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.

This captivating adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, follows a man and his ailing mother during a civil war in South Africa.

The extraordinary within the everyday: A holiday season rite returns with aerialists, trapeze acts, funny clowns (really!) and cotton candy too.

In the first Broadway revival of the Monty Python musical, the old bits are verbatim but the clowns are running the circus.

Qui Nguyen’s crowd-tickling comedy about a Vietnamese family in Arkansas mixes hip-hop and martial arts with soapy twists and turns.

Hansol Jung’s new play riffs on Greek dramas, the Restoration comedy “The Country Wife” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”

Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of the 1975 musical adds a touch of burlesque and a dash of Bertolt Brecht.

David Adjmi’s riveting new play, with songs by Will Butler, is about a ’70s band that nearly destroys itself making an epochal album.

This creepy Halloween show is the latest visual feat from Joshua William Gelb, presented by Theater in Quarantine and produced in a closet.

The playwright York Walker makes a promising New York debut at Roundabout Underground.

This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist.

This alluring spectacle at Stage 42, which aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older, makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and human beings.

A stripped-back revival in London, directed by Jamie Lloyd, brings the classic musical into the present day, and gives Scherzinger a career-defining performance.

An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.

Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.

A new play by Alexander Zeldin recreates his mother’s winding, painful path to a life of her own.

Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway playwriting debut, set in a Harlem hair braiding shop, is a hot and hilarious workplace sitcom.

Ossie Davis’s 1961 play is no period piece, as a blazing and hilarious revival starring Leslie Odom Jr. testifies.

Emma Horwitz makes her Off Broadway debut with an adventurous retelling of a devotional play from the 10th century.

In Max Wolf Friedlich’s nimble play, a crisis therapist tries to connect with a tech worker who is broken by her profession.

Theresa Rebeck’s play, a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters, is a beautifully acted dramedy exploring the truth and warped perceptions of it.