American Psycho

In the novel American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. And now, direct from London, the musical American Psycho brings its designer brand of style, sex and synthesizers to Broadway this season.

The Color Purple

Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a powerful novel of courage in the face of oppression. Celie has grown up in rural Georgia, navigating a childhood of ceaseless abuse. Not only is she poor and despised by the society around her, she's badly treated by her family. As a teenager she begins writing letters directly to God in an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear. Her letters span twenty years and record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment through the guiding light of a few strong women and her own implacable will to find harmony with herself and her home. This season Broadway welcomed a new production of the joyous musical based on Walker's story of enduring love and triumph over adversity.

Fiddler on the Roof 
based on Sholem Aleichem's “Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories”

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl. A new Broadway production of the 1965 Tony Award-winning Best Musical Fiddler on the Roof introduces a new generation to this uplifting celebration of life, based on Aleichem’s tales.

Hamilton
based on Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation. In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. Chernow’s book inspired the new musical Hamilton, now playing on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.

Misery

Paul Sheldon. He’s a bestselling novelist who has finally met his biggest fan. Her name is Annie Wilkes and she is more than a rabid reader—she is Paul’s nurse, tending his shattered body after an automobile accident. But she is also his captor, keeping him prisoner in her isolated house. Now Annie wants Paul to write his greatest work—just for her. She has a lot of ways to spur him on. One is a needle. Another is an ax. And if they don’t work, she can get really nasty. This edge-of-your-seat suspense story based on the novel by Stephen King thrilled Broadway this season.

Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse Raquin is a novel by Émile Zola, first published in 1867. It tells the story of a young woman, unhappily married to her first cousin by a well-intentioned and overbearing aunt. Her cousin, Camille, is sickly and selfish, and when the opportunity arises, Thérèse enters into a tragic affair with one of Camille's friends, Laurent. Helen Edmundson’s stage adaptation is a tale of love, lust, betrayal and guilt that played at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54 this season.

Tuck Everlasting

Doomed to―or blessed with―eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a stranger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune. Based on the novel, Tuck Everlasting is a powerful new musical about love, family and living life to the fullest.