The top Broadway and off broadway musicals in NYC: complete A-Z list

Disney's latest toon tuner is a tourist-family–friendly theme-park attraction, robed in the billowing fabrics of orientalist Arabian fantasy. As in the 1992 film, the Genie (a charismatic James Monroe Iglehart) steals the show from its eponymous “street rat” hero (Adam Jacobs). Stuffed with glitz, the musical is a carpet with little texture but colorful patterns aplenty.—Adam Feldman

“Keep it light, keep it tight, keep it fun, and then we’re done!” That’s the pithy advice that the indignant 16th-century housewife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) imparts to her husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), as a way to improve his play Romeo and Juliet. It is also the ethos of the new Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet, a quasi-Elizabethan romp through the many pop megahits of the Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin. This show is what it is: It gives you the hooks and it gets the ovations.—Adam Feldman

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.—David Cote

If you were alive in the late 1990s, you probably remember the ubiquitous 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club, which reunited elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and songs of a Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. This original musical by Marco Ramirez—directed by Saheem Ali and choreographed gorgeously by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck—brings their story to Broadway, in slightly fictionalized form, after a highly enjoyable debut at the Atlantic last year. As winter pokes its frigid fingers into New York City, this lively celebration of Cuban music offers an irresistable tropical getaway.

Eddie Redmayne returns to Broadway as the sinister Emcee of a Weimar Era nightclub in another revival of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff's exhilarating, harrowing 1967 masterpiece. This London import—directed by Rebecca Frecknall and designed by Tom Scutt—emphasizes the material's sordid underbelly in an environmental staging: The August Wilson Theatre will be extensively reconfigured into an in-the-round space, and audience members with money to spare can buy special packages that include preshow dining and drinks. Gayle Rankin, who memorably appeared in the last revival, now costars as the desperate Sally Bowles; Steven Skybell, Ato Blankson-Wood, Natascia Diaz, Henry Gottfried and the delectably tart Bebe Neuwirth.

This John Kander–Fred Ebb–Bob Fosse favorite—revived by director Walter Bobbie and choreographer Ann Reinking—tells the saga of chorus girl Roxie Hart, who murders her lover and, with the help of a huckster lawyer, becomes a vaudeville star.—David Cote

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

Set your boats against the current and prepare to be borne back into the Jazz Age as F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessentially American novel comes to Broadway. Jeremy Jordan (Newsies) and Eva Noblezada (Hadestown) headline this musical adaptation by Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, directed by Marc Bruni (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical)  and choreographed by Dominique Kelley. The supporting cast for the production, which originated at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse last year, has not yet been announced. 

Every Broadway diva worth her salt dreams of playing the greatest musical-theater role of them all, sometimes called the King Lear of musicals: Mama Rose, the all-but-unstoppable stage mother of the world-renowned ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee. Now it's Tony Award hoarder Audra McDonald's turn, and show queens are salivating to see how she will compare to such prior Roses as Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone. George C. Wolfe directs the production; Broadway mensch Danny Burstein plays her long-suffering manager, and Joy Woods is her neglected tomboy daughter.

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