History Channel Junkies

Chicago, 1924. Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins covered the back-to-back murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, then turned what she saw into a 1926 play. Kander, Ebb, and Fosse made it a musical fifty years later, and the 1996 revival has been running at the Ambassador ever since, with Roxie and Velma still working the press and a slick defense attorney for fame and acquittal.

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.

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.

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.