The Best Broadway Shows Of 2023

As The Great White Way continues advancing toward diversity, this year’s highlights gave us the most narrative variety we’ve seen in a while.

It should tell you something about this year’s Broadway season that the best shows included fart humor, a devastatingly complex story of sexual assault, a middle-aged female friendship in Ohio and a homicidal barber. The Great White Way — should we even call it that anymore? — is possibly more diverse than it’s ever been. Not just culturally but narratively as well.

The productions that made this list vary in tone, era, circumstances and format. They dazzle with both grandiose and simple sets and plotlines, low-brow to high-brow. And they remind us how every night on Broadway can and should be a different, extraordinary experience.

“Good Night, Oscar”

Director Lisa Peterson’s single-night saga based on the sour humor of superstar pianist Oscar Levant isn’t an upper. In fact, its only luster comes from the stark stage and camera lights on him during a sobering sit-down with host Jack Paar on “The Tonight Show” in 1958. They might as well be a mask that covers up his well-documented mental health struggles that seem to be only exacerbated by the glare of fame. Illuminated by an exceptional and difficult performance of Sean Hayes in the title role, “Good Night, Oscar” delicately examines celebrity neuroses, mental health taboos and the bleakness of comedy in the post-WWII Eisenhower era.

“Prima Facie”