As many of you noticed from our Facebook and Twitter updates last week, we headed East to spend some time checking out a selection the newest Broadway offerings this season and managed to squeeze in 7 shows in 6 days. While we had a lot of choices, we had limited time so after prioritizing our options we ended up seeing:

Catch Me If You Can – the movie inspired musical

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo – transferred from L.A. featuring Robin Williams in his Broadway play debut

How to Succeed Without Really Trying – Revival of the Pulitzer Winning musical this time starring Daniel Radcliffe and John Laraquette

Book of Mormon – the controversial musical debut of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Arcadia – One of Tom Stoppard’s greatest pieces fresh from London

Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark – the highly publicized, soon to be overhauled, rock spectacular

The Motherf**ker with the Hat – the intense relationship drama featuring the Broadway debut of Chris Rock

There were several others that were high on our list that didn’t fit into our schedule, so chances are we’ll be headed back to the Great White Way in the not too distant future. But until then, if you are headed out to NYC or if you are simply interested in what is hitting the biggest stages in America, check out the details on the shows mentioned above.

Catch Me If You Can

Direction: Jack O’Brien
Choreography: Jerry Mitchell
Music and Lyrics: Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman
Book: Terrence McNally

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is the high-flying new musical comedy based on the hit DreamWorks film and the incredible true story that inspired it!

Fast-rising Broadway headliner AARON TVEIT (Next to Normal, Wicked) stars as Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., a teenager who runs away from home in search of the glamorous life. With nothing more than a boyish charm, a big imagination and millions of dollars in forged checks, Frank successfully poses as a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer – living the high life and winning the girl of his dreams (played by Tony® nominee KERRY BUTLER (Xanadu, Hairspray). Tony winner and Broadway fave NORBERT LEO BUTZ (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Wicked) plays Carl Hanratty, the dogged FBI agent who chases Frank to the end and finds something he never expected. And Tony nominee TOM WOPAT (Annie Get Your Gun, Chicago) returns to Broadway as Frank, Sr., who sees his dreams of making it big lived out in his son’s fantastic adventures.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

by: Rajiv Joseph
Direction: Moises Kaufman

The lives of two American Marines and an Iraqi translator are forever changed by an encounter with a quick-witted tiger who haunts the streets of war-torn Baghdad attempting to find meaning, forgiveness and redemption amidst the city’s ruins. Rajiv Joseph’s groundbreaking new American play explores both the power and the perils of human nature. The New York Times writes, “This boldly imagined, harrowing and surprisingly funny drama is wonderfully daring.”

 A finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoocomes to Broadway for a strictly limited engagement, directed by Tony Award^® nominee Moisés Kaufman.

Oscar^® and Emmy Award^® winner Robin Williams makes his Broadway debut in the New York premiere of BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO. The cast also features Glenn Davis, Brad Fleischer, Hrach Titizian, Sheila Vand, Necar Zadegan and Arian Moayed, with Hend Ayoub, Corey Brill, Daoud Heidami and Sherman Howard.

How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying)

Direction/Choreography: Rob Ashford
Music/Lyrics: Frank Loesser
Book: Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert

Classic Broadway musical comedy about a wily window washer, J. Pierrepont Finch, who, with the aid of a trusty self-help book How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying), enjoys a riotous rise up the corporate ladder.

Starring multi award-winning international film and stage actor Daniel Radcliffe as J. Pierrepont Finch and five-time Emmy Award winner John Larroquette (in his Broadway debut) as J.B. Biggley, the show features a beloved score packed with such hit standards as “I Believe in You,” “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm,” “The Company Way,” “Been a Long Day,” “Rosemary” and “Brotherhood of Man.” It is directed and choreographed by Tony® and Emmy® Award-winner Rob Ashford.

Book of Mormon

Direction: Trey Parker and Casey Nicholaw
Choreography: Casey Nicholaw
Book, Music, Lyrics: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez

From Trey Parker and Matt Stone, four-time Emmy Award-winning creators of South Park comes this hilarious Broadway musical about a pair of mismatched Mormon boys sent on a mission to a place that’s about as far from Salt Lake City as you can get. The Book of Mormon is written in collaboration with Robert Lopez, the Tony Award-winning writer of Avenue Q, and co-directed by Mr. Parker and three-time Tony nominee Casey Nicholaw (Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone).

Contains explicit language.

Arcadia

By: Tom Stoppard
Direction: David LeVeaux

Tom Stoppard’s ARCADIA is now playing on Broadway for a limited engagement, following a sold out run in London where it was heralded as a “dazzling masterpiece, a glimpse of theatrical heaven” (The Daily Telegraph) and “the greatest play of its time” (The Independent).

April 1809, an elegant English country estate… a gifted pupil, proposes a startling theory well beyond her comprehension.  All around her, the adults, including her tutor, are preoccupied with secret desires, illicit passions and professional rivalries.

Two hundred years later, two academic adversaries are piecing together puzzling clues, curiously recalling those events of 1809 in their quest for an increasingly elusive truth.

ARCADIA features an exquisite cast including Margaret Colin, Billy Crudup, Raúl Esparza, Glenn Fleshler, Grace Gummer, Edward James Hyland, Byron Jennings, Bel Powley, Tom Riley, Noah Robbins, David Turner and Lia Williams.  Crudup, who won a Tony Award for his performance in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, made his Broadway debut in the 1995 production of ARCADIA.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Direction: Julie Taymor
Choreography: Daniel Ezralow
Music and Lyrics: Bono & The Edge
Book: Julie Taymor & Glen Berger

Broadway’s SPIDER-MAN TURN OFF THE DARK features music and lyrics by 22-time Grammy-award winners Bono and The Edge of U2 and Tony-award winner Julie Taymor (The Lion King). Drawing on over 40 years of Marvel comics, co-book writers Taymor and Berger spin a new spectacular take on this tale that’s familiar and fresh yet filled with unexpected twists and turns.

The Motherf**ker With The Hat

By: Stephen Adly Guirgis
Direction: Anna D. Shapiro

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT, by Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, makes its world premiere on Broadway starring Bobby Cannavale, Chris Rock, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Annabella Sciorra and Yul Vázquez.

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT is a new high-octane, verbal cage match about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery from playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. Jackie and Veronica have been in love since the 8th grade. But now, Jackie is on parole and living clean and sober under the guidance of his sponsor, Ralph D, while still living with and loving his volatile soul mate Veronica who is fiercely loving, but far from sober. Still, their love is pure. And true. Nothing can come between them – except a hat.

*descriptions taken from show websites