The best Broadway shows to see right now

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. Director Sam Pinkleton never lets the comic energy flag; everything comes together to create an instant classic, and the funniest stage comedy in years. Maya Rudolph currently stars as Mary, with Phillip James Brannon and Cheyenne Jackson as the main men in her life.—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

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

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

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, currently played by Jeremy Jordan. 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: 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

Adapted from the 1987 coming-of-fangs film about teenagers fighting a vampire infestation, The Lost Boys is out for blood: No other new tuner this season has been so ambitious in scope or spectacular in stagecraft. Directed by Michael Arden and designed by Dane Laffrey, the musical lowers its stakes in the second half, but it succeeds to an impressive extent where earlier vampire-themed musicals have merely sucked. LJ Benet and Benjamin Pajak play young brothers in immortal peril; Shoshanna Bean is their mom, and the charismatic Ali Louis Bourzgui is a platinum-blond baddie.—Adam Feldman

In Levi Holloway's horror play, a cleverly executed variation on the film franchise, Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight play spouses who have moved from Chicago to London to make a fresh start. The slow-burn story ramps up the suspense by allowing us into their coziest moments before plunging them into a supernatural hellscape; as we watch them lose their grips, and the liveness of theater heightens the tension by creating a kind of mass hysteria where even innocuous bumps elicit shrieks that evolve into the relief of communal laughter. The whole show is a scream.—Raven Snook

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—spawned a film that became the ultimate midnight movies. Sam Pinkleton directs the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival, which features an eclectic and high-wattage cast. British heartthrob Luke Evans stars as the show's "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.—Adam Feldman

Cinco Paul's delightful TV spoof of classic Broadway musicals leaps to the stage in a highly enjoyable production directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli. Under the protective cover of parody, the show delivers real pleasures of old-school musical comedy: catchy melodies with clever lyrics, laughs on the regular, a little romance and a cast of seasoned pros in big, joyous production numbers. Sara Chase and Alex Brightman play modern normies who stumble upon a village governed by tropes of yesteryear; the loaded cast includes Ana Gasteyer, Brad Oscar, Isabelle McCalla, Max Clayton, Ivan Hernandez, Ann Harada and the scene-gobbling McKenzie Kurtz.—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

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

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