What to See on (and Off)(and OffOff) Broadway

November 28, 2024

Let Vulture’s theater desk be your guide.

What should I see this weekend? Welcome to Vulture’s theater hub, where we’ve collected our criticism and assorted other coverage in one space to provide you a satisfying answer to that question. Below, you will find synopses of our reviews for every show on Broadway and a selection of Off and Off–Off Broadway work, with weekly recommendations by our critics, Sara Holdren and Jackson McHenry. (The lists are in reverse chronological order by opening date. Shows that have not yet been reviewed appear with short preview summaries.)

If you want even more theater in your life, keep up on news, gossip, and discussions by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, Stage Whisperer.

Legend
🏆 Won a Tony for Best Musical or Play (incl. Best Revival)
🕗 Limited Engagement
🍭 Kid-Friendly
♻️ Revival
🎤 Solo Show
⌛️ Closing This Week

Recommended This Week

Open Mic Night

Mabou Mines (150 First Avenue)

By Sara Holdren

Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey make wily, vulnerable, often unsettling work that blurs the edges of their own identities. They’re entirely present in it, curious about each other and unsparing of themselves, subtly experimenting with truth, persona, and shadow. Right now, for a few more days, you can catch their wonderful Open Mic Night running at Mabou Mines/PSNY as part of the Under the Radar Festival. It’s a dry, funny, and very tender show — perhaps surprisingly so, given some of Peter and Julia’s pieces, but, considering the story they’re telling this time around, not surprising at all really. Open Mic Night is a eulogy for an imaginary illegal DIY performance space. You know the place, even though it never existed. “Over 10,000 beers were illegally sold there,” Julia tells us, delicately hunched over a microphone, her voice and face unreadable. The show flickers between her wry commentary and Peter’s frenetic, surreptitiously generous crowd work, and underneath the laughter are currents of grief and yearning — a toast, at once solemn and unsentimental, to all things grungy and fleeting. You’ll get the chance to pay a few bucks (perhaps illegally) for a beer from a cooler, and you may well leave, like me, homesick for a place you know very well, and have never been.

🎶

Broadway Musicals

How to Dance in Ohio

Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Belasco Theatre (111 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 10, 2023

“Isn’t it nice to know what’s happening?,” the autistic cast members playing autistic characters announce at the top of How to Dance in Ohio, a musical that’s at its best when it’s carrying on in a spirit of inclusion. Based on the documentary of the same name and staged with autistic audience members in mind, it depicts the experiences of young adults in a group-therapy program getting ready for a spring formal. But while the material has potential, the execution is unsteady: There’s an unmemorable pop-rock score and a book that’s full of obvious plot contrivances, and the clichéd direction cribs from other recent issue-driven musicals. It may be that the show was rushed to Broadway too quickly, and could have used more time in development. Still, even when the show itself becomes rote and didactic, those cast members deliver winning, human-scale performances.

➼ Review: The Too-Steady Charm of How to Dance in Ohio

Spamalot

♻️
Running time: 2:20 with intermission
St. James Theatre (246 West 44th St.)
Opened November 16, 2023

In a Broadway overrun with recycled cinematic IP, the revival of Eric Idle and John Du Prez’s Spamalot is a big, fat, raspberry-blowing bait-and-switch. And that’s a good thing. Given that reciting bits of Holy Grail is practically an NCAA sport, a stage adaptation would seem to be headed straight for the danger zone — the place where a play becomes a dead parrot — but Spamalot’s smart move was to translate Grail’s cheeky meta-ness into a new medium. The movie knew it was a movie; the musical knows it’s a musical, and goes coconuts-to-the-wall to send up and celebrate that fact. Of course, you get all the recitable bits too — they couldn’t very well not — and in director/choreographer Josh Rhodes’s splashy production, the pleasure of those bits waxes and wanes. But then it starts raining kicklines, ostrich feathers, tap and tinsel, and more references than you could shake a severed arm at. By the time Sir Galahad (a very funny Nik Walker) and the Lady of the Lake (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, whose voice is a 16-ton weight made of Silly Putty: massive and infinitely malleable) sailed in together on a gondola — with the image of a hulking chandelier descending in the backdrop of always-popping projections — I was, giddily, on board. I mean, what are you gonna do, miss the boat?

➼ Review: Spamalot Returns, and It’s Not Dead Yet

Harmony

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Ethel Barrymore Theatre (243 W. 47th St.)
Opened November 13, 2023

In this musical, the songs are by Barry Manilow; the setting is Germany in the years before World War II; and the tonal incongruity you might deduce from that juxtaposition is, mostly, the point. Harmony takes for its subject the real-life Comedian Harmonists, a singing sextet formed in Berlin at the end of the 1920s, who toured the world until the Nazi regime turned on them. Directed by Warren Carlyle, the show tends to emphasize the goofy, re-creating the crew’s winningly sophomoric onstage antics, sometimes at the expense of its other elements. Narrated by Into the Woods’s Chip Zien, who plays an older version of one of the Harmonists, Harmony follows a rote retelling of history—though given the current events that surround the show’s arrival on Broadway, it hits, at least glancingly, at compelling unease.

➼ Review: The Day the Clowns Cried

Gutenberg! The Musical!

🕗
Running time: 2:00 with intermission
James Earl Jones Theatre (138 W. 48th St.)
Opened October 12, 2023. Through January 28, 2024.

The long-running early-aughts spoof about two New Jersey doofuses with let’s-make-a-Broadway-musical dreams is itself now on Broadway. Written by Beetlejuice’s Anthony King and former New York critic Scott Brown and directed by Alex Timbers, it stars Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, wonderfully matched and, it appears, having a real blast with each other. Their comic timing is wet-suit tight, their chemistry indisputable, their energy manic but precise and, crucially, unflagging. The show (like the entire genre of theater spoofery) sometimes feel a little dippy and indulgent, and Gutenberg! does occasionally reveal that it’s a one-act extended sketch grown past its natural scale, although the stars are almost able to disguise that fact by throwing buckets of geek charisma. Which isn’t to say it’s not funny! Especially if you prefer your sticks slappy, it is. The show’s primary building block is the running gag … and the walking gag, and the pogo-sticking gag, and an extremely elaborate trucker-hat gag — basically any gag King and Brown can bring back around for a second, third, eighth, ninth outing. “Madcap” is given new meaning by the hat-scapades in particular, which include all manner of creatively rendered crowd scenes and kick lines.

➼ Review: Gutenberg! The Musical!’s Broadway Dreams Almost Come True

Merrily We Roll Along

🕗 ♻️
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Hudson Theatre (141 W. 44th St.)
Opened October 10, 2023. Through July 7, 2024.

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s backward-through-time musical—an epic flop in 1981 despite its gorgeous score, well-wrought characters, and run of world-class songs — is mythic among musical-comedy enthusiasts: When on earth will this show get the production it deserves? When Maria Friedman’s production ran last year at New York Theatre Workshop, starring Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe, most signs suggested that it could finally be the one (especially because of Mendez, who was excellent as the saddening, difficult Mary Flynn). The hype was legit, and Friedman and her ensemble render the show exquisite. The cynicism and jadedness that have tended to hang in a sour cloud around the backwards-told story of the gradual selling out (or not) of three big-dreaming artistic friends — they’ve mellowed into honest heartache. Something has shifted, a key has subtly but significantly changed, and the show’s bitterness has been lovingly infused with sweet.

➼ Review: Here’s to Them. Who’s Like Them? Damn Few.
➼ Review: What’s to Discuss, Old Friends? Merrily We Roll Along Is Back.

Back to the Future

Running time: 2:40 with intermission
Winter Garden Theatre (1634 Broadway, nr. 49th St.)
Opened August 3, 2023

The three Back to the Future films are completely infused into American moviegoers’ consciousness. The musical and its actors labor under that weight, and instead of commenting on the originals, they deliver a beat-by-beat translation of its set pieces. Big projection screens dominate the set, providing for cuts between Doc and Marty, the score is basically the one you know, and the actors are really there only to sit in a car and on a ledge and shout lines you’ll recognize. But let’s be clear: Ticket sales, in the early going at least, took off like a flying DeLorean.

➼ Review: You Made a Musical … Out of a DeLorean?

Shucked

Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Nederlander Theatre (208 W. 41st St.)
Opened April 4, 2023. Through January 14, 2024.

It’s a musical about … corn. There are jokes about corn and songs about corn and puns about corn often containing even more jokes about corn, and Shucked succeeds by keeping so hyperfocused on its aims that you can’t think about anything else. Led by a creative team that includes Nashville songwriters Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark and New York theater folk including book writer Robert Horn (of Tootsie) and director Jack O’Brien (whose career covers everything from Hairspray to lot of Tom Stoppard), Shucked is, broadly, a parable about city folk learning to appreciate the corn-fed wisdom of people in the heartland (and vice versa). Shucked wants to bring the country together over corn — both the food and type of comedy. To that end, it goes in one end and out the other wholly itself.

➼ Review: At Shucked, the Corniness Is as High as an Elephant’s Eye

Sweeney Todd

♻️
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (205 W. 46th St.)
Opened March 26, 2023

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Victorian gothic masterwork has been revived on Broadway twice since premiering in 1979, both times on a smaller scale than Hal Prince’s megagrand original. Now director Thomas Kail has ratcheted Sweeney all the way back up with a cast of 25, an immense set overshadowed by a crane, and a 26-player orchestra. He’s not presenting social commentary as much as he’s enveloping us in a collective nightmare. His London is full of phantoms slipping in and out of the fog — especially Josh Groban’s Sweeney, who glints but does not gleam in the darkness. Annaleigh Ashford, as Mrs. Lovett, has gone completely feral, happily committing above and beyond whatever’s asked, and it works well within the context of Kail’s heightened staging. (Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster will go in as replacement leads on February 9.)

➼ Review: A Sweeney Todd That Leans Into the Great Black Pit

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical

Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Broadhurst Theatre (235 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 4, 2022

A Beautiful Noise is the latest in a run of bio-musicals about singer-songwriters that seem to say, Have no fear — if you tire of the plot, please know that the songs you recognize will be coming soon. The whole experience is framed by conversations between an older Neil and his psychologist, who is pressuring him to open up by analyzing his lyrics. There’s poignancy to seeing a cloistered, depressive man like Diamond try to articulate how metaphorical storm clouds descend upon him whenever he’s not onstage. But because the focus here is really on the hits, there’s only so deep these analyses can go. And do they lead us around to “Sweet Caroline”? Oh yes, they do. Twice.

➼ Review: I Am, I Said (I Guess): A Beautiful Noise

Some Like It Hot

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Shubert Theatre (225 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 11, 2022. Through December 30, 2023.

Director Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls) has fitted together the stage adaptation of Billy Wilder’s film so tightly it’s nearly vacuum-sealed. The production is relentlessly technically dazzling: Scene flows into song flows into scene flows into key change flows into dramatic set change flows into inevitable comedic tap-dance sequence flows into key change and on and on. It’s most of the way to being an incredible musical: It just needs to, you know, make you feel anything more than abstract admiration. Everything goes so smoothly that there’s hardly any friction at all — and you need friction to generate heat.

➼ Review: Well, Nobody’s Perfect: Some Like It Hot on Broadway

& Juliet

Running time: 2:30, with intermission
Stephen Sondheim Theatre (124 W. 43rd St.)
Opened November 17, 2022

We all know Juliet dies at the end of Romeo & Juliet, but what if she didn’t? If you were to take that idea and infuse it with the feeling of getting day-drunk on cheap rosé, you’d get & Juliet. The aggressively effervescent musical endeavors to wash you away in the blushy delights of pop feminism and hit singles and middle-school-level Shakespeare jokes. When someone belts the chorus of “Since U Been Gone” at you, it is impossible not to feel intoxicated. In other moments, such as when any character tries to explain any part of the show’s plot, you may feel as if the world has started to spin desperately out of control. You’ll have that ephemeral thrill of being alive on a dance floor and end up with a hangover.

➼ Review: In & Juliet, Verona Goes Pop!

Kimberly Akimbo

🏆
Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Booth Theatre (222 W. 45th St.)
Opened November 10, 2022

A peculiar pleasure in watching Kimberly Akimbo comes from thinking the musical could not possibly pull off what it is trying to accomplish and being proved wrong. The premise is at once straightforward and surreal: A 16-year-old girl is in high school in 1990s New Jersey, living with a rare disease that makes her age at four to five times the normal rate. Upon that, there are layers of absurdity: her kookily self-involved parents, a Greek chorus of classmates in show choir, her deliriously criminal aunt. By the time the script has introduced a plot involving check fraud, it seems nearly unstable. But then it all syncs up: The chaos of Kimberly Akimbo clicks into place, and the show reveals that it’s been dealing in simple, unbearable truths all along.

➼ Review: Kimberly Akimbo Skates Uptown, Anagrams Intact

MJ

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Neil Simon Theatre (250 W. 52nd St.)
Opened February 1, 2022

Is it possible to make a show about a man whose memory dwells under deep shadow? Of course. But you have to make it good. MJ, the Michael Jackson bio-musical, is on the defensive the entire time, making a pretense of telling the singer’s story while loudly and pointedly bracketing which parts of the story are available for sale. Jackson’s lyrics often contain complaint and justification, and the show picks up his frustration with the tabloids while using MTV journalists to frame and structure the story. The “plot,” so much as it exists, involves documentarians overhearing troubling conversations about Michael’s dependence on painkillers and their decision to use this information. Oh? It’s important to include the dark sides of a man’s character when you tell his story? The irony is so ripe here it has rotted.

➼ Review: MJ Exists in a Hyperbaric Chamber of Denial

Six

Running time: 1:20, no intermission
Lena Horne Theatre (256 W. 47th St.)
Opened October 3, 2021

Henry VIII’s sextet of wives perform in a battle set up like an American Idol competition in which the wife who suffered the most will win. To curry audience favor, each sings a song steeped in the style of one or more pop icons, like Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne. In the process, they attempt to claw back their history from that of their shared rotten husband. The political message is a little Easy-Bake, a little shallow, a little wishful — claim your power, ladies! Even if your reality is the headsman’s block! — but nobody’s going to this show to ponder the complexity of history. The point of Six is its escapism, and even its sheer brightness is cheering. This is one liberation in which you don’t have to lift a finger. Queens are doing it for themselves.

➼ Review: Pop Renaissance! Six: The Musical Fans Lose Their Heads Over Broadway Opening

Moulin Rouge!

🏆
Running time: 2:45 with intermission
Al Hirschfeld Theatre (302 W. 45th St.)
Opened July 25, 2019

For all its splashy, glittery, high-kicking, butt-cheek-baring, sword-swallowing maximalism, Moulin Rouge! is something more unsettling than not good. There’s a shapelessness about it, a weird enervation underneath the flash and bang. The show veers broadly away from its beloved-by-millennials-everywhere source material, which in itself is no crime. But the path its creators have taken is one long trip through the Kingdom of Pandering with multiple pit stops in the Meadows of Cutesiness and the Forest of Flat Characters. Everywhere it should be filthy, it’s scrubbed aggressively clean, yet somehow it’s still a hot mess.

➼ Review: Moulin Rouge! Is Broadway’s Biggest Karaoke Night

Hadestown

🏆
Running time: 2:25 with intermission
Walter Kerr Theatre (219 W. 48th St.)
Opened April 17, 2019

Like so many of its mythic antecedents, Hadestown is the product of much metamorphosis: It began as Anais Mitchell’s suite of songs intertwining the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone and grew into this production in collaboration with director Rachel Chavkin. The Broadway current manifestation is lush, vigorous, and formally exciting — and, in certain moments, witchily prescient. The show may read to some as a protest musical, and at times its stalwart “Do You Hear the People Sing?” earnestness is under-rousing. But as an intricate and gorgeous feat of songwriting, as a vehicle for dynamite performances, as a visionary and courageous experiment with form, Hadestown is cause for celebration. Reeve Carney recently wound up his seven years’ journey as Orpheus through its Canadian tryout and London and Broadway stints, replaced by Jordan Fisher; Ani DiFranco joins the production next February.

➼ Review: The Songwriting and Storytelling Tours de Force of Hadestown
➼ Jordan Fisher Will Look Back as the New Orpheus in Hadestown
➼ Ani DiFranco Is Heading Way Down to Hadestown on Broadway
➼ 126 Minutes With Ani DiFranco

Hamilton

🏆
Running time: 2:55 with intermission
Richard Rodgers Theatre (226 W. 46th St.)
Opened August 6, 2015

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s immense 2015 hit, reimagining the story of the American Revolution with mostly nonwhite actors and a unique and delicious cocktail of hip-hop and show tunes, is already a period piece—not of the late 18th century but the Obama era, when one could semi-seriously suggest that America’s racial wounds were healing. But even if its edge no longer gleams as it once did, and minus the uniquely talented original actors to whom the writing was custom-fitted, it’s still a breakthrough with a canonical set of songs and a closing number that reliably brings audiences to tears.

➼ Review: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton Already Feel Like They’re From Another Time
➼ A Long Talk With Lin-Manuel Miranda
➼ Brian d’Arcy James, Jonathan Groff, and Andrew Rannells on Playing Hamilton Fan Favorite King George III
➼ In the Room Where It Happens, Eight Shows a Week
➼ Nerding Out With Hamilton Musical Director, Alex Lacamoire

Aladdin

🍭
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
New Amsterdam Theatre (214 W. 42nd St.)
Opened March 20, 2014

For Aladdin, Disney’s team built on the take-no-chances, take-no-prisoners lessons of its Broadway predecessors to all but guarantee a quality hit. And Aladdin, for all its desert emptiness, plays by the rules. The trademark Disney tone is established as soon as the gorgeous curtain disappears, when Genie — a Cab Calloway type in spangly harem pants — arrives to host what amounts to a variety act at the Sands. (“Come for the hummus, stay for the floor show!”) Within seconds, the song “Arabian Nights” is setting the scene in the city of Agrabah (where “even the poor look fabulous”), introducing the main characters (urchin and princess), offering a plot synopsis (urchin loves princess), and demonstrating the Disney trick of kicking down the fourth wall with anachronistic jokes that bypass the kiddies on their way to adults.

➼ Review: Disney’s Same Old World, Back in Aladdin

The Book of Mormon

🏆
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Eugene O’Neill Theatre (230 W. 49th St.)
Opened March 24, 2011

Elder Price, a seemingly perfect young Mormon man, gets teamed up with the dorky and clingy Elder Cunningham for their mission assignment — an odd couple that proselytizes together. They practice ringing doorbells (the bravura introductory song “Hello”) to share the beliefs of the Latter Day Saints, but when they get shipped to Uganda, they find that they’re extremely unprepared for the (a) local warlord, (b) local indifference, and (c) local AIDS epidemic. Created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park and Robert Lopez, who wrote Avenue Q, the show at first occasioned questions about whether it was hostile to Mormonism; in fact it’s quite generous to the LDS church, though it has not aged well in another regard. Until the plane lands in Uganda, the show is still hilarious, but the sequences in Africa are grimly unfunny, especially as black actors are forced to sell jokes about curing AIDS by sodomizing babies.

➼ Review: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton Already Feel Like They’re From Another Time
➼ Andrew Rannells Is Happy to Play Gay Men (As Long As They’re Not Too Relatable)

Wicked

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Gershwin Theatre (222 W. 51st St.)
Opened October 30, 2003

Stephen Schwartz’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz, with a book by Winnie Holzman from Gregory Maguire’s novel, turns out to have been not only a cash machine (still at or near capacity most weeks, 20 years in) but also unlocked a winning formula that so many new Broadway musicals have followed: It’s threaded through with themes of girl power and friendship that hit a young, mostly female audience at an atavistic level. Knock it if you will for its showy glitz, but you’ll need a pretty hard heart not to be won over by “For Good” or “Popular,” let alone not to be swept up when “Defying Gravity” comes roaring out at you.

The Lion King

🏆🍭
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Minskoff Theatre (200 W. 45th St.)
Opened November 13, 1997

The rare kids’ show that adults can feast on, mostly because of the wonders wrought by Julie Taymor, who designed and directed. The animals, large and small, are re-created with unparalleled imagination, underpropped by costumes that artfully blend realism with fantasy: The prancing giraffes and leaping antelopes, the nodding elephant and barreling warthog, all keep you marveling despite the really pretty basic story line and by-now-ultrafamiliar tunes, principally by Elton John and Tim Rice.

Chicago

🏆♻️
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Ambassador Theatre (219 W. 49th St.)
Opened November 14, 1996

The John Kander–Fred Ebb–Bob Fosse musical, a modest success on its first run in 1975, became a juggernaut on its second try two decades later. Since Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth got the revival going in 1996, the slinky dances and arch dialogue about cheerily amoral murderesses in the Prohibition era have been reinhabited a hundred times over, turning the show into something of a parade of stars in short-turn stunty gigs (for a limited time, see Jennifer Holliday! Here’s Michael C. Hall! How about … Pamela Anderson?). Earlier this year, Drag Race’s Jinkx Monsoon stepped in as Mama Morton, to big applause.

➼ The Name on Everybody’s Lips Is Jinkxie

🎭

Broadway Plays

Prayer for the French Republic

🕗

Running time: 3:00 with two intermissions
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (261 W 47th St.)
Opened January 9. Through February 18.

Though its story of a French Jewish family facing rising tides of antisemitism—both past and present—is surrounded by heavy clouds, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic is plenty sharp and by no means gloomy. Zingy, morbid humor and motor-mouthed diatribes are the playwright’s weapons of choice, not lyricism or sentimentality. Yet there’s a savviness to the play’s construction that makes it ring false. Its ambition feels self-conscious: As a three-hour-and-two-intermission multigenerational family epic that’s Serious But Also Funny—and that’s full of prolonged opportunities for actors to shout—it’s essentially purpose-built to win awards, and it has. Director David Cromer leads with a mercifully light hand, and Harmon doesn’t shy away from gnarly questions, but his writing often feels showy in its engagement with them. Like that guy who corners you at the grad school mixer, Prayer for the French Republic is smart, and it has a heart in there, but its primary interest is in its own demonstrations of rhetoric.

➼ Review: Can You Put Your Faith in Prayer for the French Republic?

Appropriate

🕗
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Helen Hayes Theater (240 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 18. Through March 3.

Lila Neugenauer sensitively directs a top-notch cast in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2013 Obie-winning play about a white family gathering in Arkansas to auction off the former plantation that was home to their recently deceased father. The Lafayette siblings—played by Michael Esper, Corey Stoll, and the absolutely fearsome Sarah Paulson—bring more than enough of their own combustible baggage onto the stage to power a three act play, but we know from the beginning that the clamor of their bickering will be dwarfed inside a greater symphony of nightmarish uproar. Their patriarch’s old homestead has blood in the floorboards, in the lake, in the trees — and when one of their kids finds an old photo album full of pictures of lynchings, the characters start scrabbling as a moral sinkhole opens beneath them. After a decade of cultural shift, Jacobs-Jenkins’s play still feels devastatingly credible. It lives entirely and electrically in the space of “and”: Its characters are complicated and they’re blinkered, monstrous and pitiable, trying and failing, not individually hateful and also collectively matured in a slow-cooker of unexamined bias and malice. Stoll rationalizes and equivocates while fury seeps from Paulson’s porese, and Elle Fanning makes her Broadway debut as a sage-burning, part-time-vegan-chef named River. Yes, it’s also a comedy — one that smolders and burns. (edited)

➼ Review: An Estate That Divides: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate

Purlie Victorious

🕗♻️
Running time: 1:45, no intermission
Music Box Theatre (239 W. 45th St.)
Opened September 27, 2023. Through February 4, 2024.

Fast, fierce, and big-hearted, Ossie Davis’s wily 1961 farce set in the Jim Crow South crackles with the verve of its central performances, and the play feels wittier, braver, less careful and more caring than much contemporary writing. Both unflinching and generous, it’s just about as sharp as satire gets. Leslie Odom Jr. brings charisma for days to the title character; Kara Young, as Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, gives the kind of comic performance that young actors should study.

➼ Review: A Vintage Satire That Still Has Sting: Purlie Victorious
➼ Leslie Odom Jr.’s Broadway Return in Purlie Victorious

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Running time: 3:30 with intermission
Lyric Theatre (213 W. 42nd St.)
Opened December 7, 2021

Mostly set 22 years after the end of the final novel in J.K. Rowling’s series, Cursed Child finds Harry a 40-something, overworked Ministry of Magic official, married to Ginny Weasly with three kids, working for his eternally type-A buddy, Hermione Granger. Packed with breakneck plot twists, mind-bending spectacle, and, perhaps more surprisingly, moments of theatrical whimsy that feel, amid the high-tech sorcery, delightfully simple, The Cursed Child is a remarkable and fitting addition to the Potter canon: It effectively weaves serious themes with bouncy adventure narrative, it’s heartfelt and sometimes a touch hokey, it could have used a more rigorous editor, and you’re probably willing to forgive its shortcomings as it sweeps you along in a rush of rip-roaring, good-natured imagination.

➼ Review: Harry Potter and the Broadway Spectacle
➼ How Imogen Heap Conjured Her Magical Tracks for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
➼ How Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s Anthony Boyle Builds Sympathy for a Malfoy

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Off and Off–Off Broadway

The Night of the Iguana

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Running time: 2:55 with intermission
The Pershing Square Signature Center (480 West 42nd St.)
Opened December 17, 2023. Through February 25, 2024.

The Night of the Iguana, like the reptile in its name, needs a little heat to get moving, but La Femme Theatre’s production undercooks this less-seen Tennessee Williams drama. The often lurid and tangled story lands a defrocked preacher turned tour guide (Tim Daly) at a Mexican resort run by an old friend’s widow (Daphne Rubin-Vega), where he also meets a penniless self-deluded painter (Jean Lichty). Director Emily Mann goes for a cool, considered approach to the drama, which undersells the lurid aspects of Williams’s work, and leaves you longing for the sexual charge that would bind the piece together. The production does succeed in some later scenes between Daly and Lichty as their characters spend a dark night of the soul together and arrive at a lonely kind of peace, but there are two long acts before you hit that moment, and they are tough, slow going without a flame.

➼ Review: Cold-Blooded Tennessee Williams: The Night of the Iguana

Hell’s Kitchen

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
New York Theatre Workshop (79 E. 4th St.)
Opened November 19, 2023. Through January 14, 2024.

Hell’s Kitchen—the new musical spearheaded by the multi-Grammy-winning R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys—is chocolate-chip cookies: Its shape and taste are familiar, and when it’s best, it’s because there are some extremely high-quality ingredients in the mix. The show isn’t reinventing anything, but Hell’s Kitchen has clearly been made with test-kitchen precision — honing certain contemporary musical-theater recipes to a fine point. Keys and the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (who wrote the book to her music and lyrics) have been developing the show for more than a decade, more recently with the collaboration of director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown, and Hell’s Kitchen does sometimes have a shiny, focus-grouped quality. And yet, damn, its singers can sing, and its dancers can dance — and Keys’s songs haven’t been streamed over 5 billion times for nothing. The man next to me was weeping by the end of the first act, and by the finale, well, I definitely had something in my eye.

➼ Review: A Familiar Diary of Alicia Keys

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea

🕗♻️
Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission
Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher St.)
Opened November 13, 2023. Through January 13, 2024.

A passion project for first-time director Jeff Ward and his friend and fellow actor Christopher Abbott, and starring Abbott and Aubrey Plaza (of Parks and Recreation, Legion, The White Lotus, etc.), Shanley’s play about claws-out love between two damaged strangers turns 40 years old this year, and it’s got the 1980s in its DNA: It’s aggressive, titillating, apolitical, and so earnestly raw that it’s almost ridiculous. And, in a strangely exciting way, it holds up — mostly owing to Abbott, who nails Danny’s explosive, preemptive fury but also his guilelessness. Plaza hasn’t yet turned Roberta into a match for him — the tart deadpan she’s deployed on screen to great effect, both comic and not, here makes her armor just a little too thick, her distance from Roberta’s torment just a little too wide. She’s game, though, and underneath the brassy, broken Bronxiness, the play has the smushable underbelly of a baby pit bull: Its most tender moments are among the strongest.

➼ Review: Navigating the Expanses of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea

Here We Are

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Running time: 2:20 with intermission
The Shed’s Griffin Theater (545 W. 30th St.)
Opened October 22, 2023. Through January 21, 2024.

Although it’s not a surprise, it’s still a relief that the late Stephen Sondheim’s slow-cooked final musical—a free adaptation of the Luis Buñuel films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, with book by David Ives and developed with director Joe Mantello—is a fittingly complex and thorny one. The same seething consciousness of caste and cruelty that ripples through Sweeney forms the backbone of Here We Are, a show equally preoccupied with trendy restaurants and one with, if anything, even more of an impulse to eat the rich. There’s no blurring of the composer-lyricist’s inimitable, agile and angular forms, no blunting of his wit, no comfort in nostalgia. The play has sharp, savage urges, springing from its sense of injustice. When it wobbles, and it does so increasingly as it goes along, it’s not because it began without a clear proposition: It’s because the logical conclusion of its premise is in fact so dark, so extreme, that you can feel the opposing, more compassionate (or at least more ambivalent) instincts of the show’s creators kicking back at it — stalling, equivocating, looking for alternative exits.

➼ Review: The Last Midnight
➼ Frank Rich on the Last Sondheim

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Coming Up

Doubt American Airlines Theatre, February 29 • My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?) Lyceum Theatre, March 12 • The Notebook Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, March 14 • An Enemy of the People Circle in the Square, March 18 Water for Elephants Imperial Theatre, March 22 • The Who’s Tommy Nederlander Theatre, March 28 • The Outsiders Jacobs Theatre, April 11 • Lempicka Longacre Theatre, April 14 • Suffs Music Box Theatre, April 17 The Wiz Marquis Theatre, April 17 • Uncle Vanya Vivian Beaumont Theater, April 20 • Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club August Wilson Theatre, April 20 • The Heart of Rock and Roll James Earl Jones Theatre, April 22• Mother Play Helen Hayes Theater, April 25

What to See on (and Off)(and Off–Off) Broadway

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