Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

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

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,...

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...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Stranger Things is happening. Nearly three years after plans were announced for a theatrical prequel to Netflix’s hit nostalgia-horror series, and 18 months after the debut of that prequel in London, the show has finally arrived on Broadway. While it calls itself The First Shadow, there’s nothing dark or stealthy about the massive production that is now possessing the Marquis Theatre, a second-floor hotel auditorium built Poltergeist-style on the graves of five old venues that were razed to make way for the Marriott. There’s something apt, inevitable even, about Stranger Things taking over this accursed space. Like it or not: It’s heeeee-eeeere. Directed by Stephen Daldry and co-directed by Justin Martin, Stranger Things announces its maximalist style from the outset with an eye-popping interdimensional disaster. It is 1943, and the U.S.S. Eldridge—yes, a J.K. Rowling–level pun on eldritch—is the subject of a secret experiment by a government outpost that I regret to inform you is named “Project Rainbow base Marquis.” The goal is to make the Eldridge invisible, but instead it moves to a different plane, as though tearing through a timespace map of the known world. Here be dragons, or rather demogorgons: slinky monsters with faces that open like carnivorous flowers. The ship’s captain stares into the Abyss, and the Abyss stares back.  Stranger Things: The First Shadow | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman When this cold open ends,...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Deep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa—the poor, scrappy Greasers and the rich, mean Socs (short for socialites)—has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage, just as it did in the most recent Broadway revival of West Side Story. The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other. This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers. But it may also be significant that the rumble contains no dialogue or songs. Elsewhere, despite some lovely music and several strong performances, The Outsiders tends to attenuate the characters and situations it draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation. Action, in this show, speaks better than words.  The Outsiders | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Like Hinton’s novel, which she wrote when she was a teenager herself, The Outsiders is narrated by the 14-year-old...

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...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Hell’s Kitchen, whose score is drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys, could easily have gone down in flames. Jukebox musicals often do; songs that sound great on the radio can’t always pull their weight onstage. But playwright Kristoffer Diaz, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have found the right recipe for this show—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients—and they've cooked up a heck of a block party.  Inspired by Keys’s life, Hell’s Kitchen has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon—in a stunningly assured debut—plays Ali, a beautiful but directionless mixed-race teenager growing up in midtown’s artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the 1990s, a period conjured winsomely and wittily by Dede Ayite’s costumes. The issues Ali faces are realistic ones: tensions with her protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean); disappointment with the charming musician father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), who yo-yos in and out of their lives; a crush on a thicc, slightly older street drummer, Knuck (Chris Lee); a desire to impress a stately pianist, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who lives in the building.  Hell’s Kitchen | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin The show’s chain of Keys songs is its most obvious selling point, but it could also have been a limitation. Musically, the tunes are not built for drama—they tend to sit in a leisurely R&B groove—and...

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More gave up the ghost last fall after 14 years, but fans of that immersive theatrical experience have a new show to tide them over: a smaller-scale work by Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett that invites audience members to move barefoot through a labyrinthine installation inspired by Barry Pain’s 1901 gothic short story “The Moon-Slave," as adapted by the acclaimed British writer Daisy Johnson. Participants wear headphones and are guided through the 50-minute experience at the Shed via narration in the voice of Helena Bonham Carter. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses. The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman   The Great Gatsby often sounds great, too. Its lead actors, Jeremy Jordan as the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as his dream girl, Daisy Buchanan, have deluxe voices, and the score gives them plenty to sing. Jason Howland’s music dips into period pastiche for the group numbers—there are lots of them, set to caffeinated choreography by Dominique Kelley—but favors Miss Saigon levels of sweeping pop emotionality for the main lovers; the old-fashioned craft of Nathan Tysen’s lyrics sits comfortably, sometimes even cleverly, on the melodies.  In other regards, this Gatsby is less great. Book writer Kait Kerrigan has taken some admirably ambitious swings in adapting material that has defeated many would-be adapters before her. She cuts much of Gatsby’s backstory,...

Broadway review by 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—which premiered last season at the Atlantic Theatre, and has now moved to Broadway—is to enter a world thick with history that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know it already. While you’re there, though, you don’t need to think too hard. Just give yourself over to the sounds that pour out from the stage.  The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. It became a worldwide sensation upon its release, and was the subject of a 1999 documentary film by Wim Wenders. Marco Ramirez’s stage version has a less factual bent. “Some of what follows is true,” says the bandleader Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), who was instrumental in assembling the album’s participants. “Some of it only feels true.”  Buena Vista Social Club | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with...

Broadway review by Raven Snook It is 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, and an 11th-grade honors English class in small-town Georgia is studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s classic drama about the Salem witch trials. Their popular and engaging teacher is Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), who sparks many a teenage crush. Goofy, empathetic, devout and married with a baby on the way, he's supportive of the girls in his class; in fact, when they decide to start a feminist club, it's Mr. Smith—not their inexperienced and fainthearted female guidance counselor, Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs)—who champions the idea. He’s an ally, a friend and a sounding board: in other words, a good guy.   But who gets to be called a good guy—and, conversely, who gets called a bad girl? That’s the subject of John Proctor Is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower’s explosive response to sexism on and beyond the stage. The play’s fuse is lit by Shelby (Sadie Sink), a student who returns to school after leaving it abruptly months earlier in a cloud of gossip and rumor. As the alleged sexual misconduct of multiple men in their rural community comes to light, Shelby encourages her peers to challenge the conventional view of The Crucible’s protagonist, John Proctor, as a hero. In Miller’s allegory of McCarthyism, Proctor stands for integrity and honor: "How may I live without my name?” he asks when refusing to give the false confession that could save his life. “I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"...

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...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Tituss Burgess takes over the role of Mary Todd Lincoln starting June 23, followed by Jinkx Monsoon starting August 4.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering...

The Drilling Company's beloved Shakespeare in the Parking Lot returns for its 30th season of free classical theater on the Lower East Side. This year's offering, directed by Hamilton Clancy, is the Bard's perennially popular forest farce, in which a bossy Bottom falls into a wild world of drugged-up fairy sex; the company last mounted this show in 2016. (Seating is provided for the first audience members to claim it, but spectators can also bring their own chairs.) 

Looking for a little escapism? The Italian escape artist Lord Nil keeps you on the edge of your seat as he narrowly survives—or will he?!—such perils as boiling grease, an axe and a circular saw. Each escape is connected thematically to one of the old seven deadlies, and his battery of pulchritudinous male and female assistants seems likely to induce at least one of them.    To purchase... Code TIMEOUTNIL Link:  https://www.telecharge.com/Lord-Nil-7-Deadly-Sins-tickets?AID=OBW001466605&MC=TIMEOUTNIL&utm_source=discount&utm_campaign=LordNil7DeadlySinsSS&utm_medium=other&utm_id=OBW001466605 Save Up To $30 Valid 7/21/25 - 8/31/25 $99 Full Price + $12 fees = $111    Discounted to $69 + $12 Telecharge Fees = $81 (all in price) $69 Full Price + $12 fees = $81    Discounted to $49 + $9 Telecharge Fees = $58 (all in price)   LORD NIL: 7 DEADLY SINS The Most Dangerous Show in New York   As Seen on America's Got Talent "Amazing, Incredible... One of the maddest things I've ever seen." -Simon Cowell "I have never seen anything like this!" -Heidi Klum   SAVE UP TO $30 ON SELECT SEATS! 75 minutes of Pure Adrenaline! This year, NY becomes the stage for something darker, deeper — and more real. Lord Nil, international escape artist and master of ritual performance, presents 7 Deadly Sins — a theatrical escape experience rooted in ancient symbolism, raw physical danger, and psychological suspense. What begins as a performance quickly becomes a test of will. Of fear. Of what it means...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, the comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II, has arrived to storm the shores of Broadway with plenty of backup. Critics in the U.K. have loved it; it has been billed as “the best-reviewed show in West End history”—Time Out London’s own Andrzej Lukowski called it “a glorious spoof”—and it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The show is the debut offering of a young comedy-theater troupe called SpitLip, which has been performing variations of it since 2019, and local critics were clearly rooting for it. (“It’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company,” wrote Lukowski. “This is very much their triumph.”) Perhaps, in riding this wave of praise to Broadway, the production has lost some of what made the operation itself an unlikely success in 1943: the element of surprise.  Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Like Six, the show is an irreverent look at English history, devised by university chums, that worked its way up from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End; like Dead Outlaw, which will also open on Broadway this season, it features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of...

Theater review by Raven Snook Lick it up, baby: The high-school-is-hell musical Heathers is back to take another shot at being popular. In case you are unfamiliar with either the 1989 movie or its 2014 musical adaptation, the story centers on not-so-mean girl Veronica Sawyer (played here by & Juliet's Lorna Courtney), who's doing her best to survive the indignities of 1980s adolescence in Ohio. In a bid for social stature, she falls into the orbit of three beautiful bullies, all of whom are named Heather. But when Veronica meets J.D. (Casey Likes)—a mysterious rebel in a trench coat and mullet—she starts dreaming of freeing Westerburg High School from the Heathers’ well-manicured talons. What she doesn’t know, at least at first, is that J.D. is not just a bad boy, but a truly bad seed. Like the film, which developed a fervid Gen X cult following, Heathers The Musical needed time to catch on. Although its initial Off Broadway run at New World Stages lasted only a few months, it has since become a hit in the U.K., where it has had multiple West End productions; and thanks to a decade of cast recordings and TikToks, it has spawned legions of Gen Z fans, dubbed Corn Nuts after one character's dying words. The musical has even managed to win over some cynical fans of the darker-hued film, including me, who didn’t like it at first pass; I've come to appreciate its lighter, pop earworm–driven take. (Veronica and J.D.'s teenage angst still has a body count, but when the victims...

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

The British conjurer Jamie Allan (iMagician), a Houdini aficionado who has made his reputation by infusing newfangled technology and emotionally charged storyelling into old-school tricks, appears at New World Stages for a limited run. This latest showcase is directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond.    

After taking last summer off for renovations to the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the Public Theater's cherished annual series Shakespeare in the Park returns with one of the Bard's most popular plays: an ever-popular comedy of cross-purposes, cross-dressing and cross-gartered socks. Resident director Saheem Ali (Buena Vista Social Club) directs a starry cast: Lupita Nyong’o and her brother Junior Nyong'o as Viola and Sebastian, nearly-identical siblings separated by a shipwreck; Sandra Oh as the mourning noblewoman who takes a shine to Viola when she is dressed as a boy; and Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Khris Davis, Bill Camp, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Moses Sumney as various figures in the lovely Olivia's orbit. Tickets are, as always, free; see our complete guide to Shakespeare in the Park tickets for details.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. 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 one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.   Unlike most other jukebox-musical sources, Darin doesn’t come with a long catalogue of signature hits. If you know his work, it’s probably from four songs he released in 1958 and 1959: the novelty soap bubble “Splish Splash,” the doo-wop bop “Dream Lover” and two European cabaret songs translated into English, “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife.”  What he does have is a tragically foreshortened life. “Bobby wanted nothing more than to entertain, wherever he could, however he could, in whatever time he had, which it turns out was very little,” Groff tells us at the top of the show. “He died at 37.” Darin’s bum heart—so weak that doctors thought he wouldn’t survive his teens—is the musical’s countdown clock; it beats like a ticking time bomb.  Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s agile...