Beg, borrow, or steal... or even sell your blood plasma if you have to. Musical theatre fans owe it to themselves to snag tickets to THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS. The new show by the legendary songwriting team of Kander & Ebb earns its place among the team's most hallowed shows, including Cabaret and Chicago - and is probably their best new tuner since 1993's Kiss of the Spiderwoman.

THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS dramatizes the infamous 1930s “Scottsboro Case” in which nine African-American teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women. This case sparked national outrage and eventually led to the American Civil Rights Movement.

The musical plays like a fraternal twin to the team's legendary musical, Chicago: in addition to both shows being inspired by actual events, and both examine the American judicial system through the prism of show business. The crass characters in Chicago revel in their own guilt as they dupe the system and perform showstopping vaudeville ditties while THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS takes a sober look at its cast of innocents via a series of minstrel songs.

No writing team juxtaposes toe-tapping tunes with poisonous, barbed lyrics like Kander & Ebb. “Southern Days” is a bitterly ironic sweet-and-sour plantation tune that could have been written by Stephen Foster - if it weren't for the dark anger at its core. Likewise, audience members recoiled in horror at a cynical song performed by the boys' New York lawyer. The score for THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS also contains some of the finest songs the team ever wrote, including the glorious choral number “Go Back Home.” (Please, please, please let there be a cast album for this show soon!) This is one of four musicals that lyricist Fred Ebb left unfinished at the time of his death in 2004. His songwriting partner John Kander completed the lyrics so effectively that you can't tell where one leaves off and the other begins.

The cast is pretty spectacular, too, with Colman Domingo (returning to the Vineyard after winning a GLAAD Award for A Boy and His Soul) and Forest McClendon as archetypal minstrel characters Mr Bones and Mr Tambo. The sole Caucasian member of the cast is theatrical royalty John Cullum, as the Interlocuter, a sort of emcee character. Other highlights include Brandon Victor Dixon as the unofficial leader of the boys, and in a remarkably staged nightmare sequence involving tap dancing around an electric chair, the prepubescent Cody Ryan Wise as the youngest member of the group.

Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman (The Producers, Crazy for You, and three shows by Kander & Ebb: Steel Pier, and Off-Broadway's And the World Goes Round, and The Vineyard's 1987 revival of Flora, the Red Menace), the show manages to be both deeply moving and spectacularly entertaining. Stroman's choreography is especially provocative: you'll never again be able to watch a cakewalk dance in the same way.

Stroman's impeccable production builds to an appropriately horrifying finale that suddenly culminates in a simple, heart-catching, lump-in-your-throat moment: though the real-life Scottsboro Boys suffered terrible indignities, their ordeal was an unfortunately necessary stepping stone in the battle for civil rights. This coup de theatre is the sort of moment that reminds us why we love musicals, and why Kander & Ebb's THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS deserves a place in the canon of Great American Musicals.

Currently scheduled through April 18, THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS performs Tuesdays at 7pm, Wednesdays through Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 3pm and 8pm, and Sundays at 3pm. Tickets are $70 and can be reserved by calling 212-353-0303 or anytime online at the Vineyard Theatre website - www.vineyardtheatre.org.