re brothers under the skin.”) After witnessing a gangland rubout in Chicago, they are forced to race off in drag; under the noms de plumage Josephine and Daphne, they soon wrangle their way into a jazz ensemble led by Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams) and fronted by a hard-knocked singer named Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks).  As Joe and Jerry bond with Sugar, and recruit her into the expanded Tip Tap Trio, romantic complications ensue. Josephine, as Joe, starts fall

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  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 Bilbao). With help from Mrs. Lovett and his friend Anthony (Jordan Fish

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.