The Best Broadway Shows Right Now (2024)

The world ofHarry Potter has arrived on Broadway, Hogwarts and all, and it is a triumph of theatrical magic. Set two decades after the final chapters of J.K. Rowling’s world-shaking kid-lit heptalogy,Jack Thorne's epic(richly elaborated by director John Tiffany)combines grand storytelling with stagecraft on a scale heretofore unimagined.It leaves its audience awestruck, spellbound and deeply satisfied.

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

Cole Escola'sdizzyinghistorical burlesqueimagines a boozy, vicious and miserable Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Escola playsMary with magnetic zaniness, poise and total moment-to-moment comic commitment; director Sam Pinkleton never lets the comic energy flag, and the supporting cast is delicious. (Conrad Ricamora and James Scully play the men in Mary's life.) Everything comes together to create an instant downtown classic, and thefunniest stage comedy in years. After atalk-of-town Off Broadway engagement, the show now moves to Broadway for a limited run.

The notoriously disharmonious recording process that led to Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 LPRumoursis the inspiration for David Adjmi’s long and beautiful group portrait of a rock band riven along artistic, romantic and pharmaceutical fault lines. Every aspect of the show is excellent in isolation, from the ensemble acting to the heightened-verité design and the pitch-perfect original songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler; meticulously layered and mixed by director Daniel Aukin, they cohere into a riveting multitrack production.

Go to hell—and by hellwe meanHadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But the newness of Mitchell’s score and Rachel Chavkin’sgracefully dynamicstaging bring this old story to quivering life.

The creators ofHell's Kitchenhave found the right recipe for tis coming-of-age jukebox musical drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients. Together they've cooked up aheck of ablock party. The show hasthe sensibly narrow scope of a short story, loosely inspired by Keys's life. Maleah Joi Moon makes a stunning debut as a1990s teenager; Shoshana Beanis her protective mother, Brandon Victor Dixonis her absent father and Kecia Lewisis her teacher.

Jez Butterworthcaptivating and poignant dramais set in seaside England, but its subject is the American Dream.To depict the tangled Webb family, the play toggles between two decades: Much of it takes place at the reunion of adult sisters in 1976, butit periodically shifts periodsto show us the same characters in 1955, when their mother—played by a magnetically steely Laura Donnelly—is trying to mold them into singing child stars. (The play makes a good companion piece to Gypsy.)The very fine actors who play themain woemn originated their roles in London,which is one reason why director Sam Mendes’s production seems so fluid and cohesive. This is wide-scoped and complicated storytelling, and he and designer Rob Howell give it a staging to match.

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterworkis a lot darker than you may remember—and weirder, too. One reason it doesn’t seem dated is that it still feels experimental:The purposeful ordinariness of its first two acts, which render small-town life in a series of vignettes, gives wayto afrighteningly profound meditation on moments that are at once insignificant and infinitely full. Kenny Leon's revival, starring Jim Parsons as the omniscient Stage Manager, starts out on a too-effortful note; the excess falls away as this100-minute production moves toward its finale. But while we in the audience might weep, Wilder's view, though always sympathetic,staysclear and dry. He has an eye on the eternal.

Who doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's zingy musicalSixcelebrates, in boisterous fashion, the union of English dynastic history and modern pop music. On a mock concert stage, the six wives of the 16th-century monarch Henry VIII air their grievances in song, and most of them have plenty to complain about. In this self-described “histo-remix,” members of the long-suffering sextet spin their pain into bops; the queens sing their heads off and the audience loses its mind.

Shaina Taubs's galvanizing musical about the women’s-rights movement in the 1910s marches to Broadway with its intrepid Off Broadway director, Leigh Silverman, still leading the way, and most of its principal cast intact. Writer-composer-lyricist Taub makes her Broadway debut as Alice Paul; the invaluable Jenn Colella is Carrie Chapman Catt, the reigninggrande dameof the suffrage movement, and Nikki M. James is the civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells. These performers’ individual charisma helps deepen our understanding of the tensions that threaten their characters’ political partnership.Suffsis a full-throated musical call to action,but it'salso heart-tugging, vibrant and charming. The combination is hard to resist. It’s got my vote.

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

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, to the greatest—well, okay, not the greatest show on Broadway, but a dang fine show nonetheless. Set at a one-ringcircus inthe Depression, this original musical (byRick Eliceand thecollective PigPen Theatre Co.)knows how to craft magic out of spare parts. Director Jessica Stoneembraces overt theatricality—animal puppetry, shadow play,aerialism—as an invitation to imagination, evenas the performers show off impressive real-life physical talents.Grant Gustin, Isabelle McCalla and Paul Alexander Nolan do fine work in the show's central romantic triangle, but they are effectively the sideshow here. The main attraction is the pull of the circus itself.

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