Complete A-Z listing of Broadway shows in NYC

Aladdin. New Amsterdam Theatre (see Broadway). Music by Alan Menken. Lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice. Book and additional lyrics by Chad Beguelin. Directed by Casey Nicholaw. With Adam Jacobs, James Monroe Iglehart, Courtney Reed. Running time: 2hrs 20mins. One intermission. 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 i

Theater review by Adam FeldmanBroadway musicals often feature heroines trying to find themselves, but perhaps never as literally as in Anastasia. In 1927 Leningrad, the scrappy, strapping Dmitry (Derek Klena) and the worldly, roguish Vlad (John Bolton) devise a scheme to pass off a street sweeper, Anya (Christy Altomare), as the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna Romanov, rumored to have survived the massacre of the rest of her royal family in the Russian Revolution 10 years earlier. But as the con men school her, My Fair Lady–like, in the ways of nobility—hoping to deceive Anastasia’s grandmother in Paris, the Dowager Empress (an elegant Mary Beth Peil)—it emerges that Anya may be the real Anastasia after all. Who knows? Not Anya: She has amnesia. What former self might be nested like a doll inside her, waiting to be revealed? And might there be other dolls inside that one?As Anastasia piles discovery upon discovery, the happiest surprise is how consistently good the musical turns out to be. Smartly adapted by Terrence McNally from the 1997 animated film and the 1956 Ingrid Bergman movie—with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens impressively expanding their score from the former—Anastasia is a sweeping adventure, romance and historical epic whose fine craftsmanship will satisfy musical-theater fans beyond the show’s ideal audience of teenage girls. (When I saw it, a second-act kiss was greeted with deafening shrieks of approval.) Director Darko Tresnjak keeps the story swirling

Theater review by Adam Feldman  “The world only spins forward,” declares the defiant prophet Prior Walter in Angels in America. But as the world turns, it returns things to our shifting fields of vision. So it is with Tony Kushner’s expansive and shattering masterpiece, which is back on Broadway for the first time since its 1993 premiere, in a production of magnificent tenderness and sinew. Heaven, such as it is, be praised! Angels in America has arrived again. The great work continues. Kushner’s two-part play is massive: To see it in a single day, with multiple intermissions and a long dinner break, takes 10 hours. Yet every moment is so rich, so rewarding, so engrossing that it flies by in a rush. It is hard to do justice to the multitudes that Angels in America contains: its synthesis of the intellectual and the lyrical, the comic and the tragic, the intimate and the epic, the engaged and the transcendent. This is a play that breaks and fills your heart; it inspires you as it takes your breath away. The first half, Millennium Approaches, starts in 1985. Prior (Andrew Garfield, raw nerves exposed) has AIDS, which sends his panicked boyfriend, Louis (the excellent James McArdle), into pretzel twists of conscience. Meanwhile, the odious right-wing attack dog Roy Cohn (played with relish and bite by Nathan Lane) labors to hide his own AIDS diagnosis from the world—including his protégé, the closeted gay Mormon lawyer Joe (Lee Pace, magnetically tense with repression), who s

Theater review by Adam Feldman In a musical that is full of beautiful moments, perhaps the loveliest is the one shared on a plain park bench by Dina (Katrina Lenk), an Israeli café owner, and Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub), an Egyptian bandleader stranded for the night in her uneventful desert town in 1996. As members of his ceremonial police orchestra play incidental music behind them, Dina asks Tewfiq how it feels to be a conductor. They each raise their arms, inhabiting an imagined experience together, and the music we have been hearing stops; what they feel is realer, and we are invited to imagine it with them. To entrust such a moment to silence is an unusual choice for a musical. But The Band’s Visit, which seems even richer on Broadway than in its award-winning 2016 run at the Atlantic, is unconventionally wise. It is rare to encounter a show that has such a graceful sense of time. Itamar Moses’s book, adapted from a 2007 Israeli film, embraces the unspoken; the characters use English as a second language, which gives the dialogue a tentative, searching quality that draws us closer. And David Yazbek’s Middle Eastern–accented score, orchestrated by Jamshied Sharifi, includes not only wryly witty character songs but also joyous instrumentals for oud, cello, violin, clarinet and darbouka. Lenk, who mixes languidly feline sensuality with knowing self-deprecation, is mesmerizing; her scenes with the courtly, soulful Shalhoub capture the awkward pleasure of lonely people reaching

Beautiful—The Carole King Musical shares several virtues with its titular singer-songwriter, among them humility, earnestness and dedication to craft. If Douglas McGrath’s book never achieves the dramatic grit or comic zip of Jersey Boys, at least director Marc Bruni’s production avoids being a brain-dead, self-satisfied hit parade à la Berry Gordy’s Motown. Still, it does seem that stretches of Broadway’s newest jukebox musical consist of situations such as this: “Carole, you’ve got to write us a hit!” “I’ve written something.” “It’s a hit!” Yes, Beautiful loves its diligent, long-suffering pop genius, and invites you to do the same. It’s quite an easy task when you have the phenomenal Jessie Mueller in the lead. The effortlessly appealing star cut her teeth on Broadway flops (the mis-reconceived On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) and in supporting parts (The Mystery of Edwin Drood). Now she’s ready to carry a show. As Brooklyn-raised King, who started churning out teenybopper tunes at 1650 Broadway in the late ’50s, Mueller exudes warmth and common sense, playing up King’s old-fashioned modesty and insecurity without becoming a doormat or cipher. And when she wraps her rich, burnished voice around those hits—“So Far Away,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “It’s Too Late”—they feel as fresh as the day King penned them. McGrath’s deft, wry book tracks its hero’s tortured first marriage to lyricist-partner Gerry Goffin (Jake Epstein) and their friendly rivalry with anothe

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

Bitterness and bitchery are among the hors d'oeuvres served liberally in Mart Crowley's closet-breaking 1968 nonmusical about a gathering of unhappy homosexuals in New York City. Joe Mantello's 50th-anniversary Broadway revival of this seminal play features a glittering cast of openly gay actors, including Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Andrew Rannells, Matt Bomer and Robin de Jesús.

A boy must choose between his law-abiding, bus-driving father and a smooth-talking mob boss in Chazz Palminteri’s coming-of-age story, which began as a monologue, became a movie and now returns as a Broadway musical. With songs by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater (Leap of Faith), the piece is directed by Robert De Niro and Jerry Zaks. Read the full review.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  A beautiful bad boy can be hard to resist. In Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1945 musical Carousel, set in 19th-century Maine, the moony, quietly nonconformist Julie Jordan (the soulful Jessie Mueller) is drawn, moth to flame, to the well-built, sexually charismatic carnival barker Billy Bigelow (Joshua Henry). She marries the rageful brute, and both pay a price they can’t afford: Julie loses her job at the local mill and her reputation in town; Billy falls from favor with his hawklike employer, Mrs. Mullin (a perfectly seasoned Margaret Colin), and is driven to crime. Their unhappy struggle—they can’t even articulate their love for each other—is set against a seemingly idyllic seaside world of busting-out-all-over Junes and real nice clambakes, and contrasted with the upward mobility of Julie’s best friend, Carrie (the huggable Lindsay Mendez, who beams like nobody’s business). Carousel's sumptuous new Broadway revival plows steadily through the show’s darker currents. Director Jack O’Brien invites us to admire the show as an exemplar of classic American musical theater, lovingly emphasizing its virtues. Prime among them is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s innovative and varied score, repolished by orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and sterlingly sung by the cast; Henry offers a powerful account of Billy’s long and winding first-act finale, “Soliloquy,” and opera star Renée Fleming—though too grand in manner for the role of Julie’s kindly

Scheduled to open on Broadway in fall 2018, this jukebox musical traces decades in the life of one Cherilyn Sarkisian, who apparently is a singer and actor of some kind. Three women play the showbiz survivor at different stages of her career; Rick Elice, who cowrote Jersey Boys, tries to make biomusical lightning strikes twice, and Jason Moore (Avenue Q) directs. At the very least, the show is sure to have fabulous costumes.

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.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  For a play that includes a great deal of sign language, the Broadway revival of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God is maddeningly heavy-handed. Time has been unkind to this 1979 drama about a confused and defiant deaf woman, Sarah (Lauren Ridloff), and the would-be-heroic speech therapist, James (Joshua Jackson), who romances her. Some of the problems are structural: In a device that is awkward from the start and grows increasingly tiresome, James and Sarah sign to each other when they’re alone, but James repeats aloud everything she says for the benefit of the audience; the play is said to take place inside his mind, a conceit that functions as an excuse for choppy, half-developed scenes. But a larger problem is tonal. To today’s audiences, James’s relationship with Sarah—his student and a maid at his school—is manifestly jerkish from the get-go. After grabbing her and kissing her—an advance she rejects—he sneaks up to her bedroom window after curfew to try again. “Usually, I kiss the girl and make everything better,” he explains. “You didn’t like that one, so I climbed this tree.” It’s like a two-and-a-half-hour version of Lionel Richie’s creepy video for “Hello.” A different production might have hidden these failings or even jujitsu-ed them into virtues. But Kenny Leon’s revival, broad and ungainly, exacerbates them. Jackson’s nice-guy predator is aggressively genial and callow and speaks like he is narrating a video for a high-school

One of the more unlikely musicals on Broadway this season, Come from Away is the tense but humane story of an airport in Gander, Newfoundland, where 38 planes and more than 6,000 passengers were forced to land on September 11, 2001. The book, music and lyrics are by the Canadian team Irene Sankoff and David Hein. Read the full review.

In this captivating original musical, Hello, Dolly! scene-stealer Taylor Trensch now plays the title role of a high school student thrust into social relevance after a classmate's suicide. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's score combines well-crafted lyrics with an exciting pop sound, and Steven Levenson’s book gives all the characters shaded motives. Read the full review.

Theater review by Adam Feldman What do you expect from a Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical? The alley outside the Marquis Theatre has been done up as an empty stretch of beach, and that pretty much sums up Escape to Margaritaville, which seems intended to be watched with your feet up and a melting frozen drink in your hand. Along with more than two dozen songs from Buffett’s tropical-burnout catalog, the show offers steel drums, jean shorts, palm trees and dancers dressed as fluffy white clouds. It’s often hokey and sometimes pokey. But I’ll level with you: I had fun. Oh, right, there is a plot. Paul Alexander Nolan plays a songwriter who works at a shabby Caribbean resort with his bartender pal (an endearing Eric Petersen), and Alison Luff is a spunky environmental scientist on a weeklong trip there with her soon-to-be-married best friend (Lisa Howard). Romance predictably ensues, stumbles, and ensues anew. Written by sitcom veterans Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley, the show doesn’t shoehorn Buffett’s songs into a story so much as cobble a story around them, extrapolating characters and situations from details in the lyrics, which is more successful in small ways than in large ones. (Shrimp, sponge cake and a lost shaker of salt are neatly planted, for example, to yield comic fruit.) Performed by a vocally overqualified cast that also includes Don Sparks, Rema Webb and Andre Ward, the score is pleasantly catchy—I’ve had “Fins” swimming in my head for days—and it probably help

Theater review by Adam Feldman At the end of the first act of Frozen, there is a moment that zaps the audience to life like a blast of cold air. Elsa (Caissie Levy), the young queen of a Nordic realm, has witchy ice-creation powers that she has been forced to keep hidden; now, self-exiled to a Fortress of Solitude–like castle, she exults in reckless freedom and power. As she belts the show’s takeaway number, “Let It Go,” her heavy royal garments transform, in one thrilling instant, into a shimmery frost-blue party dress. It’s “Defying Gravity” on the rocks, and for the duration of this Wicked-cool number, Frozen breaks free from the forces that keep most of Disney’s latest musical earthbound. Otherwise, there is altogether too little magic in the kingdom of Arendelle, which Elsa’s impulsive younger sister, Anna (Patti Murin), must save from the eternal winter to which Elsa has unwittingly condemned it. In adapting their smash 2013 movie to the stage, Frozen’s creators—including screenwriter Jennifer Lee and songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez—faced a challenge: Many of the film’s key sequences are adventure scenes (a wolf attack, a giant snow monster, a climactic blizzard) that are hard to re-create onstage. Julie Taymor solved this problem in The Lion King by coming up with a comprehensive aesthetic vocabulary of her own, but Frozen director Michael Grandage’s reach is less ambitious. In lieu of the great outdoors, he moves much of the show to lofty and stu

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 pamp

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The world of Harry Potter has arrived on Broadway, Hogwarts and all, and it is a triumph of theatrical magic. 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, the show looks like a million bucks (or, in this case, a reported $68 million); the Lyric Theatre has been transfigured from top to bottom to immerse us in the narrative. It works: The experience is transporting. Jack Thorne’s play, based on a story he wrote with Rowling and Tiffany, extends the Potter narrative while remaining true to its core concerns. Love and friendship and kindness are its central values, but they don’t come easily: They are bound up in guilt, loneliness and fear. Harry (Jamie Parker) is weighted with trauma dating back to his childhood, which hinders his ability to communicate with his troubled middle son, Albus (Sam Clemmett); it doesn’t help that Albus’s only friend is the bookish outcast Scorpius Malfoy (the exceptional Anthony Boyle), son of Harry’s erstwhile enemy, Draco (Alex Price). Despite the best intentions of Harry’s solid wife, Ginny (Poppy Miller), and his friends Hermione (Noma Dumezweni) and Ron (Paul Thornley), things turn dark very fast. Set designer Christine Jones and lighting designer Neil Austin keep much of the stage shrouded in

Theater review by Adam FeldmanThe secret of Dolly Levi’s success is revealed at the top of Hello, Dolly!’s unstoppable title song. The number is usually recalled as a paean to the star, sung by the adoring waiters of the ritzy Harmonia Gardens Restaurant as she descends a staircase in triumph and a bright red dress. But it begins, tellingly, with Dolly singing to them: “Hello, Harry / Well, hello, Louie…” It’s been years since her last visit, but she remembers them all and greets them by name. No wonder they love her. She makes them feel loved.In the musical’s blissful Broadway revival, the same thing happens between Bette Midler and the audience. Midler fans out her performer’s wares with expert self-assurance—she delivers her jokes at a steady vaudevillian clip, like Mae West in a hurry—but she also seems like she couldn’t live without us. And the part of Dolly, a matchmaker in late-19th-century New York, is exquisitely suited to Midler’s enormous warmth, savvy and drive. (She cuts her schmaltz with zest.) It’s hard to imagine a better match of actor and role: It is, in a word, perfection.Adapted by Michael Stewart from a Thornton Wilder comedy, Hello, Dolly! may be a vehicle for its star, but this revival treats it like a vintage Rolls-Royce. From the rousing overture on, everything about the production, directed with joyful aplomb by Jerry Zaks, gleams with old-fashioned charm. David Hyde Pierce brings droll dignity and adorable flashes of cartoon clowning to his performa

Theater review by Adam Feldman Denzel Washington weaponizes his famous charm in The Iceman Cometh. Eugene O’Neill’s gloomy 1946 drama needs all the energy it can get: The play begins just before dawn in a run-down 1912 New York saloon, whose regulars have passed out at their tables from yet another night of drinking their hopes away. Into their placid river of denial dives Washington’s grinning, glad-handing Hickey, their beloved old crony. But Hickey isn’t on another bender; he has gone around the bend. With the drive of a traveling salesman and the zeal of a preacher’s son, both of which he happens to be, he cajoles them to accept truths that he says will set them free—if only paradoxically, by making them happier in their cages. Over the course of nearly four hours, The Iceman Cometh chronicles the effects of Hickey’s disruption with almost hypnotic repetition, exhaustively tracing parallel arcs for almost all of its 16 supporting characters, including widower and shut-in Harry (a bluff Colm Meaney) and the ashen post-anarchist “foolosopher” Larry (David Morse). The language is stiff with dated slang; key terms like “pipe dream” recur literally dozens of times. Yet the cumulative effect of this handsomely decrepit production is bracing. Director George C. Wolfe keeps things moving at a quick clip; not all of the bigger character choices pay off—and some of the actors are hard to hear or understand—but there are performances to savor. (I especially admired Michael Potts

Theater review by Adam Feldman. The Al Hirschfeld Theatre (Broadway). Book by Harvey Fierstein. Music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper. Dir. Jerry Mitchell. With Stark Sands, Billy Porter, Annaleigh Ashford. 2hrs 20mins. One intermission. [Note: The cast of Kinky Boots has changed since this review was first published. Currently, American Idol winner David Cook plays straight man to Wayne Brady's high-heeled Lola.] The kicky crowd-pleaser Kinky Boots is the very model of a modern major musical. Adapted from a 2005 English indie film, Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper’s fizzy pop tuner tells of Charlie (the capable Sands) and his Northampton footwear factory, Price & Son—a family business in danger of closing down. Hope arrives in the unlikely form of Lola (Porter), a self-possessed drag queen with ideas for a niche product line: knee-high, skin-tight, stiletto-heeled sheaths of ostentatious color, strong enough for a man who’s made up like a woman. (Gay style and consumer dollars to the rescue! The shoe must go on!) Directed with verve by Jerry Mitchell, Kinky Boots feels familiar at every step, down to its messages about individuality, community, pride and acceptance; it could have been cobbled together from parts of The Full Monty, Billy Elliot and Fierstein’s La Cage aux Folles, and it culminates in a feel-good finale so similar to Hairspray’s (which Mitchell choreographed) that it might as well be called “You Can’t Stop the Boot.” Yet the musical holds up for the same reason

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.—Adam Feldman Running time: 2hrs 40mins. One intermission.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Teenage girls rule in the tart but sweet new Broadway musical Mean Girls. But their system of high-school government is far from a democracy: It’s a reign of terror, angst and mall fashions, where popularity is arrogated and then ruthlessly enforced. Having spent her childhood being home-schooled in Kenya, nature and math enthusiast Cady (Erika Henningsen) is initially confused by the rigid caste system of her new school in Chicago. She tries to be nice, but the ruthlessness of American teenage culture brings out Cady’s predatory instincts. She reverts to the mean. A canny crossbreed of Heathers and Hairspray, the musical has been adapted by Tina Fey from her own 2004 cult movie, and updated to reflect the new realities of smartphones and social media. Fey is one of the sharpest comic writers in America, and the show remains, in some sense, her vehicle: an auto de Fey, burning with bookish anger at the limits young women place on each other and themselves. (Her film role as a pushy calculus teacher is amusingly evoked by Kerry Butler, who also plays the other adult women.) But this version of Mean Girls is not just a copy of the original. The most famous lines from the screenplay are here, but Casey Nicholaw’s energetic staging wisely breezes past them; the newer jokes get bigger laughs, while the score—by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin—successfully builds on Fey’s knowingly corrective tone. (“This is modern feminism talkin’,” sings a high-

Theater review by Adam Feldman  We’ve grown accustomed to the grace of Bartlett Sher’s revivals of American stage classics, but that doesn’t mean we should take them for granted. Working in blessed harmony with his trusty creative team—including set designer Michael Yeargan and costumer Catherine Zuber—Sher is not an iconoclast or radical re-sculptor; instead, he acts as a restorer, leaving the shows on their pedestals but stripping off years of obscuration to reveal layers the works have possessed all along. So it is with the splendid new Lincoln Center Theater revival of My Fair Lady. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s sparkling 1956 musical doesn’t need much retooling. Its delightful songs—including “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?,” “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “The Rain in Spain”—spring like fresh water from the show’s source, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 parable Pygmalion. In Edwardian London, a haughty and misogynist professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins (Harry Hadden-Paton), makes a bet with his friend Pickering (Allan Corduner) that he can take lowborn flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Lauren Ambrose) and give her the manners and elocution of a poised aristocrat. Or as he says, with nasty Shavian snap: “I’ll make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe!” In the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady, Henry was played by an imperious headliner, Rex Harrison, and Eliza by the then-unknown Julie Andrews. In this one, the star-power dynamics have shifted. The lu

Theater review by Adam Feldman After seeing the imaginative and dynamic Once on This Island, you may feel that once is not enough. Michael Arden’s immersive revival of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical is staged in the round and constantly on the move, drumming its story forward to a steady throb of pop-Caribbean beats. Framed as a folktale shared among impoverished islanders—Dane Laffrey’s sandy set suggests the aftermath of a natural disaster—the plot follows naive orphan Ti Moune (Hailey Kilgore, in a winsome Broadway debut), who falls for a boy above her station: the rich and light-skinned Daniel (Isaac Powell). Overseeing their quasi-romance, which defies the strict class and color divides of their French Antilles isle, is a quartet of sometimes capricious gods, played by Lea Salonga, Quentin Earl Darrington, the striking Merle Dandridge and the remarkable Alex Newell (in an astonishing drag diva turn). One of Ahrens and Flaherty’s earliest collaborations, Once on This Island is patchy in parts. Its best-known songs, “Waiting for Life” and “Mama Will Provide,” bring down the house, but there are also languors (such as the drippy “The Human Heart”). And the central story of female sacrifice and degradation, which borrows liberally from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” is treated as more inspirational than it actually is. But it is hard to imagine a better account of the show than the one that Arden and his team—including choreographer Camill

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic, bombastic musical goes on. Directed by Harold Prince, The Phantom of the Opera is lavish and engaging enough to draw tourists more than two decades into its run. Although the score often strikes a cheesy 1980s synth-pop note, the spectacle and romance remain more or less intact. James Barbour now plays the Phantom.—David Cote Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.

Theater review by Adam Feldman Ah, the joy of watching theater fail. The looming possibility of malfunction is part of what makes live performance exciting, and disasters remind us of that; the rite requires sacrifice. There is more than schadenfreude involved when we giggle at, say, a YouTube video of a high-school Peter Pan crashing haplessly into the scenery. There is also sympathy—there but for the grace of deus ex machina go we all—and, often, a respect for the efforts of the actors to somehow muddle through. Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong takes this experience to farcical extremes, as six amateur British actors (and two crew members who get pressed into service onstage) try to perform a hackneyed whodunnit amid challenges that escalate from minor mishaps (stuck doors, missed cues) to bona fide medical emergencies and massive structural calamities.  Depending on your tolerance for ceaseless slapstick, The Play That Goes Wrong will either have you rolling in the aisles or rolling your eyes. It is certainly a marvel of coordination: The imported British cast deftly navigates the pitfalls of Nigel Hook’s ingeniously tumbledown set, and overacts with relish. (I especially enjoyed the muggings of Dave Hearn, Charlie Russell and coauthor Henry Lewis.) Directed by Mark Bell, the mayhem goes like cuckoo clockwork.  If you want to have a good time at this show, chances are good that you will; there are many funny sequences, and I laughed a lot. But you may find it

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Joan of Arc (Condola Rashad) may speak with Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret every day, as she claims, but they do not inhabit her: She is nothing if not self-possessed. George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in 1923, not long after the teenage warrior was belatedly canonized by the Catholic Church (making amends for having sent her to the stake in 1431), and his portrait of her is sympathetic and admiring. Dressing in men’s clothes and claiming to have a direct line to God are what got Joan silenced by the powers that were; but if she hadn’t done those things, then no one would have heard her in the first place. The atheistic Shaw toys with the idea that Joan actually had divine powers—he depicts events that could be interpreted as miracles—but he’s mostly drawn to her good sense and courage of convictions. She succeeds, for a time, not by supernatural means but because her ideas and leadership prove valuable to the same nobles, commanders and priests who later throw her under the cross. Ever the great complicator, Shaw devotes much of Saint Joan to exploring the motives and rationales of these other players. Among them are the ineffectual Dauphin (a modernly slack Adam Chanler-Berat), the red-robed Bishop of Beauvais (Walter Bobbie), the worldly Duke of Warwick (Jack Davenport), the gaunt Archbishop of Reims (John Glover), the sturdy military leader Dunois (Daniel Sunjata) and the wily Inquisitor (the wondrously sonorous Patrick Page) who

School of Rock: Theater review by David CoteEver see the pitch-perfect 2003 Jack Black comedy School of Rock? Then you know what to expect from the musical version: fake substitute teacher Dewey Finn frenetically inspiring his charges to release their inner Jimi Hendrix; uptight preppy tweens learning classic riffs; and the band’s pivotal, make-or-break gig, with their overbearing parents watching in horror. We expect cute kids in uniform, a spastic Dewey and face-melting riffs—along with heart-tugging family stuff. It worked for the movie, and wow, does it work on Broadway, a double jolt of adrenaline and sugar to inspire the most helicoptered of tots to play hooky and go shred an ax. For those about to love School of Rock: We salute you. What a relief to see that an unlikely creative team—Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, veteran composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Glenn Slater (Leap of Faith)—successfully execute such a smart transfer of film to stage. This is one tight, well-built show: underscoring the emotional arcs (Dewey as both surrogate kid and parent; the students’ yearning to be heard); gently juicing the romantic subplot between Dewey and buttoned-up school principal Rosalie Mullins (sweetly starchy Sierra Boggess); and knowing when to get out of the way and let the kids jam. School of Rock has absorbed the diverse lessons of Rent, Spring Awakening and Matilda and passes them on to a new generation.You’d have to have zero sense of humor about pop to no

Theater review by Adam Feldman Are you ready? The splashy new Broadway musical SpongeBob SquarePants, whose arrival was greeted in some circles with sneers of anticipatory derision, turns out to be a joy. Like its irrepressible yellow hero, played by the peppy and limber-limbed Ethan Slater, the show is unabashedly committed to imagination and dorky enthusiasm. As SpongeBob and his squirrel friend, Sandy (Lilli Cooper), labor to save their undersea town—the cheekily named Bikini Bottom—from a local volcano, the wonders of Tina Landau’s production pour from the stage in a ravishing stream of color and invention that sucks you into its merry, silly currents. Adapted by Kyle Jarrow from Nickelodeon’s popular cartoon, the show takes time to find its sea legs. The introductory sequences seem squarely aimed at kids, and there are early weak spots in the eclectic score, which comprises original songs by pop stars including the Flaming Lips, Panic! at the Disco, T.I., Lady Antebellum and John Legend (plus a David Bowie tune from the 1990s). But music supervisor Tom Kitt manages to bring them all into the same world, sometimes with magical results. In a gospel number by Yolanda Adams, “Super Sea Star Savior,” SpongeBob’s indolent starfish pal, Patrick (Danny Skinner), is hilariously worshipped by a cult of sardines. And Gavin Lee, as SpongeBob’s dour neighbor Squidward, gets the takeaway musical number of 2017. In the fantasy Broadway showstopper “I’m Not a Loser”—choreographed by C

Theater review by Adam Feldman  “I'm no hero, that’s understood,” sings Bruce Springsteen in “Thunder Road,” self-effacingly but also with the knowledge that a cardinal rule of heroism is denying it. He's got the dirty hood, sure, but it’s a hoodwink of a kind, and in the extraordinary concert show Springsteen on Broadway he is candid about that: Rock stardom, he says, is partly “a magic trick.” He's the young man without a driver’s license writing songs about the road; the artist costumed in the “factory clothes” of his emotionally withholding father; the working man who is also always the Boss. For more than four decades, Springsteen has maintained a sturdy performance of authenticity. He writes unforgettable character songs and sings them, essentially, as an actor; between them, he recites eloquently plain-spoken monologues—full of lists that touch on joy and sex and pain—that he writes for the character of Bruce. So Springsteen on Broadway is less of a contradiction in terms than it may seem. Dressed in simple black with no band (though his wife, Patti Scialfa, joins him for two duets), he performs what amounts to a two-hour solo musical about himself, a rock-star cabaret act. The hits are here, including “Born to Run” and “Dancing in the Dark,” but stripped down and edged with wistfulness; “Born in the U.S.A.” is pared into a skeletal, nearly a cappella blues. It’s an intimate show and a generous one, not just to past friends and collaborators but also to the audience,

Young Jean Lee, whose experimental work has delighted in metatheatrical mind games, shifts gears with this relatively straightforward American father-sons drama on themes of identity and privilege. Is naturalism the new subversion? Rewritten by the playwright since its premiere at the Public Theater in 2014, the play moves to Second Stage's new Broadway flagship with a cast that includes Tom Skerritt and widespread internet crush object Armie Hammer (Call Me by Your Name). Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County) directs.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Heaven knows what the creators of Summer are thinking, if any thought at all has gone into this disco dud of a show. Three talented and blameless women—LaChanze, Ariana DeBose and Storm Lever—play the late Donna Summer at different stages of her life in a tacky, sub-Vegas jukebox biomusical that draws from the singer’s groovy catalog of hits, including “I Feel Love,” “MacArthur Park,” “On the Radio” and “Last Dance.” At its most watchable, the show plays like a barely dramatized adaptation of Summer’s Spotify and Wikipedia pages. But when it’s bad, it’s so, so bad. Director Des McAnuff ably steered the Four Seasons musical Jersey Boys but is less adept with just Summer. Nearly two dozen songs are crammed into this intermissionless 100-minute survey, which relies heavily on narration to yank us through a blanched account of the diva’s rise from humble beginnings in Boston to sex-symbol stardom in the Studio 54 era (with a dozy nod to her subsequent years as a born-again Christian); there is also a smattering of bathetic TV-movie dialogue. (Summer, on leaving her baby daughter to be raised by her parents: “Why is there always a price?”) The general level of befuddled kitsch is raised by the bizarre background presence of a nearly all-female ensemble, which spends much of the show in boxy drag-king suits and clumpy short wigs. By the time we reach the halfway mark of “Enough Is Enough”—cued by an out-of-nowhere scene of domestic violence, in whi

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Glenda Jackson gives a towering performance in the exquisite new revival of Edward Albee’s brutally truthful 1991 drama, Three Tall Women. That the tower is crumbling makes it all the more fascinating. Now 81, Jackson has not been on Broadway since 1988—she spent 23 of the intervening years as a member of the British Parliament—and here she plays the character identified as A: a rich, mean elderly woman nattering about her life as she nears the end of it. Overtly modeled on Albee’s own mother, A is paranoid, vain, bigoted and demanding; she seems at first a familiar dragon, with claws sunk into her hoard. Yet her imperious bearing is undercut by the intrusions of her aged body—sudden incontinence of bladder or emotion. Jackson tears through the grandeur and pathos with ferocious command. For a time, it seems as though A’s caregiver, B (the wonderful Laurie Metcalf), and lawyer, C (a flinty Alison Pill), are there mainly to witness the old lady’s death prattle. But at the halfway point, Albee turns the play outside-in. In the central coup de théâtre of Joe Mantello’s scalpel-sharp production, Miriam Buether’s gorgeous set opens up to create a new space of phantoms and mirrors. A, B and C reappear as versions of the same woman at different stages of her life: C as a dreamily calculating ingenue; B as the disillusioned and hardened matron; and A, no longer demented, at the finish line, “the point where you can think about yourself in the third p

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Watching Tom Stoppard’s devilishly clever Travesties is rather like solving a puzzle of the cryptic British crossword variety, whose intersecting clues are witty little games in and of themselves. Stoppard frames his 1974 play as the “senile reminiscence” of a doddering and unreliable narrator: a sartorially fussy English civil servant named Henry Carr (the marvelous Tom Hollander), who works in Zürich in 1917. There he crosses paths with several figures of historical note: modernist giant James Joyce (Peter McDonald), with whom he squabbles over a production of The Importance of Being Earnest; Dada provocateur Tristan Tzara (Seth Numrich), who cuts up sonnets with scissors and flings the pieces like confetti; and Bolshevik ideologue Vladimir Lenin (Dan Butler), who thinks art must be bent into a tool for social progress. Time and Stoppard have taken scissors to Carr’s memories, which Travesties artfully reassembles in an olio of genres—farce, spy story, seminar, musical, history lesson, absurdist prank—with mixed-in orts of culture high and low: Shakespeare, a World War I soldiers’ song, a tie-in to T.S. Eliot, a tea scene that sets the hypersweet sniping of Earnest’s Gwendolen (Scarlett Strallen) and Cecily (Sara Topham)—conflated here with women from Carr’s life—to the tune of a 1920s Vaudeville ditty. The facets of Stoppard’s jewellike play are overwhelmingly, even ostentatiously brilliant; the Irish Joyce is introduced in a scene that i

Waitress: Theater review by David Cote [Note: American Idol and Smash star Katharine McPhee takes over the leading role on April 10, 2018.]One’s sorely tempted to praise the delightful new musical Waitress using lots of bakery metaphors. After all, its hero is a pastry genius with relationship woes named Jenna (Jessie Mueller). She’s a perky Southern gal who can confect a mouthwatering Mermaid Marshmallow Pie but can’t measure the right ingredients for happiness. So, unable to resist, here I go: Fresh and delicious, Waitress has an excellent ratio of sweet to tart; supporting characters who provide crustiness (Dakin Matthews’s grumbly store owner) and flakiness (Christopher Fitzgerald’s loony admirer of another waitress); and cooked-to-perfection staging by Diane Paulus. The whole dish is—please forgive me—love at first bite.Based on the 2007 indie film by the late writer-director Adrienne Shelly, Waitress has been whipped (I’ll stop now) into an expertly constructed and emotionally satisfying tale of self-liberation in the face of limited options. Jessie Nelson’s broadly comic yet brooding book meshes wonderfully with a frisky, bright score by pop star Sara Bareilles, a seasoned songwriter who lets the Beatles and other Britpop influences shine through. Bareilles’s custom-built earworms address workplace pluck (“Opening Up”), first-date jitters (“When He Sees Me”), quirky, obsessive love (“Never Ever Getting Rid of Me”) and an eleventh-hour ballad of loss and regret (“She U

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 Jackie Burns as Elphaba and Amanda Jane Cooper as Glinda.