The 5 Best Broadway Shows of 2024

2024 was the year that the future of Broadway in the 21^st century really began to come into focus, with an excellent crop of new plays and musicals. Here are my top five of the year.

5. Stereophonic
Winner of the 2024 Tony Award for Best Play, David Adjmi’s recording studio drama follows a 1970s rock band that bears a striking resemblance to Fleetwood Mac. They’ve already climbed to the top of the charts, which means that if they’re going to be more than a flash in the pan their next album needs to be something special — so special that they spend over a year recording it. Adjmi sensitively captures their fraying relationships and shifting alliances, illuminated by Daniel Aukin’s expert direction and excellent performances by the cast. David Zinn and Enver Chakartash’s provide a realistic environment and cool retro duds for the actors. Best of all, Will Butler’s original music actually sounds like something you might hear on the radio circa 1977. It all adds up to three hours of extremely satisfying backstage drama, an experience that is undiminished by accusations of plagiarism (the parties to the lawsuit recently reached a settlement).

4. Death Becomes Her
Those who like their Broadway musicals splashy and bitchy will find a winner in Death Becomes Her, the lavish new stage adaptation of 1992 film about two best friends (read: mortal enemies) who take mortality out of the equation by ingesting a potion that makes them live forever in their sexiest bodies. Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s score has a big brassy Broadway sound thanks to hearty orchestrations by Doug Besterman, and Marco Pennette’s book is chock-full of outrageous one-liners and magnificent shade. As performed by leading ladies Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, it all blazes with the intensity of 1000 episodes of Real Housewives. Death Becomes Her is a great adult night out on Broadway, and a must-see for the gays.

3. Water for Elephants
The most spectacular new musical on Broadway this year didn’t have a huge expensive set, but multiple platforms on castors that could be strung together to form the skeleton of a circus train crisscrossing America during the Great Depression (exceptionally clever set design by Takeshi Kata). And that left plenty of room for the imagination as well as the high-flying feats of agility that made this show memorable. While circus shows appear on Broadway with some frequency, I’ve never encountered one like Water for Elephants, in which circus acts are integral to the storytelling of a serious book musical (huge credit for this goes to director Jessica Stone and co-choreographers Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll). Add to that Ray Wetmore, JR Goodman, and Camille Labarre’s extraordinary animal puppets and you have a genuine meeting place of the arts, with acrobats and artisans bringing their A-game to the Broadway stage. More of that, please.

2. Oh, Mary!
I suspect that when future theater historians write about 2024, Cole Escola’s name will appear in (or very near) the first sentence. The breakout success of Escola’s dubious historical comedy about washed-up cabaret chanteuse Mary Todd Lincoln and her nasty homosexual husband signals a way forward for Broadway plays that doesn’t rely on casting Hollywood A-listers to sell tickets. Nor does it require producers to join the design arms war: When Escola slams the double-doors of the oval office, one gets the sense that the upstage wall might fall over. Part of that has to do with the ferocity of Escola’s performance as Mary, which harnesses her emotional intensity to produce the biggest laughs currently on Broadway. But mostly, Oh, Mary! signifies the Broadway audience’s hunger for real comedy — the more ridiculous and irreverent, the better. Let’s get out there and slaughter some sacred cows.

1. Maybe Happy Ending
Of all the shows on this list, the only one that succeeded in getting me to tear up was Will Aronson and Hue Park’s charming little musical about two obsolete robots who fall in love and go on a great adventure. Helen J Shen plays Claire and Darren Criss plays Oliver, who is convinced his owner will one day come back for him, and who studiously listens to his favorite jazz records in preparation. This little detail allows Aronson and Park to write some truly beautiful jazz numbers, which are performed by lost member of the Rat Pack Dez Duron in a thrilling Broadway debut. Director Michael Arden, who helmed last year’s revival of Parade, shows his mastery of the musical form in a show that marries cutting-edge technology (Dane Laffrey’s ever expanding and contracting set is remarkable) with good old-fashioned emotional storytelling. Expect this to be a major contender for the Best Musical Tony next spring.