Theater Reviews: Critics' Picks

Raja Feather Kelly makes his playwriting debut with a spellbinding story of three generations of Black men at Soho Rep.

Lauren Patten and Taylor Iman Jones star in an achingly romantic, softly sexy new musical by Rachel Bonds and Zoe Sarnak.

While poking fun at her own agreeable malleability, Benanti flexes her talents in a show that will be available on Audible, without the physical dimension.

Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.

Amy Herzog’s heartbreaker arrives on Broadway with Rachel McAdams as the alarmingly upbeat mother of a fearfully sick child.

At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.

The retooled jukebox musical, with its top-notch performances and exciting choreography, “stands out as one of the rare must-sees” in a crowded season.

In David Adjmi’s new play, with songs by Will Butler, a ’70s band’s success breeds tension, and punches up the volume on Broadway.

The musical traces the story of Black twin sisters who pass as white, and exact their own form of justice for the crime of slavery, in 19th-century Texas.

The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.

The circus-themed love story, already a novel and a movie, becomes a gorgeously imaginative Broadway musical.

The “Succession” star headlines a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s play about a lifesaving doctor and the town that hates him.

In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.

The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.

Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s moral head spinner about pride, the priesthood and presumptions of pedophilia.

Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album has become an unlikely and unforgettable dance-musical hybrid, directed and choreographed by Justin Peck.

Zach Zucker delivers a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic at SoHo Playhouse.

Cole Escola’s play, which imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret singer, surprisingly pulls off stretching a stupid joke to its extremes.

Did Jelly Roll Morton “invent” jazz, as he claimed? A sensational Encores! revival offers a postmortem prosecution of one of the form’s founding fathers.

Moses Ingram makes her New York stage debut in Dominique Morisseau’s love poem to Nina Simone.

Two deadly standoffs at Wounded Knee are the bookends for a show that manages to narrate a violent history with moments of light and humor.

Worldwide colony collapse is the subject of a bright, strange, upbeat thought experiment about insect hives, and our own.

Gabby Beans shines as a time-hopping protagonist tracing her trauma in Rachel Bonds’s slip-slidey new Off Broadway play.

A tender reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz” follows Dora, an angsty American teenager who initially rejects her family’s Mexican heritage.

Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are superb as a midcentury-modern couple free-falling into addiction in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical.

The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.

Heather Christian’s latest exploration of the religious sublime is a musical spectacle about the often overlooked “caregivers and makers.”

Making a blistering Broadway debut, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 play about the legacies of hatred feels like a new work entirely.

The family-friendly circus troupe Phare highlights the richness of Cambodian culture with gravity-defying acrobatics, Indigenous music and rousing choreography.

An exquisite revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play at the Irish Repertory Theater is the first of three there by the Irish author.