History Channel Junkies

Lin-Manuel Miranda's biography-in-rap of Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant founding father who designed the U.S. Treasury and died in 1804 at the wrong end of a duel with Aaron Burr. Built from Ron Chernow's biography and scored with hip-hop, R&B, and traditional showtune. Into its eleventh year at the Richard Rodgers.

Step back into the sweltering summer of 1972 when one man's desperate Brooklyn bank heist captivated the nation. Stephen Adly Guirgis adapts the 1975 Sidney Lumet film, with Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sonny and Sal, the two amateur robbers whose botched fourteen-hour hostage standoff became a media circus no one in New York could look away from.

E.L. Doctorow's turn-of-the-century New York unfolds at the Vivian Beaumont, where a Jewish immigrant, a Harlem ragtime pianist, and a New Rochelle WASP family see their lives collide with Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, and Evelyn Nesbit. The musical is a roll call of the actual figures who built the American century.

Jeremy Jordan plays Bobby Darin in this in-the-round bio-musical at Circle in the Square, tracing the singer from his Bronx childhood through "Mack the Knife," "Beyond the Sea," Vegas headliners, a marriage to Sandra Dee, and a Kennedy-era political turn that surprised everyone who thought they had him pegged.

Nick Yarris spent 22 years on death row for a murder he insists he did not commit. The play traces the conversations between Nick and Jackie, a prison volunteer, as the case unwinds and Yarris's own life rearranges around the question of whether the system that put him there can be wrong on the most consequential count of all.

Direct from three sold-out London runs, Jack Holden plays 35 characters in 90 minutes of true-crime monologue about the 1981 vigilante killing of Ken Rex McElroy, the small-town bully whom dozens of neighbors in Skidmore, Missouri watched die in broad daylight, and no one would name the shooter. A blistering study of justice taken into private hands.

Eric Bentley built this 1972 docudrama entirely from the transcripts of the Red Scare hearings, when the House Un-American Activities Committee hauled Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Jerome Robbins, and Elia Kazan in front of Congress to ask if they were now or had ever been a communist. A rotating all-star cast plays the witnesses at New York City Center for fifteen weeks only.

You learned about the Underground Railroad that ran north. This one ran south. Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson built a two-man, looping-music piece about the freedom seekers who crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where slavery had been abolished decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. A history lesson stitched into a high-wire performance.

Gabriela Lena Frank's Met debut is a magical-realist opera about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the painters whose tumultuous marriage and political art defined twentieth-century Mexico. Pulitzer winner Nilo Cruz writes the libretto, casting Frida (Isabel Leonard) leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead to find Diego (Carlos Álvarez) one last time.

The National Asian American Theatre Company condenses Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays into two evenings at The Public, performed in rep. King Henry V is dead, his infant son inherits a kingdom that spirals into the Wars of the Roses, and Shakespeare's earliest history cycle traces the medieval royal feud that obsessed English audiences for over a century before he ever picked up a quill.

In the spring of 1963, James Baldwin telegrammed Bobby Kennedy that his brother's administration was complicit in the violence of the civil rights battle. Kennedy called him back. Pulitzer winner James Ijames reimagines what followed, the Baldwin-Kennedy summit with Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, staged in an afterlife by Rachel Chavkin.

Ireland, 1966. A skipper sails into Dingle Bay with a very unusual catch, and what follows is an unbelievable true story involving Eamon de Valera, Queen Elizabeth, and a surprising number of nuns. Built from interviews, performed in a pub with live trad music, the production has been quietly teaching audiences about Anglo-Irish relations since 2018.