The best Broadway shows you need to see

If theater is your religion, and the Broadway musical your particular sect, it’s time to rejoice. This gleefully obscene and subversive satire is one of the funniest shows to grace the Great White Way since The Producers and Urinetown. Writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park, along with composer Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), find the perfect blend of sweet and nasty for this tale of mismatched Mormon proselytizers in Uganda.

Composer-lyricist-star Lin-Manuel Miranda forges a groundbreaking bridge between hip-hop and musical storytelling with this sublime collision of radio-ready beats and an inspiring, immigrant slant on Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. A brilliant, diverse cast takes back American history and makes it new.

The world of Harry 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 Korea try 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, and brilliantly staged by Michael Arden and 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 just learning what that entails. That this show is casting its firefly glow on Broadway feels like a gift.

Cole Escola's dizzying historical burlesque imagines a boozy, vicious and miserable Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Escola plays Mary 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 the funniest stage comedy in years.

The notoriously disharmonious recording process that led to Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 LP Rumours is 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.

There’s a big twist at the end of the first act; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. Those are just two of the injuries that two old frenemies inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about the quest for eternal youth. Adapted by Marco Pennette, Julia Mattison and Noel Carey from the 1992 film, and directed by Christopher Gattelli, the show is a catty, campy delight. The terrific Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, two of Broadway’s most gifted musical comedians, make musical-comedy magic together—and musical comedy, when performed this well, never gets old.

Christmas has come early to Broadway this year: the latest Broadway revival of this 2010 holiday musical is really elfin’ good. Based on the 2003 Will Ferrell movie, the show follows a grown man named Buddy, raised in holly as one of Santa’s helpers, who travels to New York in search of his father. This new production is directed by Philip Wm. McKinley, and Grey Henson is the bright new star at the top of its tree. His guileless Buddy is a creature of twinkle from his eyes down to his toes—an overgrown sweetie with a gentle heart and penchant for mild mischief—and it’s a pleasure to take off with him on Elf’s magic ride.

Go to hell—and by hell we mean Hadestown, 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’s gracefully dynamic staging bring this old story to quivering life.

The creators of Hell's Kitchen have 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 a heck of a block party. The show has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story, loosely inspired by Keys's life. Maleah Joi Moon makes a stunning debut as a 1990s teenager; Shoshana Bean is her protective mother, Brandon Victor Dixon is her absent father and Kecia Lewis is her teacher.

Jez Butterworth captivating and poignant drama is 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, but it periodically shifts periods to 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 the main 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.

Director-designer Julie Taymor surrounds the Disney movie’s mythic plot and Elton John–Tim Rice score with African rhythm and music. Through elegant puppetry, Taymor populates the stage with a menagerie of African beasts; her staging has expanded a simple cub into the pride of Broadway.—Adam Feldman

Solea Pfeiffer and John Cardoza play lovers caught in a bad romance in this gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffed  adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers and drawing music from more than 75 pop hits, this jukebox megamix may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterwork is 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 way to a frighteningly 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 this 100-minute production moves toward its finale. But while we in the audience might weep, Wilder's view, though always sympathetic, stays clear and dry. He has an eye on the eternal.

Who doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's zingy musical Six celebrates, 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 reigning grande dame of 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. Suffs is a full-throated musical call to action, but it's also 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 a conceptual exploration of the filmic in modern life, when the pictures are smaller than ever. (This Norma sometimes explicitly evokes a thirsty 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-ring circus in the Depression, this original musical (by Rick Elice and the collective PigPen Theatre Co.) knows how to craft magic out of spare parts. Director Jessica Stone embraces overt theatricality—animal puppetry, shadow play, aerialism—as an invitation to imagination, even as 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.

This musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz addresses surprisingly complex themes, such as standards of beauty, morality and, believe it or not, fighting fascism. Thanks to Winnie Holzman’s witty book and Stephen Schwartz’s pop-inflected score, Wicked soars.