Category: Broadway’s Best

When most people say “I hate Broadway,” what they actually mean is: I hate the version of Broadway that lives in my head: jazz hands, three-hour runtimes, someone singing about their feelings in a cornfield.

But here’s the thing… the Broadway that exists right now? It barely resembles that. Some of these shows feel like concerts and some like prestige TV and indie films. Others feel like you accidentally walked into a life-changing experience.

We ranked them from pure crowd-pleaser to the ones that will quietly undo you.

1. MJ The Musical

For people who like: concerts, nostalgia, absolutely no homework.
You already know every song. You will not be doing any emotional labor. You are just… vibing.

2. Moulin Rouge! The Musical

For people who like: chaos, nightclubs, sensory overload as a lifestyle.
Big, loud, and sexy. If you get bored, you are actively resisting fun.

3. & Juliet

For people who like: Max Martin music, Shakespeare being humbled, surprisingly good cries.
Pop bangers, self-awareness, and just enough heart to catch you off guard.

4. Maybe Happy Ending

For people who like: quiet devastation, love stories that linger.
It’s two robots, but it’s one of the most human things you’ll ever see.

5. Six

For people who like: pop concerts, girl groups, history as a flex.
Short, punchy, and refuses to waste your time.

6. The Book of Mormon

For people who like: South Park, being slightly scandalized.
You’ll laugh so hard you forget you’re at a musical.

7. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

For people who like: blockbuster movies, “did that just happen?” magic effects.
It’s spectacle-first and theatre second. (Also now starring Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy!)

8. Stranger Things: The First Shadow

For people who like: Stranger Things, origin stories.
Feels like binge-worthy TV… but live. It’s huge spectacle and worth the dollars.

9. Hamilton

For people who like: hip-hop, history, crying later.
Still doesn’t feel like Broadway. Still hits.

10. The Outsiders

For people who like: grit, brotherhood, emotional damage
You don’t watch this one… you feel it.

11. The Lost Boys

For people who like: vampires, 80s energy, getting in early.
New, buzzy, and already building a cult following.

12. Death Becomes Her

For people who like: camp, chaos, big performances.
Knows exactly what it is… and commits.

13. Beaches: A New Musical

For people who like: weepies, comedies, big performances.
You bring your best friend to this and you leave holding them a little tighter.

14. Every Brilliant Thing

For people who like: unexpected crying, human connection.
It sneaks past your defenses… and suddenly you’re in it.

“Hating Broadway” is a vibe… not a fact. Shows vary from concerts to movies on a stage to emotional ambushes that you can’t get on your couch. All are exactly what you didn’t know you needed.

The curtain has come down. Every show has opened and the 2025–2026 Broadway season is now history. Before the Tonys hand out their envelopes and the discourse shifts to who won and who was snubbed, it’s worth pausing to ask a quieter question: what was Broadway actually saying this year?

Taken together, this season told us something, not in any single show, but in the accumulation of them: the recurring questions, the shared anxieties, the themes that kept surfacing across very different stages. Here’s what we found.

By Jim Glaub

This season asked: who are you, really?

Identity was everywhere. The Lost Boys explored the fear of growing up and what we sacrifice when we refuse to. Cats: The Jellicle Ball turned selfhood into something performed, shaped by community and spectacle (and death drops). Call Me Izzy made the simple act of naming yourself feel like the most consequential thing a person can do. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone went deeper still, tracing what it takes to reclaim an identity that history tried to erase, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show reminded us, joyfully and defiantly, that self-expression needs no apology.

These are completely different shows circling the same question: who am I?

This season asked: can you trust what you know?

Several productions this year put perception itself on trial. Proof followed a woman wrestling with whether she can trust her own brilliant mind. Bug watched paranoia quietly dismantle reality. Oedipus delivered its ancient warning: that the truth, once uncovered, cannot be unfound. Marjorie Prime asked something gentler but no less unsettling, whether the past is something we remember, or something we build. And The Fear of 13 argued that truth doesn’t reveal itself. Someone has to fight for it.

In a year when fact and fiction feel increasingly negotiable, Broadway put truth itself on trial and didn’t offer a verdict.

This season asked: who built this, and who pays for it?

The season’s most politically charged work gathered around questions of power and legacy. Death of a Salesman, as devastating as ever, laid bare the gap between the American Dream and American reality. Ragtime brilliantly mapped the contradictions of national identity across race, class, and immigrant experience. The Queen of Versailles examined what excess looks like from the inside, and what it looks like when it falls apart. Giant traced how power shifts across generations, while Liberation and The Balusters both asked how long any system can hold before its foundations show.

These are not abstract questions, they are the questions on the front page every morning. This season, Broadway held up a mirror and the reflection was uncomfortably familiar.

This season asked: what happens after the moment you can’t take back?

Some of the season’s most gripping work lived in aftermath. Dog Day Afternoon put a desperate man under a public microscope and watched the pressure build. Punch followed the ripple effects of a single act of violence far beyond its origin. Becky Shaw looked at the quieter damage: what happens when well-meaning people make careless choices and the people around them absorb the cost. Waiting for Godot made the case, quietly, that choosing not to act is still a choice, and it carries weight. Little Bear Ridge Road asked what happens when emotional distance quietly becomes permanent.

This season asked: who do you hold onto?

There was love, not romance exactly, but connection in all its forms. Beaches: A New Musical made the case that a friendship can be the central love story of a life. Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York found something true and surprising in a chance encounter. Chess put love in direct tension with loyalty and ideology. Schmigadoon! argued that real connection requires putting down your defenses. Fallen Angels approached it from a different angle entirely, with Noël Coward’s razor wit asking what long-term love actually looks like when an old flame reappears and the carefully maintained surface begins to crack.

We live in a world with more ways to connect than ever before, and an epidemic of loneliness to show for it. This season asked the question underneath that contradiction: not how do we reach each other, but who are we actually willing to show up for?

This season made room for joy.

Not every show this season asked a hard question, some just insisted on joy, and in 2026, that might be the hardest position of all. We’re living in a moment that makes delight feel frivolous, that treats lightness as a failure of seriousness, and Broadway pushed back. Titanique reinvented myth purely for the pleasure of it, and dared you to feel guilty about laughing. Every Brilliant Thing catalogued small delights, a list built against despair, until they added up to something that felt, unexpectedly, like a reason to keep going. Art hid genuine feeling inside a comedy of manners, which is perhaps the only way to sneak tenderness past an audience that has learned to be defended against it. Mamma Mia! chose warmth, deliberately and without apology, in a season and a world that kept choosing difficulty

In this moment, choosing joy is a radical act. And yet, ask anyone in the industry and they’ll tell you: this was a weird one. No foolproof hits or single juggernaut that swept the conversation. Instead, a season of clear frontrunners in some categories and genuine uncertainty in others, a slate of shows that didn’t all want the same audience or offer the same experience.

And maybe that was exactly the point.

This wasn’t a season built for everyone. It was a season built to reflect everyone, which is a different thing entirely. Divided, emotional, searching, occasionally exhausting, and shot through with unexpected moments of beauty and laughter. Sound familiar? It should. Broadway in 2025-2026 looked a lot like the world it was made in.

So much of what this season offered was a slice of joy, a few hours of laughter, beauty, and feeling in a world that can feel relentlessly heavy. Not every show landed for every person and not every theme resonated, but somewhere in those thirty productions, there was something for the grieving, the hopeful, the furious, the romantic, the skeptical, and the ones who just needed to laugh.

That’s what this community has always done in difficult times: holds up a mirror, asks hard questions, and finds joy even when joy feels radical. Then, the curtain comes down, the house lights come up, and we all walk back out into the world we came from.

Broadway didn’t try to comfort us this season, it tried to reflect us, and in that, it did something uncommonly well.

Broadway, in 2026, feels expansive—open to possibility, collaboration, and a renewed sense of play. Names that echo from film, television, music, and beyond, gathering here not as a novelty, but as a celebration, and audiences are surely enjoying the ride. 

Daniel Radcliffe, in Every Brilliant Thing, draws the audience into something quietly profound; while Adrien Brody, in The Fear of 13, brings a thoughtful intensity that seems to deepen in the presence of a live audience. 

Nearby, Ayo Edebiri offers a beautifully measured turn in Proof, revealing a versatility that feels powerful and delightful. And Rose Byrne, in Fallen Angels, is theatrical elegance with a lightness that makes the form feel fresh and alive.

Then there is Death of a Salesman, led by Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf—a pairing of artists whose mastery turns a familiar text into something newly resonant. Watching them is less about witnessing celebrity than about experiencing craft at its most refined.

Megan Thee Stallion brings her unmistakable presence to Moulin Rouge!, infusing the production with a fresh, kinetic energy. In Six, Dylan Mulvaney steps seamlessly into a show already attuned to contemporary voices, creating a connection that feels immediate and celebratory.

In Giant, John Lithgow, already an Olivier Award winner for the role, brings his Roald Dahl stateside in a masterful performance that’s making waves on Broadway as well.

Meanwhile, Lea Michele and Aaron Tveit, in Chess, offer something like a homecoming—they’re already Broadway icons who are giving performances that feel rooted, expansive, and deeply connected to the musical theatre tradition.

And in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer bring warmth and presence to a breathtaking story that continues to resonate, inviting new audiences into its world.

What distinguishes this moment is not simply the number of recognizable names, but the spirit in which they are arriving. For artists like Don Cheadle and Tessa Thompson, the stage offers a chance to reconnect with the immediacy of live performance—a space where storytelling unfolds in real time, shared between actor and audience.

This season sparkles with Hollywood stardust and Broadway royalty, and we love it!

Playwrights are consistently drawn to newsrooms and broadcast desks because these environments act as a perfect, ready-made pressure cooker for dramatic conflict. Here’s a sampling of plays that center around journalism.

The Front Page (1928) by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
A fast-talking, definitive comedy about a star reporter trying to quit the tabloid business, and his ruthless editor who will go to illegal extremes to keep him on a breaking story. This play has had 4 revivals, most recently in 2016 starring Nathan Lane, John Slattery, and John Goodman.

Night and Day (1978) by Tom Stoppard
Set during a violent African rebellion, this play contrasts a cynical veteran reporter and an idealistic freelancer to debate press freedom, ethics, and the dangerous pursuit of an exclusive scoop. The lead role was created by Diana Rigg in London and Maggie Smith on Broadway.

Frost/Nixon (2006) by Peter Morgan
Recreates the high-stakes 1977 television interviews between David Frost (Michael Sheen) and Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), highlighting the psychological warfare and accountability demanded by broadcast journalism.

Time Stands Still (2009) by Donald Margulies
An emotional drama about a wounded photojournalist (Laura Linney) and a foreign correspondent (Brian d’Arcy James) recovering in Brooklyn, wrestling with the moral ambiguities and exploitative nature of documenting human tragedy.

Lucky Guy (2013) by Nora Ephron
Ephron’s final play captures the gritty, hard-drinking 1980s tabloid culture through the meteoric rise, scandalous fall, and redemption of Pulitzer-winning columnist Mike McAlary, played by Tom Hanks in his Broadway debut.

The Lifespan of a Fact (2018) by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell
A high-stakes ideological battle between an overzealous fact-checker and an acclaimed author, questioning the value of verifiable facts versus emotional truth in storytelling. This three actor play starred Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, and Daniel Radcliffe.

With a built-in ticking clock, moral and ethical dilemmas, and naturally sharp dialogue, there’s a clear intersection for theatre and journalism. With the internet and the 24 hour news cycle making the news move faster than ever before, what can we expect to see from future playwrights? Only time will tell.

There are Broadway journeys… and then there’s the arc of Daniel Radcliffe, a career that began under the global spotlight of a wand and Hogwarts robes, and evolved into one of the most surprisingly fearless stage reinventions of a generation.This is a story of transformation through the stage.

When Daniel Radcliffe first stepped onto Broadway, it wasn’t as a safe post-franchise transition, it was a shock to the system. A young Radcliffe, barely out of his teens, chose one of the most psychologically intense plays in modern theatre, Equus (2008). The role demanded vulnerability, physical exposure, and emotional extremity that intentionally shattered audience expectations.

Then came the pivot to pure musical comedy in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (2011). We didn’t see that coming. Radcliffe didn’t just survive Broadway; he was becoming a Broadway baby (and at just 21, he still was!) Dances, comedic timing, and full-scale musical performance showed a different kind of craft: discipline without spectacle, his charm was undeniable. The message was clear: he wasn’t testing Broadway, he was building a second career in it.

Between major headlines, Radcliffe kept returning to stage work that prioritized complexity over scale, including the plays The Cripple of Inishmaan (2014), a dark comedy in which he played the titular character, a 17 year old orphan with physical disabilities whose life changes when a Hollywood crew begins filming on his isolated island in Ireland.

Next up was The Lifespan of a Fact in 2018, a three-hander in which he starred opposite heavyweights Bobby Canavale and Cherry Jones. Radcliffe held his own as a determined young factchecker forced to contend with a challenging author (Canavale) and demanding editor (Jones.)

With a third play under his belt, and fourth Broadway production within a 10 year span, Radcliffe continued showing the world that Broadway was where he wanted to be.

In the critically acclaimed revival of Merrily We Roll Along, Radcliffe stepped fully into ensemble-driven emotional storytelling alongside powerhouse co-stars. The role demanded restraint, musical precision, and emotional aging, winning him a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. 

If Merrily We Roll Along showed Radcliffe as a fully integrated Broadway performer, Every Brilliant Thing shows something even more revealing: an actor comfortable with silence, improvisation, and vulnerability without theatrical armor.

In a way, it echoes the earliest intention of his stage career. It shows his willingness to step into discomfort — but with none of the distance of spectacle.

Every Brilliant Thing is perhaps where his performance isn’t about becoming someone else, but about standing in front of an audience and simply holding a shared emotional space. What a fantastic journey for Daniel.

We are no longer seeing “Daniel Radcliffe doing Broadway.”

Daniel Radcliffe’s Broadway journey is about consistency over spectacle. He has expanded beyond the silhouette of a major franchise, one role, one risk, one performance at a time. And on Broadway, that kind of patience is its own kind of stardom.