Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant hits the current historical moment like a targeted strike. The play unfolds on a single afternoon, interrupted only by intermission, at the English country home of Roald Dahl. It is the summer of 1983, and the beloved children’s author has come under fire for his review of a book about Israel’s siege of West Beirut, in which Dahl opined of the Jews that “never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Rosenblatt began writing his play in 2018, five years before the October 7 attacks that would prompt both a wave of Israeli military action and a spike in anti-Zionism that has often blurred with—or overtly embraced—antisemitism. Giant couldn’t be timelier: It arrives on Broadway in the same month as a new Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.  The play’s topicality is only partially anesthetized by the historical distance that separates us from its story. Back at the Dahl house, the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach—played superbly by master thespian John Lithgow—is examining the proofs of his latest project, The Witches, as those in his orbit try to convince him to apologize for his comments about the Jews or at least walk them back a bit. These include his flinty but gracious fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), and his accommodating British publisher,...

Theater review by Raven SnookLibby Carr's achingly humane Calf Scramble is set in a sweltering barn where the cattle aren’t the only ones feeling penned in. Five teenage girls in Huntsville, Texas, are competing to win prize money by raising calves for their Future Farmers of America projects in 2007. The confident Vivvy (Marvelyn Ramirez), bred on a ranch, is the group’s de facto leader; her happy acolytes include the sassy preacher's daughter Anna Lee (Ferin Bergen), the ultra-devout Maren (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) and the accommodating El (Gabriela Veciana). But El's ambitious and overcommitted bestie, Sofi (Elisa Tarquinio), isn't so easily corralled. Calf Scramble | Photograph: Courtesy James Leynse On Cate McCrae's woodchip-strewn set, cooled by four industrial fans, the girls bond and bicker (sometimes over liquor) as they tend to their heifers and haltingly discuss their faith, relationships and futures. Religion and prison rule their insular and conservative community, where everyone seems connected to an inmate or a corrections officer. The headstrong Sofi hopes that winning the calf contest could be her ticket out, but her cohorts have more domestic dreams, even the ones who are too scared to reveal their authentic selves for fear of the town's wrath. In a powerful piece of double casting, the five performers also play the calves. Guided by Caitlin Sullivan's assured direction and Hannah Garner's expressive movement, they fluidly transform from wranglers to...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The talk in Clare Barron’s icky, tender, gorgeous You Got Older is sometimes so small it nearly vanishes completely. Alia Shawkat plays Mae, a youngish lawyer whose life is in ruins—she has lost her job, her apartment and her boyfriend in one fell swoop—and who has moved back to rural Washington to spend time with her father (Peter Friedman). Between awkward pauses in the play’s opening scene, they discuss gardening, toothbrushes, sleeping arrangements; what they don’t discuss is his recent cancer diagnosis. You Got Older is less about disease than about the unease that surrounds it, and it beautifully captures elusive things about avoidance: It’s about the denial of death, but also the denial of living. You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin You Got Older mostly unfolds as well-observed comedy that often ventures into morbid territory. When Mae and her siblings—blunt older sister Hannah (a hilarious Nadine Malouf), amorphous middle brother Matthew (Misha Brooks) and excitable youngest sister Jenny (Nina White)—gather around their dad’s hospital bed, they spend their visit bickering, teasing and commiserating about the off-putting family odor they share: “Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg.” A similar sense of bodily dysfunction informs the flirtation between Mae and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), a former schoolmate she encounters at a local bar; she shares details of her painful rash, and he reveals that he is into that sort...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (this play i read in high school), the Chorus has an uncanny encounter with a teenage girl on an airplane. This Chorus is nicknamed Dicey, and is played with perforated steeliness by Celia Keenan-Bolger; the girl, a student played by Susannah Perkins, is reading Antigone, Sophocles’s tragedy of protest and punishment in ancient Thebes. Antigone’s behavior in the face of punishment has haunted Dicey throughout her life: an implicit spirit of reproach to her own lack of courage. She finds herself explaining, she says, “how literary characters can stalk you sometimes.”  Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The sense of being shadowed by Antigone may feel familiar to New York theatergoers. Variations on her story are everywhere now. She was a side character in Robert Icke’s Oedipus on Broadway; Alexander Zeldin's modern British take on her, The Other Place, just closed at the Shed, but Jean Anouilh’s 1944 version is at the Flea and Barbara Barclay’s Antigone in Analysis begins next week at La MaMa. The challenge resides in finding ways to adapt a 2,500–year-old tragedy—in which Antigone’s cause relates to the burial of her disgraced brother—to modern purposes. The girl on the plane, for one, is unimpressed with the Sophocles original. “Is it even about her?” she complains with with insouciant directness. “It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.” Dicey,...

Theater review by Raven Snook If you feel stressed and overworked, the members of the Australian performance collective Pony Cam can relate. Burnout Paradise is their way of transforming the Sisyphean hamster wheel of modern life into exhilarating entertainment. As an onstage clock ticks down, four athletic actors—some of them noticeably injured—attempt to complete a series of tasks while running on treadmills. Their assignments range from the everyday (shaving, waxing, shampooing) to the much more ambitious (performing Shakespeare, filling out a grant application, cooking a three-course meal). Straining to do it all, they depend on audience volunteers to help out by retrieving stray tomatoes, playing bingo, shooting hoops, even dancing at an impromptu rave. Burnout Paradise | Photograph: Courtesy Austin Ruffer On paper, Burnout Paradise may seem like a show that, as though on a treadmill itself, is fated to go nowhere. But in practice, it is both an amusing indictment of our soul-crushing go-go-go ethos and a gleeful conjuring of community. Those who choose to take part in the challenges seem to have a blast; even just watching, you find yourself surprisingly invested in the ever-mounting chaos. Organized into four 12-minute rounds, the show has the electric suspense of a sporting event: Will the performers complete their assignments and beat their record mileage before the buzzer sounds? If they don't, you can ask for a full refund, though it’s hard to imagine you’ll...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The story of Chess dates back to the 1980s, and so do the efforts to fix it. This overheated Cold War musical, by lyricist Tim Rice and ABBA songsmiths Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, began as a 1984 concept album (which yielded the unlikely radio hit “One Night in Bangkok”). But its original London production was a mess, and its 1988 Broadway incarnation, which framed the songs in a completely new book, closed in under two months. The script has been reworked countless times since then, as different writers keep moving its pieces around, trying to solve the large set of Chess problems. None have cracked it yet, and the show’s latest revisal, with yet another completely new book, inspires little hope that anyone will.  Chess | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “No one’s way of life is threatened by a flop,” sings the chorus in what is now the show’s opening number, and while that sentiment has a ring of wishful thinking here, it does speak to a certain strain of showtune culture. Many musicals that are not initially successful attract passionate fandoms—perhaps all the more passionate for their underdog spirit—and subsequent versions of such shows are sometimes markedly better (like the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along or the charming current production of The Baker’s Wife). That is not the case with Chess. The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful...

Theater review by Tim Teeman  At the very start of Public Charge, a 6-year-old Julissa Reynoso tries to leave her native Dominican Republic in 1981 to join her mother in the Bronx. But a consular officer has other ideas: The Public Charge Proviso, he points out, stipulates that the sponsor of a person coming to the U.S. must possess “sufficient financial resources” that her mother does not possess. This key moment from Reynoso’s life—a collision between emotion and bureaucracy—implies a promising theme for Public Charge, Reynoso’s autobiographical drama (co-written with Michael J. Chepiga) about a political crisis that she had to solve as a senior diplomat in the Obama Administration. But the play seems to misrecognize the potential of its own opening scene. It tables the emotion to focus on the bureaucracy. Public Charge | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The play’s main story begins in 2009, when Reynoso—now a Harvard-educated lawyer, and played with brisk charm by Zabryna Guevara—begins working in Hilary Clinton’s State Department. It goes on to depict what Reynoso may see as the crowning achievement of her five-year stint at State: the complex negotiations that led to the release from a Cuban prison of an American aid worker named Alan Gross. (The Cubans wanted America to release prisoners in return.) It’s a hostage crisis of sorts, but without the tension and high stakes that term implies; the tone is dry and administrative.  Public Charge | Photograph: Courtesy...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How well do you know Sean Hayes? You probably think of him as a master of broad comedy, as he demonstrated in 11 seasons as Jack on Will & Grace (and as Jerry in Martin and Lewis and Larry in The Three Stooges). Maybe you enjoy his good-natured enthusiasm on the podcast Smartless. Maybe you saw him quip, scowl and play classical piano in his Tony-winning portrayal of Oscar Levant in Broadway’s Good Night, Oscar. Even so, you might still be surprised by how well he plays a basically regular guy in The Unknown: Elliott, a somewhat isolated, somewhat depressed, mostly sober middle-aged writer who has been having a hard time devising a screenplay, perhaps because his own life has so little drama.   David Cale’s one-man play whips some up for him. While clearing his head at a rural retreat, Elliott hears someone singing a love song about romantic disappointment—a song that Elliott wrote years earlier for a musical. When he returns to the city, a seemingly chance encounter with a handsome Texan at a West Village gay bar leads to a growing fear that he is being shadowed by a marginal figure from his past—and/or, perhaps, by that man’s identical twin. On Hayes’s old sitcom, this scenario might have been played for laughs: Jack and the Bein’ Stalked. Instead, it spirals into a dark-hued exploration of obsession and the porous line that separates life from art.  The Unknown | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Elliott's journey, however, doesn’t...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Christmas is just around the corner, and Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers), a 10-year-old Black girl in 1987, has a modest wish list for Santa: “I want a Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.” None of these is likely to be provided by her financially strapped single father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), a former Black Panther who owns a roller rink in the south side of Syracuse, New York. But through her participation in a children’s choir called the Seedlings of Peace, Meek has started writing to a Soviet stranger. (“War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”) And her pen pal in the Urals soon sends Meek a very special Speak + Spell: one that not only teaches her the Russian translations of useful terms like “revolution” and “armageddon” and “government official,” but also recruits her into a scheme that may affect upcoming disarmament talks between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Spasibo, comrade!  Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova That’s just a taste of the mayhem wrought by the playwright and composer Ro Reddick in Cold War Choir Practice, an offbeat dark comedy that may be set in the 1980s but whose genre-fluid blend of surrealist humor, satirical songs and looming menace recalls the 1970s plays of John Guare. Reddick’s brand of ridiculous, though, adds a current of racial conflict, as reflected in the tense relationship...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] 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,...

The Elizabethan equivalent of a slasher film, Titus Andronicus is the Bard's goriest horror show, in which cycles of violence and revenge leave no body part unhacked: The title character serves his enemy a pie that is stuffed with the flesh of her sons, and that's just the tip of the viceberg. Broadway's favorite baddie, the deeply sonorous Patrick Page (Hadestown), stars in a production directed by Jesse Berger for his often bloody-minded classical company, Red Bull Theater. The company also includes McKinley Belcher III, Francesca Faridany and Enid Graham.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Masquerade wth director Diane Paulus on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly altered to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex,...

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...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman [Related: An in-depth discussion of Ragtime with director Lear deBessonet on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] A little-known fact about the anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman is that she dabbled in theater criticism. In a series of 1914 lectures, collected in book form as The Social Significance of Modern Drama, she assessed such writers as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw through the lens of their revolutionary potential. Modern drama, she opined, “mirrors every phase of life and embraces every strata of society, showing each and all caught in the throes of the tremendous changes going on, and forced either to become part of the process or be left behind.” That is a good description, as it happens, of the 1998 musical Ragtime, which is being revived on Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater in a first-class production directed by Lear deBessonet and anchored by the superb actor-singer Joshua Henry. The show is a vast panorama of American life in the turbulent early years of the 20th century, as illustrated by the intersecting stories of three fictional families—those of a moneyed white businessman, a Jewish immigrant and a successful Black pianist—as well as a clutch of real-life figures from the period, including Goldman herself. It is hard to know what she would make of this grand musical pageant. Perhaps she would admire the production’s epic sweep, stirring score and excellent cast; perhaps she might shudder at the lavish...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

Manhattan Theatre Club continues its long and very fruitful relationship with the excellent playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Kimberly Akimbo) by mounting the world premiere of his latest play: a comedy about a neighborhood association thrown into internecine turmoil when a newcomer suggests adding a stop sign to one of the local corners. The killer emsemble cast—directed by Kenny Leon (Purlie Victorious)—comprises Richard Thomas, Anika Noni Rose, Margaret Colin, Ricardo Chavira, Michael Esper, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Jeena Yi, Kayli Carter and the priceless Marylouise Burke. 

Having won a Tony Award for Merrily We Roll Along, Daniel Radcliffe returns to make more magic in the Broadway premiere of Duncan Macmillan's interactive dark comedy about a British man who makes lists of the world's good things, both to ease his mum's depression and to ward off his own. The show ran Off Broadway in 2014 with Jonny Donahoe, who also contributed to the script; this version is co-directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin (Wolf Hall). Click here for our full Broadway review.

Theater review by Tim Teeman  When you enter the Claire Tow Theater to see Night Side Songs, a welcoming cast member provides you with a songbook so that you can join along when prevailed upon to sing. If you’re the kind of person who freezes with horror at the very mention of audience participation, fear not: The spotlight will never fall on you. The scattered moments of group song that emerge as the heart of the show are entirely communal. This original musical, which features text and a folk score by the brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour (We Live in Cairo) and was developed with director Taibi Magar, is about living in the shadow of terminal illness. Drawn from real-life testimonies of patients, caregivers, doctors and nurses, the show focuses on the experience of Yasmine (Brooke Ishibashi), joining her on a physical and emotional rollercoaster that begins with the shock of her cancer diagnosis. Along for the ride are Yasmine’s quirky, supportive husband (Jonathan Raviv), her gay doctor and former eighth-grade crush (Robin de Jesús), her nurse (Kris Saint-Louis) and her impossible but fiercely loving mom (Mary Testa, commanding as ever). Alex Bechtel supplies precise musical direction and piano arrangements; Justin Stasiw’s sound design and Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting—which includes a stunning circular orb of empty bottles—are also impressive. Night Side Songs | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin Night Side Songs takes its title from a line in Susan Sontag’s...

The Encores! concert series's 2026 season continues with a very welcome staging of one of best-scored musicals of the 2000s: Michael John LaChiusa's adaptation (co-written with George C. Wolfe) of Joseph Moncure March's poem about a Jazz Age fête that goes terribly out of tune—not to be confused with Andrew Lippa's Off Broadway version of the same poem, which debuted the same year and which Encores! presented in 2015. Boop!'s Jasmine Amy Rogers continues her meteoric rise as Queenie, the party's hostess, and Tina's Adrienne Warren is Kate, the frenemy who throws the night into mayhem by bringing a too-attractive date; the large ensemble also includes Jordan Donica, Jelani Alladin, Lesli Margherita, Claybourne Elder, Andrew Kober and—in a brilliant stroke of casting—Tonya Pinkins (the original cast) in the role first played by Eartha Kitt. The Chicago-based director Lili-Anne Brown oversees the mounting mayhem, and Daryl Waters (Pirates!) is the guest conductor.

The Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza’s version of Hamlet combines Shakespeare’s masterpiece with personal anecdotes and reflections from the show's eight actors, all of whom have Down’s Syndrome. Director Chela De Ferrari marshals the spectacle, which is performed in Spanish with English supertitles. The production was part of the Big Umbrella Festival at Lincoln Center last year, and Theatre for a New Audience is bringing it back for a longer run—providing space not just for a new audience but for a relatively new kind of performer.

The unassuming-looking but keenly incisive playwright Wallace Shawn's on-again, off-again 50-year collaboration with the director André Gregory has yielded, among other things, the fascinatingly unconventional films My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street and the dystopian 2000 masterpiece The Designated Mourner. They reunite for Shawn's newest work: a sharp-elbowed look at a successful writer and the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle on his wife, their son and the writer's longtime mistress—played, respectively, by the very auspicious quartet of Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Hope Davis. (On select Sunday and Monday nights throughout the run, Shawn performs his dark 1991 monologue The Fever.)

John Kelly, whose career as a performance artist stretches back more than 40 years, plays the outsider artist and graphomaniac Henry Darger—a Chicago menial worker whose enormous trove of strange and sometimes disturbing paintings, illustrations and literary efforts came to light mostly after his 1973 death—in the word premiere of a work conceived and directed by the dance-theater eminence Martha Clarke (The Garden of Earthly Delights). The show's script has been adapted from Darger's copious writings by the veteran playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart). Read the full review here.

Playwright Barbara Barclay reimagines the story of the irrepressible Theban protester Antigone—who has understandably complex feelings about Oedipus, her father—in a version that centers her relationship with Jocasta, her mother (and grandmother). Alessandra Lopez and Oh, Mary!'s Bianca Leigh play the principal roles; Peculiar Works Project's Ralph Lewis directs the world premiere at, appropriately enough, La MaMa. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out. Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stops-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped...

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...