In Previews
Broadway Theatre (1681 Broadway)
Opens April 25, 2024.
Marking the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel’s first trip to Broadway since it entered the public domain (a second Gatsby musical from Florence Welch begins performances at the American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts this summer), this adaptation features a jazz-and-pop-influenced score from Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen and stars Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Who says you can’t teach an old sport new tricks?
In Previews
James Earl Jones Theatre (138 W. 48th St.)
Opens April 22, 2024.
If Back to the Future wasn’t enough gotta-get-back-in-time for you, here’s a new jukebox musical rom-com inspired by the music of Huey Lewis and the News, telling the story of a couple of 30-somethings in 1987 who get a second shot at their dreams.
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In Previews
August Wilson Theatre (245 W. 52nd St.)
Opens April 21, 2024.
After a lauded run on London’s West End, Cabaret (or Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, as this revival is being billed) returns to Broadway starring Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles and with Eddie Redmayne reprising his Olivier-winning role as the Emcee. Set in 1931 Berlin and featuring the famous music of Kander and Ebb, this classic has been reimagined with an intimate, immersive staging from director Rebecca Frecknall.
In Previews
Shubert Theatre (225 W. 44th St.)
Opens April 20, 2024.
Produced by and featuring the music of Alicia Keys, Hell’s Kitchen tells the coming-of-age story of 17-year-old Ali as she grows up and chases her dreams in the titular New York City neighborhood in the mid-’90s. Starring newcomer Maleah Joi Moon as Ali and Shoshana Bean as her mother, Jersey, the musical, which is loosely inspired by Keys’s own upbringing, includes both new music from the singer as well as classics like “Empire State of Mind” and “Girl on Fire.” The show makes the move to Broadway after concluding a successful run at the Public Theater earlier this year.
In Previews
Longacre Theatre (220 W. 48th St.)
Opens April 19, 2024.
After aristocrat Tamara de Lempicka (Eden Espinosa) and her husband flee the Russian revolution, she turns to painting — a passion that causes a reckoning between the life she knew and the possibility of this newfound ambition. Inspired by the true story of the famous artist, this pop-infused musical comes to Broadway after critically acclaimed runs at Williamstown Theatre Festival and the La Jolla Playhouse, and is directed by Tony winner Rachel Chavkin (who also directed Hadestown, which is running just across the street).
In Previews
Music Box Theatre (239 W. 45th St.)
Opens April 18, 2024.
Set during the women’s movement in 1913 America, Suffs, as the title playfully suggests, tells the inspiring story of suffragists fighting for the right to vote. With music and a book by Shaina Taub, and directed by Leigh Silverman, this new musical arrives to Broadway after a sold-out run at the Public Theater in 2022 and boasts a producing team that fittingly includes Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai.
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In Previews
Marquis Theatre (1535 Broadway)
Opens April 17, 2024.
This groundbreaking all-Black take on The Wizard of Oz, which first debuted in 1974, returns to Broadway as a classic in its own right. Starring Nichelle Lewis as Dorothy Gale, with Deborah Cox as Glinda and Wayne Brady as the Wiz, this production is moving into the Marquis following a 2023 National Tour. Directed by Schele Williams, the show also features additional material by writer Amber Ruffin.
In Previews
Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre (242 W. 45th St.)
Opens April 11, 2024.
Set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1967, The Outsiders tells a story of brotherhood between Ponyboy Curtis, Johnny Cade, and their chosen family as they struggle to find acceptance in a battle between the haves and have nots. Based on the novel by S.E. Hinton and the subsequent film from Francis Ford Coppola, this new iteration of the story features music by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, lyrics by Justin Levine, and a book by Adam Rapp.
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Running time: 2:10 with intermission
Nederlander Theatre (208 W. 41st St.)
Opened March 28, 2024.
Who doesn’t want to headbang when that “Pinball Wizard” guitar riff starts? At the same time, and for all its zealous energy, the Who’s heady rock opera can’t help feeling like a curio: The album is from 1969, Pete Townshend and director Des McAnuff’s stage musical first hit Broadway in 1993, and this revival marks the latter’s 30th birthday. The album and the musical are interested in whom we worship and why, be it holy men or rock stars, and in the ways worship dehumanizes even as it elevates. Here, its first act is a pretty consistent rush, ending — with “Pinball Wizard” as its climax — on an exultant, smash-the-guitars high note, and the second act struggles to refind that sense of momentum and sheer musical euphoria, perhaps because now it has to start making sense. Moments that could be aurally understood in a more slippery and figurative way suddenly have bodies enacting them. When Tommy’s fans crowd around him on the couch that hasn’t changed position since he was 4 and time rockets forward (noted by projected dates on the backdrop), is he now … 84 years old? And if so, why do his parents look the same? Or have we moved into an allegorical space, where Tommy is ageless, his celebrity a kind of divinity? But then how does that square with a bunch of actual people, playing actual Tommy maniacs, hanging out in his actual house? I had questions — but also, I’m not really that bothered. Especially not when Bourzgui has the stage: He has something about him that feels un-modern-Broadway in a completely exciting way.
➼ Review: Always Gets a Replay: The Who’s Tommy, Revived
Running time: 2:40 with intermission
Imperial Theatre (249 W. 45th St.)
Opened March 21, 2024.
We begin with an old man, dreamy-eyed, sitting in the empty stands of a traveling circus. “Show’s over, sir,” the owner tells him. “We’re breaking it down and hauling out.” The sentimental frame is the show’s weak point — yet if, like me, you are highly susceptible to sawdust and tinsel, then much of Water for Elephants will delight on the basis of spectacle alone. We’re soon flashed back to the Great Depression, where young Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin), grieving the death of his parents, abandons his vet-school studies and hops a train. Soon enough he’s adopted by the “kinkers” and “rousts” of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Though the show puts its weight in the places that make narrative sense, they aren’t always the most rewarding ones. We never really get to see much of the extraordinary zoo of puppet animal creations. Instead, we spend the bulk of our time with the creature of the title, an elephant named Rosie (team-puppeted by Caroline Kane, Paul Castree, Michael Mendez, Charles South, and Sean Stack). Rosie — who gets a possibly unhelpful amount of build-up before her eventual appearance — is both lovely and slightly underwhelming, and the same might be said of certain broader stretches of Water for Elephants, though the production, especially in the acrobatics of its ensemble of carnies, also contains real flashes of astonishment and grace.
➼ Review: Water for Elephants Is Best When It’s Behind the Times
Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre (236 W. 45th St.)
Opened March 14, 2024.
Any self-respecting musical of the celebrated 2004 cinematic weepie The Notebook (itself adapted from Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel) has got to guarantee literal showers of at least the scattered variety on stage, and this one is also capitalizing on its audience’s emotional precipitation by selling souvenir boxes of tissues in the lobby. But if I had to take bets on how many actual tears The Notebook The Musical manages to jerk — well, I wouldn’t advise anyone to bring a bucket. With prosaic direction and a strangely heavy and sterile aesthetic sense that feels, despite Schele Williams’s presence as a co-director, all too similar to Michael Greif’s other productions this season, as well as a surprisingly beige slate of songs by the folk-pop artist Ingrid Michaelson, the show disappears from memory almost moment to moment. It’s built not around revelation but around our pretty much immediate understanding of its premise and the continuous increase of our heartache over time. We’re supposed to see everything coming, long for it to come, and revel in how agonizingly bittersweet it is, just as we knew it would be, when it does. Take all this and package it up in musical-from-movie form, and the sentimental anticipation factor increases tenfold. Sure, perhaps not everybody in the theater is here because they remember how good the heartbreak felt in 2004, but that doesn’t change the fact that the engine of the whole machine is nostalgia.
➼ Review: Love and Brains, Dull and Sharp: The Notebook and The Effect
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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.
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?
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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (205 W. 46th St.)
Opened March 26, 2023. Through May 5, 2024.
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. (Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford recently departed the show; Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster went in as replacement leads on February 9.)
➼ Review: A Sweeney Todd That Leans Into the Great Black Pit
➼ I Demand to Ride the Sweeney Todd Death Slide
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Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Broadhurst Theatre (235 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 4, 2022. Through June 30, 2024.
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
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!
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Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Booth Theatre (222 W. 45th St.)
Opened November 10, 2022. Through April 28, 2024.
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
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
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
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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
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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 joined the production this 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
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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
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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
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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)
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.
➼ Still Popular: Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel Talk Wicked on the 20th Anniversary
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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.
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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?). Last year, Drag Race’s Jinkx Monsoon stepped in as Mama Morton, to big applause. Currently, Ariana Madix rules the stage.
