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How do you offend as many people as possible in two hours?

This isn't usually a question musical writers ask themselves when putting together a new show for Broadway. But it's a typical starting point for "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who have joined forces with Avenue Q creator Robert Lopez to formulate The Book of Mormon, a show likely to be the most audacious and talked-about new musical of the 2011 spring season on Broadway.

Stone and Parker have made a reputation of stepping heavily and gleefully on the toes of the rich, famous and sacred in the name of comedy, and their first foray into theatre is likely to follow that playbook. (The title alone is provocative.) The story reportedly follows two young Mormon missionaries who are shipped off to a dangerous part of Uganda to spread the good word. Their adventures are told alongside the story of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. Previews start in February at the O'Neill Theatre.

Oscar Wilde's 19th-century comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by and starring (as Lady Bracknell) Brian Bedford, opens in January at the American Airlines Theatre. The Roundabout production borrows elements from Bedford's acclaimed earlier staging at Ontario's Stratford Festival.

Two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy returns to the Broadway stage as the star of The People in the Picture, the story of three generations of women headed by a former star of the Yiddish stage in Poland. It features book and lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart and music by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler. Stoller is best known as half of the legendary songwriting duo Lieber and Stoller. Previews begin at the American Airlines Theatre in April.

	Catch Me If You Can star Aaron Tveit
	photo by Chris Bennion

With Catch Me If You Can, composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman finally offer a follow-up to Hairspray, their smash musical of nearly a decade ago. Like that work, the new one is based on a film, Steven Spielberg's caper about renowned con man Frank Abagnale, Jr. and his real-life Javert, FBI agent Carl Hanratty. The Hairspray team of director Jack O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell is back, as is Hairspray's old home, the Neil Simon Theatre. It begins in March.

Cinema's Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, makes his second Broadway appearance, in February at the Al Hirschfeld, playing a sort of stage predecessor of Abagnale: J. Pierrepont Finch, the cheerfully conniving ladder-climber of Frank Loesser's How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Rob Ashford directs and choreographs what is being billed as the 50th-anniversary revival of the satiric, Pulitzer Prize-winning show.

	Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney

Another high-profile musical revival has Sutton Foster inheriting a role previously played on Broadway by Ethel Merman and Patti LuPone: Reno Sweeney in Cole Porter's Anything Goes, a show not seen on Broadway in more than 20 years. Kathleen Marshall will direct and choreograph. Classics such as "You're the Top" and "I Get a Kick Out of You" will be belted from the stage of the Roundabout Theatre Company's Stephen Sondheim Theatre starting in March.

Other new musical productions due this season include Sister Act, a stage adaptation of the nun-filled Whoopi Goldberg film comedy, by songwriters Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, at the Broadway Theater in March; Wonderland, composer Frank Wildhorn's modern twist on the classic "Alice in Wonderland," playing the Marquis Theatre in March; and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, an Australian jukebox musical import, based on the film of the same name about three pals on a trip in the outback, commencing February at the Palace Theatre.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire delivers Good People, his first new play since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Hole in 2007. He sets the play in his native neighborhood of Southie, Boston, where struggling Margie Walsh turns to an old flame made good to help solve her mounting financial woes. Daniel Sullivan directs the drama at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre beginning in February. Frances McDormand, Estelle Parsons and Tate Donovan star.