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.

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.

Aviator, filmmaker, mogul, recluse: Howard Hughes was one of the 20th century's most outsized American lives, and this off-Broadway play catches him revisiting all of it in his final hours. It moves through the record-breaking flights, the studio empire, and the paranoia that sealed him away, circling the one thing his fortune could never buy. A single-life epic at the Theater at St. Jean this September.

Dorothy Kilgallen was the most powerful female journalist of the 1950s, a reporter who moved among the politicians and power brokers she covered. This true-crime musical follows her after the Kennedy assassination, when she became convinced the official story was a lie and kept digging even as the danger closed in. She died under unexplained circumstances in 1965, a case still open, and the show treats her reporting as the thriller it was.

Built around the 1992 Dangerous World Tour, MJ goes inside Michael Jackson's process as he assembles the show that would define stadium pop. Two-time Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage wrote the book and Christopher Wheeldon directs and choreographs, threading more than 25 hits through the rehearsal room where they were shaped. It took four Tony Awards, including one for the choreography that recreates Jackson's moves down to the tilt.

In 1993, AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci and playwright-activist Larry Kramer had a televised confrontation that captured a turning point in the fight for treatment and recognition. Daniel Fish, who reinvented Oklahoma!, restages their clash as an hour of rage, urgency, and unexpected intimacy between two men who spent years as enemies and something closer to friends. Tony winner Will Brill leads at St. Ann's Warehouse.

In 1610, Galileo Galilei aimed a homemade telescope at the night sky and found moons circling Jupiter, proof the Earth was not the center of everything. The Roman Inquisition disagreed, and in 1633 it tried him for heresy and forced him to recant. Raúl Esparza plays the astronomer in Michael Mayer's new musical, with songs by Michael Weiner and Zoe Sarnak, opening at the Shubert this November.