5 Shows to See in New York This Month

As 2024 draws to a close, I wanted to make sure these five shows are on your radar, starting with a must-see new Broadway musical.

1. Maybe Happy Ending
Will Aronson and Hue Park’s Maybe Happy Ending is about two obsolete robots who fall in love on a road trip from Seoul to Jeju Island, home of the last remaining fireflies on earth. It’s a sci-fi story set to a jazzy score — a perfect marriage of old and new sensibilities. Darren Criss and Broadway newcomer Helen J. Shen are irresistibly charming as the central couple, inhabiting a futuristic world that feels all-too-plausible as rendered by director Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey (the way the set is unveiled throughout the show is truly breathtaking). As birthrates plummet in the developed world (nowhere more dramatically than South Korea), it seems entirely likely that roles once occupied by flesh-and-blood humans will be filled by robots created in our image.

2. Death Becomes Her
Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp pose an alternative solution: Why not live forever in our sexiest bodies? That’s the premise of the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, which has just been turned into a hilarious new Broadway musical with a score by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, and an outrageous book by Marco Pennette. Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard play frenemies in a battle to the death between two equally matched comedic superstars. But, of course, they cannot die thanks to the magic potion sold to them by the alluringly mysterious Viola Van Horn (Michelle Williams, fabulous), and that results in the most impressive special effects currently on Broadway. I howled as Simard sneered at the smoking hole in the middle of her abdomen where Hilty shot her, and I suspect you will too.

3. Swept Away
Speaking of coming back from the dead, I was so pleased to learn that Swept Away, which was slated to close today, has been granted a reprieve till December 29. The Avett Brothers musical about a shipwreck that leads to cannibalism was always going to be a tough sell during the holidays, but I urge you to catch this gorgeously tuneful, ravishingly designed, and heartily performed new musical before it’s gone. John Gallagher Jr. in particular is giving a Tony-worthy performance as “Mate,” the darkly philosophical narrator of this grim tale based on real 19^th-century events. Splashy film-to-stage adaptations like Death Becomes Her are fun, but I’m glad that Broadway can still be a home to challenging new work.

4. Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey
I’m sure some of my more avant-garde readers are currently rolling their eyes at the notion that anything on Broadway is “challenging,” and for them I have just the recommendation: Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey is the first new Richard Foreman play in a decade, and it is about a woman unsure if she actually exists. (Same, girl.) Foreman is the godfather of off-off-Broadway theater, with an instantly recognizable style that marries hallucinogenic sound and imagery with often-inscrutable language. While Foreman typically controlled the sound cues from a special table at his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, this production is adapted and directed by Kara Feely with live music by Travis Just at La MaMa. It’s the perfect Christmas gift for the experimental theater set.

5. Christmas Spectacular
But for everybody else, you can still do no better than the Christmas Spectacular. The Rockettes have been kicking it at Radio City Music Hall since 1933, and the show has only gotten better each year, incorporating cutting-edge projection and drone technology into a stage show that still includes classic numbers like “New York at Christmas” and a lavish live Nativity scene with real camels onstage. I caught the opening night performance and was impressed by the new-show energy surging off the stage in this almost century-old Christmas tradition. The house is massive, and in the coming weeks there will be as many as five performances a day, so there are plenty of tickets for you and your loved ones. It’s fun for the whole family — even the family member who would rather be seeing Richard Foreman.