The best Broadway shows to see right now

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

Audra McDonald is a revelation as Rose—the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters—in George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent revival of the classic 1959 musical by Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim. Making the central family Black gives everything a fresh coloration and a sense of discovery. Every song is a rite of passaggio between McDonald's chest voice and head voice, but she makes that tension work to her advantage in an unforgettable star turn.—Adam Feldman

Lin‑Manuel Miranda's massively successful 2015 musical, staged to perfection by Thomas Kail, filters the rags-to-Treasury tale of Alexander Hamilton—an orphan immigrant turned founding father—through a prism of modern hip-hop and pop. Its combination of 21st-century music and 18th-century history is dazzlingly ingenious, but the show is also surprisingly moving. It's at once a drama, a comedy, a character study, a spectacle, a lesson, a romance, a war story, a historiographical critique. And it’s a success story of the best kind, breathtaking but also breath-giving: an inspiration.—Adam Feldman

Obsolescent androids in a near-future Korea try to make a Seoul connection in this highly original new musical by Will Aronson and Hue Park. The notion of robots discovering love could easily fall into preciousness. Instead—as charmingly acted by Darren Criss and Helen J Shen, and brilliantly staged by Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey—it is utterly enchanting: an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it means to be human, channeled through characters who are just learning what that entails. That this show is casting its firefly glow on Broadway feels like a gift.—Adam Feldman

Cole Escola's dizzying historical burlesque imagines a boozy, vicious and miserable Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Escola plays Mary with magnetic zaniness, poise and total moment-to-moment comic commitment; director Sam Pinkleton never lets the comic energy flag, and the supporting cast is delicious. Everything comes together to create an instant classic, and the funniest stage comedy in years. Betty Gilpin takes over the title role from January 21 through March 16.—Adam Feldman

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great American play looks at the structural damage behind the facade of a famous Black dynasty much like Jesse Jackson's. This is an old-fashioned family epic, disastrous dinner and all, that takes on perfect-family mythology, religion, parenthood, queerness, mental illness and more; it's a big swing, but that's what you need to get a big hit. The terrific cast of six—Jon Michael Hill, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Glenn Davis, Alana Arenas and the newly minted Broadway star Kara Young—is directed with deep aplomb by Phylicia Rashad.—Adam Feldman 

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 fundamental 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.—Adam Feldman

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

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

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

Go to hell—and by hell we mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But the newness of Mitchell’s score and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging bring this old story to quivering life.—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, Jack Thorne's epic—richly elaborated by director John Tiffany—combines grand storytelling with stagecraft on a scale heretofore unimagined. It leaves its audience spellbound.—Adam Feldman

The creators of Hell's Kitchen have found the right recipe for tis coming-of-age jukebox musical drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients. Together they've cooked up a heck of a block party. The show has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story, loosely inspired by Keys's life. Maleah Joi Moon makes a stunning debut as a 1990s teenager; Jessica Vosk is her protective mother, Brandon Victor Dixon is her absent father and Kecia Lewis is her teacher.—Adam Feldman

Who gets to be called a good guy, and who gets called a bad girl? That’s the subject of Kimberly Belflower’s explosive response to sexism on and beyond the stage. The play’s fuse is lit by Shelby (Sadie Sink), a student at a small-town Georgia high school who encourages her peers to challenge the conventional view of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt drama The Crucible. Belflower has a gift for teenage vernacular, and the pitch-perfect cast—directed with clear-eyed compassion by Danya Taymor—makes you believe in these promising students as they navigate a world obsessed with the danger of believing young women.—Raven Snook

First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by that radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives his considerable all. Michele Pawk, Emily Bergl, Gracie Lawrence and Erika Henningsen provide witty support as the women in Darin's life. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little and you swing along with the brassy band. Meanwhile, Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver's canny script also makes smart larger points about the escapism that entertainment can provide not just for the audience but for the performer: what it means to be a live show and, for some show people, what it means to be alive.—Adam Feldman

Director and 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.—Adam Feldman

Solea Pfeiffer and John Cardoza play lovers caught in a bad romance in this gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffed  adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers and drawing music from more than 75 pop hits, this jukebox megamix may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.—Adam Feldman

Writer-director Kip Williams adapts Oscar Wilde’s fantastical 1891 novel—a gothic meditation on the blurry lines that separate art from life, appearances from reality, body from soul—into a multimedia, multicharacter a solo show performed with astonishing stamina and skill by Sarah Snook. She plays the title character, who magically never loses his surpassing good looks even as a hidden portrait of him ages hideously; she also serves as the play's narrator and, very entertainingly, everyone else, often performing opposite prerecorded clips of herself in other guises. She’s largely acting for the cameras, not for the audience, but the show's embrace of artifice and self-reproduction as devices works because it mirrors Wilde's own.—Adam Feldman

Rupert Holmes pumps some Dixieland pizzazz into Gilbert and Sullivan's 1880 comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance in this lively adaptation, which moves the action from Cornwall to New Orleans. Scott Ellis directs a power cast that includes the colorful Ramin Karimloo and Jinkx Monsoon, the pluperfect Nicholas Barasch and the masterfully droll David Hyde Pierce as the befuddled Major-General. As the poet wrote: "The modern world is full of stress, so go and have a party, brah / And shake it like a necklace made of gaudy beads at Mardi Gras. / Enjoy this Broadway hybrid that is tuneful and poetical: / A most delightful model of a modern operettical."—Adam Feldman

This crowd-pleasing and uplifting show is in many ways a traditional Broadway musical—energetic, melodious, familiarly constructed—that celebrates traditional American values like loving your family and succeeding as an entrepreneur. But since most of its characters are undocumented Latina immigrants, this heir to Hairspray is also, unexpectedly, the most relevant musical of the year. Tatianna Córdoba plays a bright young woman in the 1980s whose mother (the wonderful Justina Machado) wants her to work for the family dressmaking business. Lisa Loomer and Nell Benjamin’s conventional but well-crafted script is matched to an accomplished score by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez that mixes theater and pop with appealing Mexican accents. Yes, the show’s style is unapologetically expansive, but this is Broadway, where a broad broad can be broad.—Adam Feldman

Who doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's zingy musical Six celebrates, in boisterous fashion, the union of English dynastic history and modern pop music. On a mock concert stage, the six wives of the 16th-century monarch Henry VIII air their grievances in song, and most of them have plenty to complain about. 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.—Adam Feldman

Jamie Lloyd’s very meta and very smart Broadway revival of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical stars the entrancing Nicole Scherzinger as faded film star Norma Desmond and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the handsome screenwriter drawn into her web. The show's tension between the real and the imaginary is expanded here into a conceptual exploration of the filmic in modern life, when the pictures are smaller than ever. (This Norma sometimes explicitly evokes a thirsty social-media personality.) Giant images of live video tug at your eye; you sometimes can’t help choosing them over the small, real person who is actually there. In this revival, that doesn’t feel like a gimmick or a distraction. It’s a new way to see an old dream.—Adam Feldman

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.—Adam Feldman