The best Broadway shows to see right now

Audra McDonald is a revelation as Rose—the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those daughters—in George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent revival of the classic 1959 musical by Arthur Lawrence, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim. Making the central family Black gives everything a fresh coloration and a sense of discovery. Every song is a rite of passaggio between McDonald's chest voice and head voice, but she makes that tension work to her advantage in an unforgettable star turn.—Adam Feldman

Lin‑Manuel Miranda's massively successful 2015 musical, staged to perfection by Thomas Kail, filters the rags-to-Treasury tale of Alexander Hamilton—an orphan immigrant turned founding father—through a prism of modern hip-hop and pop. Its combination of 21st-century music and 18th-century history is dazzlingly ingenious, but the show is also surprisingly moving. It's at once a drama, a comedy, a character study, a spectacle, a lesson, a romance, a war story, a historiographical critique. And it’s a success story of the best kind, breathtaking but also breath-giving: an inspiration.—Adam Feldman

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.—Adam Feldman

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. Everything comes together to create an instant classic, and the funniest stage comedy in years. Betty Gilpin takes over the title role from January 21 through March 16.—Adam Feldman

In this long-running musical comedy, two idealistic young Mormons—one shiny and driven, the other an insecure loser—get in way over their heads on a mission to Uganda. The show is as irreverent and hilarious as you'd expect from its creators: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the pair behind South Park, and Robert Lopez, who cowrote the score for Avenue Q. Many of the songs are very funny, and co-directors Parker and Casey Nicholaw know how to land the jokes. But what's kept the show running since 2011 is the fundamental sweetness behind its dark shock humor about warlords, famine and AIDS. Even as it pokes fun at true believers, it retains a basic faith in human goodness.—Adam Feldman

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.—Adam Feldman

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.—Adam Feldman

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 spellbound.—Adam Feldman

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; Jessica Vosk is her protective mother, Brandon Victor Dixon is her absent father and Kecia Lewis is her teacher.—Adam Feldman

Director and designer Julie Taymor’s visionary reimagining of Disney’s animated movie is an expedition through gorgeous new terrain. The parts of the show involving comic relief remain tethered to a theme-park aesthetic, but the production is otherwise remarkably beautiful. Through elegant puppetry and stagecraft, Taymor populates the stage with a menagerie of beasts, and surrounds the movie’s mythic plot and Elton John–Tim Rice score with African rhythm and music. Decades after its 1998 premiere, the show is still delighting kids and adults alike; Taymor's 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.—Adam Feldman

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.—Adam Feldman

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.—Adam Feldman

Wicked divided critics when it opened in 2003, but it's still transporting audiences today. A revisionist prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the show traces the radicalization of the green-skinned outsider Elphaba in a land where propaganda and repression are on the rise. Winnie Holzman's book, adapted from Gregory Maguire's much darker novel, smartly focuses on our witchy heroine's unlikely friendship with her more socially capable schoolmate, Glinda. Joe Mantello's direction is appropriately wondrous, and when Stephen Schwartz's pop-Broadway score flies, it flies high.—Adam Feldman