10 Shows That Meant the Most to Me in 2025

As usual, I’m late with a list of the shows I most enjoyed in 2025 but I’m going to share it anyway and since I am late, I’m also going to cut right to the chase. There were musicals I liked a lot (Beau, Floyd Collins, Mexodus, Operation Mincemeat, Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York) and revivals that gave me a whole new appreciation for shows I’d seen in the past (The Brothers Size, Eurydice, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Marjorie Prime, The Weir) but my Top 10 for last year are all original plays because I love discovering new work and each of the following ones, listed alphabetically, brilliantly showed me something worth knowing about the way we live now.

ANGRY ALAN @ Studio Seaview: British playwright Penelope Skinner’s sly satire chronicles one middle-aged white guy’s descent into the most toxic and self-pitying parts of the manosphere and how its insistence that men are victims of society can unleash destructive rage, a message amplified by a terrific performance from the usually menschy John Krasinski, driving home the point that almost anyone can be pulled into that cesspool.     

THE ANTIQUITIES @ Playwrights Horizons: Set in a museum sometime in the late 22nd century, this fascinating cautionary tale by Jordan Harrison (also the author of the similarly thought-provoking Marjorie Prime) imagines a future in which AI has triumphed and humans exist only as figures in diorama-style exhibits detailing how they surrendered control to the inanimate but increasingly powerful entities they hubristically created 

CAROLINE @ MCC Theater: The title character is a young trans girl (beautifully played by the child actor River Lipe-Smith) but the sticking point in Preston Max Allen’s quietly powerful domestic drama isn’t her gender identity but the contrasting—although equally well-meaning-—views of her mother and grandmother about what it means to be a good and supportive parent 

GRANGEVILLE and LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD @ Signature Theatre and Broadway’s Booth Theatre: OK, I’m cheating by listing two entries here but Samuel D. Hunter is one of my favorite playwrights and both of the works he offered this past year—the first about two estranged brothers trying to reconnect and the second about a strained reunion between a reclusive aunt and her disaffected nephew—continue Hunter’s heartfelt meditations on the ability to forgive past sins, although it’s hard for me to forgive the poor ticket sales that caused Little Bear to end its limited run early

THE HONEY TRAP @ the Irish Rep: There have been scores of books, movies and plays about the violent period from the 1960s through the 1990s when Protestants and Catholics clashed in Northern Ireland, but Leo McGann has set his tense psychological thriller years later and focused it on a cat-and-mouse game between a former British solider and a former IRA operative struggling to deal with the repercussions of the fateful decisions each made back during that time aptly named The Troubles 

JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN @ Broadway’s Booth Theatre: Both a literary critique of one of the most popular plays in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the gender politics of the #MeToo era, Kimberly Belflower’s sensational play fired up a new generation of theatergoers as it showcased a group of high school students wrestling with the ways in which the patriarchal hero in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible treated women and with what to do with the similarly patronizing men in their own lives 

MEET THE CARDOZIANS, a Second Stage production @ the Signature Center: Inspired in part by a 1925 Supreme Court decision, Talene Monahon’s dramedy about the struggles of Armenian-Americans to balance the burdens and privileges of racial identity in this country during two very different time periods manages to make serious points about contemporary politics without being overly didactic and while being laugh-out-loud funny 

OEDIPUS @ Broadway’s Studio 54: You may be wondering why I didn't include Sophocles’ 2000-year old tragedy, which has been done 10 times before on Broadway, in the group of revivals I liked but the smart, contemporary language of director Robert Icke’s adaptation and its updated setting to the election eve for a modern-day change-style politician transformed this revisal into an enthralling political thriller. And the performances by Mark Strong and Lesley Manville were so stunningly good that this is hands-down my favorite of the 150+ shows I saw this past year

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY @ Broadway’s Music Box Theatre: I'm not usually a big fan of one-person shows or of lots of video screens onstage but Kip Williams' witty adaptation of the 1890 Oscar Wilde novel about a man who trades his soul in exchange for a life of endless beauty and sensual pleasures, the bravura performance by Sarah Snook who played all 26 characters in the production and the you’ve-got-to-see-it to-believe-it video wizardry by David Bergman had me swooning with delight

WELL, I’LL LET YOU GO @ The Space at Irondale:  First-time playwright Bubba Weiler’s small play about a widow wrestling with the loss of her husband and his death’s effect on their small Middle American community was staged in a church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn far away from Broadway but it punched way above its weight, in no small part due to the sensitive direction of David Cromer protégé Jack Serio and performances by a cast of some of the top actors in the city, including Michael Chernus, Constance Schulman and an incandescent Quincy Tyler Bernstine

 

Happy New Year!

 

Wishing You All the Merriest Christmas...

 ...from me and some of our mutual friends:

Challenging Power Plays in "The Burning Cauldon of Fiery Fire" and "Practice"

Getting others to see the world in a certain way and then convincing them to do almost anything to preserve that point of view requires a toolbox of skills that include charisma and a fervent belief that one's way is the only right way. And as two recent plays demonstrate the fallout from that dynamic can be destructive—and it can happen anywhere: in a social community, a theater company or maybe even a country.

Thomas, the patriarchal leader of a small northern California commune is willing to go to great lengths to defend the way of life in the sanctuary he’s created with a group of wounded souls in Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, which closed at the Vineyard Theatre last weekend. 

One of the group’s survivors, who grew up in that community and who serves as this memory play’s narrator, recalls how its peaceful but fragile existence was disrupted by the arrival of two outsiders and the death—perhaps a suicide, perhaps a murder—of one of them. But although this whodunnit eventually turned into a somewhat confusing what-was-that, the thing that remained clear was how an ideology, no matter how initially benign, can turn ugly.   

Washburn and her director Steve Cosson refused to answer other questions—why the basement door is padlocked, how people just eking out a living manage to buy elaborate costumes for the pageant staged by the commune’s children—but Burning Cauldron dared its audiences to think about how much of one’s self an individual should be willing to give up for what someone else dictates to be the peace and security of the larger community.

Practice, Nazareth Hassan’s cautionary tale which has been extended at Playwrights Horizons through Dec. 19, is more direct about the tyranny it wants to challenge: it’s theater itself. Or, as Hassan explains in his program notes, it's the harmful ways in which he believes some gatekeepers in the theater world operate.

His play centers around the eccentric Asa Leon, a MacArthur genius grant winner who heads up an avantgarde theater company that places great demands—physical, spiritual and emotional—on its members as they devise a new performance piece. 

These selected performers, who are introduced as each of them puts their distinctive spin on the same audition speech, are required to live together and to bare their souls to one another under Asa’s imperious commands. Secrets are revealed, and exploited. Demands, sexual and otherwise, are made. People are intentionally pushed to their limits. Only one opts out. 

Practice places demands on the audience too. The first act runs for two hours and is filled with repetitive acting exercises, including running in place almost to the point of exhaustion (when one character threw up, I wasn’t sure at first if that was part of the script or a real reaction). There are also multiple instances in which director Keenan Tyler Oliphant has the troupe members set a table, eat a meal, clear the table and then moments later do the same thing all over again.   

The shorter second act is devoted to the actual performance piece and to Asa’s spoken manifesto about the kind of theater he believes in. The question of whether he is indeed a genius, a sadistic cult leader or just a manipulative fraud is left up to the audience. As is the question of how much of one’s self should be sacrificed for the sake of art. Or for the sake of anything else for that matter. 

I found both of these shows to be well acted and obviously thought-provoking. But I can't really say I fully enjoyed either because they made me feel so uncomfortable. But I suspect that may have been exactly what they intended.

Thankful Thoughts for This Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! 

It’s been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I’ve seen 20 of them over the past four weeks—some good, some just OK, a few actually great and, to be honest, at least one that was dreadful. But I’ve been so busy seeing them (and trying to tend to the other things in my life, including squeezing in a birthday celebration for my husband K who has very patiently put up with all this theatergoing) that I haven't had the chance to write here as much as I would have liked.

However I did manage to share some thoughts about a half dozen shows on Broadway & Me Quickies, my collection of short reviews that I hope give a sense of what’s good and not so good about the productions I’ve seen for folks who may not have time to get through longer reviews (you can check those quickies out by clicking here).

And last Sunday, I joined my BroadwayRadio pals James Marino, Peter Filichia and Michael Portantiere on the “This Week on Broadway” podcast to talk about a few of the season’s big shows, including Chess, Oedipus and the Tom Hanks’ play This World of Tomorrow (you can hear all of that by clicking here).

Finally, I do try to keep up with the news about what’s going on in the theatrical world and to share it in my Flipboard magazine, which you can read by clicking here. And I've created a Substack archive of all the episodes of "All the Drama," my podcast on Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and musicals (I’m really excited about the one for December that's going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hamilton and hope you’ll check that out)

So although I’m a bit tired—and despite the ongoing challenges in the world—I’ve a lot to be thankful for, including those of you who read this blog and listen to my podcasts. And I’m hoping that your holiday weekend is filled with loved ones, good food and drink, lots of laughter and maybe some theatergoing too.   

"Kyoto" is a Call to Action on Climate Change

The only thing small about Kyoto, the latest import from Britain that opened this week at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater, is its one-word title. Everything else is outsized: the show runs nearly three hours, it features a cast of 14, it has two authors (Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson) and two directors (Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin). And its subject is the 10-year struggle to get the nations of the world to come together on a plan to address the outsized issue of climate change. Those negotiations resulted in the titular Kyoto Protocol that was finally adopted in 1997 but which the U.S. Congress still has yet to ratify.

Now negotiations surrounding an international treaty would hardly seem to be compelling theater. And a lot of complicated information about climate science and bureaucratic procedures does get tossed around. Yet I found this to be a fascinating evening of theater. 

Murphy and Robertson, who a few years ago dramatized the international immigrant crisis with their much-acclaimed immersive piece The Jungle, have centered this story around Don Pearlman, the real-life American lawyer who became an oil industry lobbyist and the chief mastermind when it came to thwarting any efforts to address climate change (click here to read more about him). 

In the tradition of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Pearlman serves as the show’s narrator and its primary villain. The American actor Stephen Kunken portrayed Pearlman when this production played to sold-out audiences in London and he’s come home with it, offering the kind of seductively wily performance that makes you root for his character even though you know you shouldn’t.   

Most of the production takes a Brechtian approach to telling Pearlman’s story. Characters don’t have names but are identified by the countries they represent at the series of conferences held over the years to address the climate problem. 

And under Daldry and Martin's energizing direction both the delegates’ language and their movements are often highly stylized. Believe it or not, one of the most amusing scenes in the play is one in which the delegates debate grammar.

Video projections, aided by Aideen Malone's excellent lighting, help to establish the location of each meeting and provide context about what’s going on in the world at the time. The audience is pulled into playing a role too. When you enter the theater, you’re handed a badge that identifies you are as one of the groups attending the proceedings. I was an NGO. 

A few audience members are also seated at the big round table that is scenic designer Miriam Buether’s main set piece. At times they’re instructed to take an even more active part in what’s going on. The ones at my performance looked to be having a great time.

The actual actors also hand up a few cameo appearances of recognizable personalities who turn up at the various conferences: the German chancellor Angela Merkel, the film director Werner Herzog and the then-U.S. vice president Al Gore. 

But besides Pearlman the only characters we really get to know are Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the amiable Argentinian diplomat who chairs the Kyoto meeting (Jorge Bosch reprises his Olivier-nominated performance) and Pearlman’s wife Shirley, who becomes increasingly horrified as she learns how far her husband will go to undermine any and all attempts to cut back on the damaging use of oil and other fossil fuels.

Played in a finely understated performance by Natalie Gold, Shirley Pearlman serves as a stand-in for those of us who are too often willing to look the other way from the climate threat for the sake of personal convenience and she's a reminder that we should be paying better attention if we have any interest in keeping the planet habitable for future generations.

And here's where I should confess that I have a weak spot for big one-word, state-of-the-world plays like Oslo, Patriots, Ink and my personal favorite Enron, which ran for just 16 performances back in 2010. Even when flawed, these shows make me reckon with my own role in the world, which is what I think good theater should do. 

Still reviews for Kyoto have been mixed and the response from the audience the night I saw the show was muted. Which is ironic because that kind of apathy is the point of the play.

 

 

Going Solo: "The Least Problematic Woman in the World," "Other" and "Did You Eat?

One-person shows are popping up everywhere. And it makes sense that they should.  They’re comparatively cheap to put on since by definitiion there’s only one performer to pay and the costume and set—when there is a set—are usually simple, all of which matter in this high-cost theatrical environment. Plus as United Solo, the theater festival currently running at Theatre Row through Nov. 23, demonstrates, these shows come in lots of different forms: stand-up routines, formal recitations, full narratives in which the one actor plays many characters and, increasingly, confessional pieces in which the performer shares past trauma. 

The latter seem to be the one breaking out of the festival circuit and I recently saw three of those autobiographical works in well-established off-Broadway venues. As I watched those shows, I found myself wondering why the performers were telling me such intimate things, whether it was difficult for them to relive those painful experiences night after night and, finally, why I should care about any of it. Yet each audience was full and many people seemed moved by what they were seeing. You may be too so here’s a sneak peek at each of them:

The show: The Least Problematic Woman in the World @ the Lucille Lortel Theatre

The performer: The social media personality Dylan Mulvaney, who chronicled her gender transition on TikTok

What she shares: The 28-year-old recounts her full life as a trans woman, from her childhood days desperately wishing she could dress as a girl right up through the controversy when MAGA conservatives threatened to boycott Bud Light after the beer brand featured Mulvaney in a social media promotion. Her show works because Mulvaney is not only naturally engaging but also a trained musical-comedy performer who appeared in The Book of Mormon and she uses all of her skills to give her current audience a good time so that even before the show starts, she wanders around in an angel-winged costume to take selfies with fans. Tim Jackson has directed the show smartly and both the set (primarily a pink Barbie’s Dream House interior) and her costumes are just tacky enough to fit in with the sweetly campy vibe. Plus there are nifty original songs by such well known composers as Ingrid Michaelson and Six creators Toby Marlow & Lucy Moss. 

Did I care:  Yeah. Although with an official 75 minute run time—that can stretch past 90—the show is too long but trans people are under serious threat right now and having someone like Mulvaney standing centerstage and proudly telling her story is meaningful.

 

The show: Other @ Greenwich House Theatre

The performer: Tony winner Ari’el Stachel, who won a supporting actor award for his performance in The Band’s Visit

What he shares: Shame is the motivating factor driving Stachel’s show. It charts his struggle with severe anxiety, which he traces all the way back to when he was diagnosed at just five with obsessive-compulsive disorder and which now manifests itself in panic attacks that can cause sweat to literally drip off the actor whenever he’s feeling stressed, including when he's onstage (many hankies were soaked as he blotted off the perspiration at the performance I attended). But the show is also fueled by the lifelong uneasiness and shame Stachel has felt about his racial identity as the son of a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish-American mother and a darker-skinned Yemenite Jewish father who bore a resemblance to Osama bin Laden, the latter a real problem in the wake of 9/11 when schoolmates started calling young Ari a terrorist. And so over the years, Stachel has claimed at various times to be white or black and he has faced push back when he has been cast in roles that others considered to be rightfully theirs. This show, under the tight direction of Tony Taccone, is his declaration that he is no longer ashamed of who he is or how he presents and is now on his way to making peace with himself.

Did I care: Kind of. I wish Stachel had settled on one of his issues and really dug deep into it. Instead, right now the show seems more like a therapy session than a performance piece. And to my shame, I have to confess that I was put off by all the visible sweating.

 

The show: Did You Eat?

The performer: Korean-American actor and writer Zoë Kim

What she shares: Emotional hunger and how to survive an abusive childhood are the subject of this autobiographical piece by Kim who grew up in Korea as the only child of parents who desperately wanted a son. And then when she migrated to the U.S. to attend school in her teens, she continued to be plagued by the obligations and oppression of her home culture that prized male children. Director Chris Yejin and choreographer Iris McCloughan have put together a production that uses English, Korean (subtitles are projected on screens) and stylized movement to tell Kim’s often harrowing story, which includes a kidnapping and a murder attempt.

Did I care: Not enough. Kim is a lovely performer but her story seems too specific to her and at the same time she skips over too many important plot points (how did she survive so much physical abuse without people noticing? how did she meet the man who helped her to heal?) The result is that I spent more time wondering how things could have happened than I spent truly feeling for what had been done to her.