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

 

The 10 Shows That Spoke to Me in 2024

It’s that time of year when people like me who are lucky enough to see lots of shows are supposed to look back and draw up a list of the ones we consider to have been the best. But that’s always been tricky for me because “best” is such a subjective word. I've always believed that art is a conversation between the people who make it and those of us who receive it. So below are 10 shows that may or may not have been the best that appeared on the boards over the last 12 months but are the ones that truly spoke to me.

DEAD OUTLAW: You might not think that a show—a musical no less—centered around a corpse could charm anyone but composer David Yazbek, book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer turned the macabre saga of a bumbling outlaw whose mummified remains ended up as a sideshow attraction into a nuanced commentary on today’s obsession with true crime stories and an even more valuable meditation on death itself. It also featured a terrific toe-tapping score and a you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it performance by Andrew Durand as the titular cadaver that all left me grinning. A Broadway run was recently announced so there will be another chance for us all to enjoy this one in the spring.

GYPSY: I’ve seen three of the four previous revivals of this classic 1959 musical about a mother who pushes her kids into show business and I marveled each time at the music by Jule Styne, the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and the book by Arthur Laurents but I’ve never been as moved as I was this time as I watched Audra McDonald play Madam Rose not as a monster or even a self-involved stage mom but as a woman simply desperate to make a way for her girls in an unforgiving world. There were moments when, although they don’t look at all alike, that I'd have sworn I was looking at the brave yet vulnerable single mother who raised me.  

THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA: Jez Butterworth also beautifully rendered the ineffable bonds that bind mothers, daughters and sisters to one another in this drama about a working-class British mother whose ambitious dreams for her four daughters cause her to make a decision that will haunt all five of them for the next two decades. Two separate quartets of actors played the sisters as teens and as grown women and under Sam Mendes deft direction, they were all terrific, particularly so when the younger versions sang swing-era songs in perfect close harmony. It’s a real shame that this one closed last weekend, far earlier than it should have.

MARY JANE: Back in 2017, I was so knocked out by the New York Theatre Workshop production of Amy Herzog’s play about a single mother caring for a severely ill child that I was instantly dismissive when I heard that Rachel McAdams, a movie actress who hadn’t appeared on stage since high school, was bringing the play to Broadway this year. Boy, was I wrong.  McAdams turned in an exquisitely calibrated performance that drove home the sustaining power of love in even the most dire of circumstances. It won't be the same but an audio version has just been released on Audible.

MAYBE HAPPY ENDING: This surprisingly charming tale about two humanoid robots who fall in love features an unexpectedly jazzy score and a wholly original book by Will Aronson and Hue Park, witty performances by Darren Criss and Helen J Shen and clever direction by the always inventive Michael Arden, who has found really smart ways to use the trendy technology of cameras and screens without sacrificing good storytelling. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that more and more theatergoers give it a shot because this one is really a special treat and deserves a good run.

MEDEA: RE-VERSED: Greek dramas don’t get done as much as, say, Shakespeare's do but this very clever rap version of Medea is a reminder of why those stories have held on for thousands of years. The tale of the princess who betrays her own people to help the Greek warrior Jason find the Golden Fleece but later murders their young sons when he casts her aside for another woman remains the same as it is in the Euripides version but playwright Luis Quintero updated the storytelling and demonstrated his love for classic theatrical forms with smart rhyming couplets and hip-hop emcees stepping in as the chorus. 

MOTHER PLAY: By this time, you’re probably thinking that I’m obsessed with mothers and will give a pass to just about any show sympathetic to them. Maybe. But Paula Vogel’s semi-autobiographical three-hander totally earns its place on this list—and in my heart. With unusually forgiving grace, it tracks four decades in the life of a not very good single mother who copes by guzzling gin, chain smoking and browbeating her children, both of whom eventually come out as gay. Under Tina Landau’s sensitive direction, Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger gave performances that balanced the pathos of the family’s struggles with the humor they employed to survive them. 

OH, MARY: Campy humor isn’t usually my thing but Cole Escola’s bizarro-world version of Mary Todd Lincoln’s activities in the weeks leading up to the assassination of her husband is so delightfully daffy that I found it impossible to resist. And I clearly wasn't alone in that. For the show has been packing them in for months after making the surprising move from the Lucille Lortel uptown to the Hudson on Broadway. Escola, who has been deservedly drawing the lion’s share of the praise, has been given invaluable support by Sam Pinkleton’s pitch-perfect direction and by a totally game cast, especially Conrad Ricamora as a horny Abe Lincoln.

OUR CLASS: Inspired by true events, this story of how the Holocaust affected a group of Jews and Christians in one small Polish village over seven decades—from their grade school years to their days in nursing homes for the few who survived that long—is innately powerful but director Igor Golyak’s inventive stagecraft turned it into a potent cautionary tale about how people can act when faced with truly horrendous choices. It kept me thinking for weeks about what I might or might not do in similar circumstances.

SUFFS: What does a woman have to do to make her voice heard in this country? Or on Broadway? Shaina Taub won this year's Tonys for both the book and the score for her musical about the struggle to get American women the right to vote. A diverse all-female identifying cast played the hell out of it. Audiences cried and cheered during its climactic anthem “Keep Marching.” And yet, the show is closing just eight months after it opened. Luckily PBS is filming the current production for its “Great Performances” series so it will able to inspire future generations to continue the fight.

 

 

 

Not the Best Shows in 2023 But Those That Put A Smile on My Face When I Needed One

It’s that time of year when people like me draw up Top 10 lists ranking the cultural experiences they’ve had over the past 12 months but, as some of you know, 2023 hasn’t been a great year for me. Still even in the worst of times, maybe particularly in the worst of times, theater can be a saving grace.    So this year I’m not going to try to single out the best shows or performances I saw, instead I’m going to acknowledge with great gratitude 10 shows that managed to reach out in the dark and give me small sparks of hope for better times to come.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show: Theatergoing is a tradition in my family that’s been passed baton-like from one generation to the next so it gave me great joy to be able to share this delightful children’s show with my seven-year-old grandniece Joi, whose name is pronounced “joy.” Inspired by Eric Carle’s beloved series of picture books, the show is a kid-friendly 60-minute production that will tour around the country starting next month. Seeing it when it played at the DR2 Theatre here in New York was the first time that Joi and I went to a show alone together and I’m now looking forward to sharing many more with her in the years to come.

Life of Pi: My sister Joanne loved both the book and movie versions of this metaphysical tale about a young shipwreck survivor who claims he spent 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. But Lolita Chakrabarti’s theatrical adaptation was my first encounter with the story and I was dazzled by British director Max Weber’s truly imaginative staging that included life-sized puppets, immersive projections and a bravura performance by the actor Hiran Abeysekera. And now that she's no longer here, getting to share all of it with my sister is a memory I will cherish forever. 

Parade: Even though many critics were lukewarm about the original 1998 production of this challenging musical, both my mother and I were moved by Alfred Uhry’s retelling of the case of Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched in Georgia in 1913, and by the gorgeous score that Jason Robert Brown wrote for it. So I was totally gratified by the nearly unanimous raves this revival drew both when it played at Encores! and then when it quickly moved to Broadway. Michael Arden’s staging was simple but elegant and the cast was uniformly excellent, particularly Ben Platt as Leo and Micaela Diamond as his loyal wife Lucille; I couldn’t get their duet “This is Not Over Yet” out of my head and I didn’t want to.

Sweeney Todd: I guess I have a thing for dark musicals because Stephen Sondheim’s masterwork about a deranged barber seeking revenge against the men who unjustly imprisoned him and destroyed his family is my all-time favorite musical. I saw the original 1979 production with Len Cariou as Sweeney and Angela Lansbury as his accomplice Mrs. Lovett and I’ve also seen several terrific revivals (one with Brian Stokes Mitchell and Christine Baranski and another in a simulated pie shop). So I was a little nervous about this new production starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. I needn’t have worried. Groban and Ashford put different spins on their characters but their interpretations work and the score, brilliantly orchestrated by my friend Jonathan Tunick, remains glorious, especially as played by a 26-piece orchestra. 

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding: Set in a Harlem hair salon and aided by Whitney White’s smart direction, playwright Jocelyn Bioh’s latest dramedy deftly balanced laugh-out-loud comedy—performed by a crackerjack and almost entirely-female ensemble—with some of the very serious issues that confront immigrant women, particularly those from African countries, as they try to grab hold of some tiny piece of the American dream. So I was grateful to Manhattan Theatre Club for offering such an engaging slice of contemporary life that too seldom gets shown on major stages.

Here Lies Love: Although I pranced around on the dance floor when this immersive musical about the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda played at the Public Theater in 2014, the now older me sat up in the mezzanine when it moved to the Broadway Theatre earlier this year. But I still had a good time, caught up by the head-bopping music of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, the kinetic staging by Alex Timbers and the spirited performances of Broadway’s first all-Filipino cast. It was a unique experience and I wish more people had seen it before its too-short run ended.

Primary Trust: Whimsey isn’t usually my thing but Eboni Booth’s lovely fable about a lonely misfit and his journey of overcoming a truly traumatic past by taking the risk of connecting with the people in his community won me over. And that was in large part because of a thoroughly charming performance by William Jackson Harper that made me root for the character’s success and even feel a little hopeful about the world outside the theater too.

Uncle Vanya: I'll confess that a large part of the pleasure of seeing this production of Anton Chekhov’s classic was the fact that each performance played to just 40 people in a loft space so intimate that you could almost smell the scent of the actors—who included Will Brill, Bill Irwin and director David Cromer in the title role—as they passed by. But even in a larger space, Marin Ireland’s performance as the lovelorn Sonya would have stood out. It was so heartbreakingly honest that I felt both protective of the character and privileged to see such a master actor at work. 

The Phantom of the Opera: For 35 years I avoided seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s retelling of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel about a mysterious figure who lives in the bowels of the Paris Opera House and becomes obsessed with a young singer there. But when I heard that this landmark show was closing, I knew I had to finally see it. And I’m so glad I did. It may have been fraying a bit around the edges but I still got a sense of what all the fuss had been about and I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a production as grand and lavish as this one the late great Hal Prince put together. I already miss seeing the iconic white mask that sat on the Majestic Theater’s marquee and reigned over 44th Street for all those decades. 

Shucked: No one was more surprised than I was when this intentionally corny musical turned out to be one of my favorite shows of the year. Here’s the set-up: when the corn crop that is the main livelihood of a secluded community begins to wither and die, a young woman named Maizy (get it?) tries to save her hometown by seeking outside help. A few lessons about tolerance and acceptance are embedded in this tale but for the most part its joke-filled book by Robert Horn and toe-tapping score by country music stars Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally simply aim to entertain, and I left the theater with a big grin on my face. 

 

My Favorite Theatrical Things in 2022

Theater worked hard this year to come back from the pandemic. As part of those efforts, Broadway dropped its requirement that theatergoers show proof of being vaccinated and made mask wearing optional. Smaller off-Broadway theaters dropped the vaccination requirement too, even though many of them kept their masking mandates. 

And there were so many new shows this fall that sometimes two or even three of them opened on the same night as producers rushed to serve up the theatrical equivalent of comfort food: familiar titles (there are currently four Pulitzer Prize-winning plays—Between Riverside and Crazy, Death of a Salesman, The Piano Lesson, Topdog/Underdog—running on Broadway) starry casts (Hugh Jackman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Vanessa Williams, Samuel L. Jackson, Daniel Craig, Daniel Radcliffe) and lots of Sondheim.  

Some of those efforts were successful (several of those productions were terrific). But some weren’t (numerous performances, including the opening night of The Collaboration, the final Broadway production to open in 2022, had to be cancelled when cast members tested positive for the virus).  

Even in the before times, it could be hard for me to single out what was the best in a theatrical year and it’s even tougher to do that in these still fragile times. So I’m going to leave the anointing of this year’s best to my critical brethren and sistren (click here to read my pal Jonathan Mandell's annual compendium of their choices). Instead, to paraphrase the great Oscar Hammerstein, here are just a few of my favorite things:

Seeing A Case for the Existence of God: No play moved me more this year than Samuel D. Hunter’s quiet two-hander that opened at Signature Theatre all the way back in May. It started off as an uneasy reunion between two former high-school classmates (one black, gay and college-educated; the other white, straight and working class) but under David Cromer’s sensitive direction it evolved into a more encompassing meditation on both the feelings of alienation that have so divided this country over the past few years and the things we all share in common, managing in the end to offer a ray of hope for better times to come.

Reveling in Michael Potts' performance in The Piano Lesson.  There were plenty of performances I adored this year: Marylouise Burke in Epiphany, K. Todd Freeman in Downstate, Corey Hawkins in Topdog/Underdog, Linda Lavin in You Will Get Sick. But it was Potts who stood out most for me. In the midst of the dazzling constellation of stars—Danielle Brooks, John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson—that director LaTanya Richardson Jackson assembled for this revival of August Wilson’s drama about the legacy of slavery, Potts stole every scene he was in with a performance that was so natural and so true that it didn't seem as though he was acting at all. 

Discovering Lloyd Suh and Sanaz Toossi: One of the things I most love about going to the theater is finding new voices who allow me to see the world from a fresh perspective. Suh, a winner of this year’s Steinberg Award for mid-career playwrights; and Toossi, who only completed her M.F.A from NYU four years ago, each did that for me twice this year. His plays The Chinese Lady at the Public and The Far Country at the Atlantic looked at parts of the American experience that too often get left out of the history books. While her plays English, also at the Atlantic Theater; and Wish You Were Here at Playwrights Horizons upended conventional stereotypes about Muslims, particularly Muslim women, living in contemporary Iran. All four productions opened my eyes and made me eager to see what these playwrights do next. 

Marveling at John Lee Beatty’s set for Chester Bailey at the Irish Rep.  Sets don’t usually get attention unless they’re big and glitzy in some way. Beatty’s hauntingly beautiful creation was the opposite of that. It was just a unit set that didn't change much at all but with the help of Brian Levitt's exquisite lighting, it elegantly evoked New York’s old Penn Station, a WWII munitions factory and an isolated hospital ward as though it had been designed specifically for each location in Joseph Dougherty’s drama about the power of imagination to insulate us from even life's cruelest tragedies. The Irish Rep has always punched above its weight but this year it was one of the beneficiaries named in Stephen Sondheim’s will and it is clearly putting that money to good use.

The casting of black leading ladies in musicals.  Twenty-one musicals are running on Broadway during this holiday season and 15 of them have women of color starring in leading roles. It’s no surprise that shows like Aladdin, Hadestown, Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, The Lion King and A Strange Loop (its L. Morgan Lee is the first trans woman to get a Tony nomination) have non-white actresses in principal roles but those parts were written that way. 

What got my attention is that this year Emilie Kouatchou became the first black actress to play Christine in Phantom of the Opera and Brittney Johnson became the first black actress to step into Glenda’s shoes full-time in Wicked.  

And they were joined by Denée Benton as Cinderella in Into the Woods, Lorna Courtney as Juliet in & Juliet, Lana Gordon as Velma Kelly in Chicago, Adrianna Hicks as Sugar in Some Like It Hot, Kristolyn Lloyd as John Adams in the gender-flipped revival of 1776 and Solea Pfeiffer as the head groupie Penny Lane in Almost Famous. Plus there’s the rainbow coalition that have made up the cast of  British queens in Six since its very beginning.

Such diverse casting is unprecedented for the Great White Way.  And I can hardly imagine what it would have meant for a young me to have seen leading ladies who looked like me standing center stage and being so adored and so admired when I was coming up. Or what it would have meant for the non-black people sitting in the audience beside me.

And finally, if you’ll permit me, I’m going to add one more thing to this list:

Working on my BroadwayRadio podcast "All the Drama."  For the past year and a half, I’ve been researching and talking to people about the select group of plays and musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize. Putting the episodes together has been both really informative and great fun for me. And I hope that it will be enlightening and enjoyable for you too. You can check it out by clicking here.

 

 

 

10 Spots of Theatrical Joy in a Dire Year

This is the time of year when people like me create lists that tout the best things we’ve experienced in the areas of interest we followed over the last 12 months. But it’s hard to put the word best in the same sentence with anything connected with this year so defined by illness, death, social isolation, racial reckoning and an election that’s left the country as polarized as ever (USA Today just reported that 78% of Republicans still don’t believe that Joe Biden was legally elected president). So shows I saw before the pandemic closed all theaters here in New York now seem as though they existed in a different world. But maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing.  

The challenges of this year could force producers and artistic directors to adapt in ways that will make theater better once the quarantine ends.  Like maybe some of the online productions that sprouted up will continue, allowing theater to be more accessible to those who can’t get to a theater easily or who can’t afford to go or who haven’t felt comfortable once there.  And maybe theaters will learn to be truly inclusive, telling all kinds of stories that showcase a multiplicity of experiences and that are told by an array of voices.

In the meantime though, there have been some things that have given me theatrical joy even in this distressing year and I want to celebrate and thank them. So on this list are five shows I saw in a theater at the beginning of the year and five I saw on my computer or TV screen later on.  They are, in the order of my seeing them:

AMERICAN UTOPIA: I actually saw David Byrne’s exhilarating staged concert twice: once when my theatergoing buddy Bill and I went to one of its final performances at the Hudson Theatre before its scheduled close in February and then again when a filmed version started streaming on HBO in late summer. It’s kind of hard to explain why watching a dozen people of different colors and genders clad in matching gray suits play their instruments and dance around a stage could be so invigorating but each viewing made me feel so very good to be alive. An encore live production has already been scheduled for next fall but if you're an HBO subscriber, you can see the film now by clicking here.

DARLING GRENADINE: The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Daniel Zaitchik’s chamber musical about a man struggling to overcome alcoholism and the woman who loves him struggling not to be an enabler might not have muscled out bigger musicals if they’d had a chance to open but its charming performances and imaginative staging left me with a smile on my face that lingered for days.

HAMLET AT ST. ANN'S WAREHOUSE:  Worn down by seeing one so-so production after another, I’d sworn off Shakespeare for a while—and especially off seeing Hamlet. But my curiosity about the notion of the British actress Ruth Negga playing the role without regard for gender drew me to St. Ann’s where Ireland’s Gate Theatre production ran through March 6. And my reward for going was being able to witness how Negga’s intelligent and unsentimental performance turned what is too often an old war-horse into the thoroughbred that the Bard meant it to be.

THE HEADLANDS: Christopher Chen’s noirish murder mystery at LCT3 was both a meditation on assimilation, identity and the stories that define all of us and a showcase for its all-Asian cast to show off the full and impressive range of their talent.  And its inventive video projections not only provided the sets for the scene but established the mood of the entire piece.

THE HOT WING KING: Definitions of black masculinity were viewed through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family and friends as they all prepared for a culinary competition in this deliciously funny but deeply affecting play by Katori Hall whose run at Signature Theatre was cut too short when all the city’s theaters closed March 12.

TAKE ME TO THE WORLD: A SONDHEIM 90TH CELEBRATION: The lockdown came 10 days before Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday, which was supposed to be celebrated with the opening of avant-garde director Ivo van Hove’s reinterpretation of Sondheim’s first Broadway show, West Side Story. So, led by Raúl Esparza, a group of the composer’s friends—AKA everyone who is anyone on Broadway—threw him a virtual party instead and filled it with heartfelt encomiums and one-of-a-kind performances of selections from his singular songbook. It’s the kind of event that I would have been unlikely to attend in person and so felt grateful that technology allowed me to revel in it, which you can do too by clicking here.

BILL IRWIN'S IN ZOOM: In the time-honored spirit of the show must go on, theater folks began performing online within days of the theater lockdown. Among the best of that early crop was an original 10-minute piece that Irwin put together with the help of San Diego’s The Old Globe. He and fellow funny man Christopher Fitzgerald explored and expanded the boundaries of the then-novel Zoom, demonstrating that theater no longer had to be restricted by geographical location and that even a safely-distanced production could offer up some great physical comedy.  You can check it out by clicking here.   

IN CAMERA: London’s The Old Vic presented this series of small-cast plays that were performed live in its empty theater for viewers who bought hefty-priced tickets that allowed them to see a specific performance on their computers at home. So far I’ve seen Three Kings, Stephen Beresford’s one-man show in which Andrew Scott gave a brilliant performance as a man coming to terms with the estranged father whose love he’s always craved, and Faith Healer, a revival of Brian Friel’s three-hander about an itinerant con man who travels around Ireland pretending—to his audiences, his long-suffering wife, devoted manager and to himself—that he can heal the afflicted. The performances by Michael Sheen, Indira Varma and David Threlfall left me gob smacked. You can see for yourself why if you purchase (the much cheaper) tickets for recorded encore presentations of those productions, which you can find here.

RUSSIAN TROLL FARM:  This comedy, created specifically to be seen online, has been my favorite virtual theater experience so far. Working with TheaterWorks Hartford, TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas and the Brooklyn-based Civilians, playwright Sarah Gancher imagines the lives of the Russian hackers who spread false information on social media leading up to the 2016 presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House.  Like so many digital workers, hers are driven to get as many clicks as they can and the hilarity stems from watching how they—a terrific cast, by the way—do it. The show’s limited run has been extended through Jan. 14 and you can buy $20 tickets here.

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM: Part of Denzel Washington’s effort to film all 10 of the plays in August Wilson’s "American Cycle," this Netflix production about a day in the life of the legendary blues singer was in the works way before most of us had even heard of the coronavirus or of George Floyd, whose death under the knee of a Minneapolis cop gives poignant relevance to this rumination on how Black people have been treated in this country. Reuben Santiago-Hudson massaged the script for the screen, squeezing it down to 90 minutes and adding an effective coda. George C. Wolfe directed and Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman lead an excellent cast as Rainey and Levee, the young trumpet player in her band who wants to make a different kind of music. If you have a Netflix account you can treat yourself to it by clicking here.

The Most Meaningful Shows of 2019 For Me

For those of us who write about culture, the holiday season includes making Top 10 lists. But this year, I’ve decided against trying to anoint the best shows I’ve seen or even tallying up my favorites of the past year. Instead I want to celebrate something that I think is more significant: the integration of works by theater artists of color into the theatrical mainstream.

Works such as David Henry Hwang’s Soft Power, Leah Nanako Winkler’s God Said This, Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord and Sylvia Khoury’s Power Strip provided engaging and enlightening views of the world as seen through the Asian, Hispanic and Middle Eastern gaze. But it is African-American stories that have made the most progress this past year.

Two shows by black playwrights—Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy and Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play—opened on the often all too aptly named Great White Way. And just about every major off-Broadway company included at least one black themed-work in their season and they didn’t maroon them all in February’s Black History Month slot either. 

Meanwhile The Public Theater presented the first professional revival of Nzotake Shange’s trailblazing choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf since the show debut there in 1976.

Other productions, such as director Daniel Fish’s resetting of Oklahoma!, The Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of All My Sons, the Primary Stages adaptation of Little Women and Shakespeare in the Park’s all-black version of Much Ado About Nothing tried, with varying success, to weave the black experience into established classics.

At the same time, but with almost no aren't-we-woke fanfare, black women played the main love interest in such varied productions as Betrayal and Tootsie on Broadway and in Cyrano and Scotland, PA. off-Broadway.

Capping it all off, Jackie Sibblies Drury won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fairview, a boundary-busting work that challenged the way we all look at theater, especially when it deals with people of color.

I was lucky enough to see all of those shows and to find something of value in almost each one. And I'm hoping that they aren't just a fad but a real sea change ushering in truly more inclusive theater. In the meantime here, in alphabetical order, are the 10 (old habits die hard) productions I saw this year about the black experience that still linger with me:

1. Ain’t Too Proud: Sure it’s a jukebox musical with a traditional rags-to-riches-to-almost-wrecked-it-all storyline but the soul music of The Temptations is irresistible, the performances in this production are terrific and this show put a bigger smile on my face than any other thing I saw on Broadway this year.

2. American Moor: One-person shows aren’t usually my favorite but playwright-performer Keith Hamilton Cobb’s meditation on one black actor’s struggle to bring his interpretation of Othello to the stage personalized the tension between the way black people see themselves and the way white people, even well-meaning ones, see them.

3. Behind the Sheet: In telling the story of early gynecology in this country by dramatizing the medical experiments done on enslaved black women, Charly Evon Simpson not only revealed a painful part of this nation’s history but restored dignity and honor to those women, who like legions of others, suffered in anonymity to make America as great as it has been.

4. Boesman and Lena: Signature Theatre’s revival of Athol Fugard’s classic play about a South African couple driven from their homeland didn't erase the memory of previous productions with such actors as James Earl Jones, Ruby Dee and the great Zakes Mokae but the magnificent performances of Sahr Ngaujah and Zainab Jah still managed to give the show a new and urgent relevance when people around the world are being made refugees because of their ethnicity or beliefs.

5. Fires in the Mirror: I was dubious when I heard that Signature Theatre was reviving Anna Deavere Smith’s landmark 1992 one-person play without Smith. But Michael Benjamin Washington gives such a remarkable performance that this show about the 1991 Crown Heights riot that claimed black and Jewish victims resonated for me in new way that reflected the fractured times in which we now live.

6. Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven: This is a big messy thing but playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’ unabashed determination to pay honest tribute to women—abused women, butch women, fat women, immigrant women, old women, women of color—whose lives are so often marginalized or trivialized onstage and in society that it won me over.

7. The Light: The ongoing debate over what to do with men who have sexually mistreated women is sensitively portrayed in this two person-drama by newcomer Loy A. Webb and the fact that the characters are African-American is a powerful reminder of the ways in which this country has always dealt differently with sexual transgressions against black women and those allegedly committed by black men.

8. Marys Seacole: Not resting on her laurels, Jackie Sibblies Drury crafted another ingenious work, this one examining the way in which black women throughout history, starting with the titular British woman who served as a nurse during the Boer War, have served—and been ignored—in the role of caretakers, all brought to vivid life by a multi-cultural cast led by the always brilliant Quincy Tyler Bernstine.

9. A Strange Loop: Michael R. Jackson’s wholly original musical puts the life of a queer black artist at centerstage and sets his professional and personal woes to a pop-soul score that offers some of the most ear-wormy show music of the year.

10. Toni Stone: Shows about sports often have a hard time onstage but, with strong assistance from a heartfelt performance by April Matthis, Lydia R. Diamond scored with her bio-play about the titular character whose 1949 debut in the Negro Baseball League made her the first woman to play professional baseball for any male team.

10 Shows That Stood Out for Me in 2018

The end of the year has sneaked up on me. I got lost in the whir of finishing the school semester where I teach, getting ready for Christmas and dealing with some health problems (nothing serious: a bad cold and a lingering foot injury). But I’ve found time to read the year-end 10 Best lists, including the round-up of them that my blogger pal Jonathan Mandell puts together every year and which you can find by clicking here.

These lists always make me smile because, of course, there is no absolute best. I counted more than 50 different shows that popped up on the nearly two dozen 10 Best lists I saw or heard on podcasts. And even a much-admired show like The Ferryman failed to make the cut for some critics.

That’s in part because there was so much good stuff to see year.  But it's also because theater is a conversation between the people who make a show and each of us who is lucky enough to see it. And how we come out feeling about a show depends on all kinds of things from how an actor performed his part to whether he looks like an old boyfriend, from how well a playwright explores a theme to whether that theme is an issue that touches us personally, from the magic of the stagecraft to how much we needed a good laugh or a quiet cry that day. 

So, with all that in mind, here, in my usual cop-out alphabetical order, are 10 shows that, for various reasons, stood out for me from the nearly 140 shows I saw this year:

Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo: Signature Theatre Company’s revival of these one-act plays written at the beginning and the end of Albee’s career was brilliantly directed by Lila Neugebauer and performed by a stellar cast that deftly walked the tightrope between the cool intellectualism and the visceral emotionalism that this late great playwright’s work demands.

The Ferryman: If I were doing a numbered list, Jez Butterworth’s magnificent family drama set against the back drop of the Irish troubles would be at the top. I was exhilarated by Butterworth’s simultaneously lucid and lyrical storytelling, the uniformly superb performances of the show’s 21-member cast (including a scene-stealing baby) and the nimble staging of director Sam Mendes and his design crew, top-notch from set to sound.

Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish: The trendy way to revive an old musical nowadays seems to be to try to make it fit more with our contemporary sensibilities. But under the astute direction of Joel Grey, The National Yiddish Theatre's production of the classic Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical based on the shtetl stories of Sholem Aleichem has taken a different approach: performing the show in the language its Jewish characters would actually have spoken in the 19th century and treating their traditions with reverence. The result is surprisingly fresh and deeply moving.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Naysayers grumble that this show didn’t deserve its Tony for Best Play but this sequel to J.K. Rowling’s stories about the adventures of a boy wizard and his friends is filled with the kind of good old-fashioned storytelling by Jack Thorne and spectacular stage magic created by director John Tiffany and movement specialist Steven Hoggett that will appeal to the kids who grew up on the Potter books, the kids they’re now raising and kids at heart like me.

The Jungle: Immersive shows were a growing trend in 2018 but this one at St. Ann's Warehouse the Park Avenue Armory stood apart. It set theatergoers in the mdist of a refugee camp that once existed in Calais, France and housed scores of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and other war-ravaged countries, all desperately hoping to start a new life in Europe. Some of the actors once lived in the real-life camp but all of them—whether playing camp leaders, relief workers or smugglers—were superbly affecting.

  

Lewiston/Clarkston: The Rattlestick Theater transformed its playing space to house the changing physical and emotional landscape of the American West in Samuel D. Hunter’s linked one-acts set in contemporary towns named for the 19th century explorers Meriwether Lewis and John Clark. A chicken dinner was served in the break between the plays (offering food themed to shows was another trend this year) and the actors moved around the 51 people lucky enough to attend each performance but director Davis McCallum and his impressive cast maintained an aching authenticity throughout.

On Beckett: Drawing on his finely-honed skills as both a trained clown and a serious tragedian, Bill Irwin proved the perfect guide into the sometimes-inscrutable works of the absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett. And this one-man show at The Irish Repertory Theatre, which Irwin both wrote and directed, was a master class in acting and a love letter to theater making.

Slave Play: The trend that most impressed me this year was the growing number of shows that broke taboos—societal and theatrical—to look at the knotty issue of race in new ways. I could have chosen Pass Over, Antoinette Nwandu’s riff on Waiting for Godot; Jackie Sibblies Drury’s genre-bending Fairview or Aleshea Harris’ What to Send Up When It Goes Down, each deliberately unsettling and thoroughly thought-provoking. But I’m going with New York Theatre Workshop's production of this one by Jeremy O. Harris because it’s the most intimate of the genre and because its final scene was so unflinchingly raw and honest that it shook me to my core.

Sugar in Our Wounds: Identifying as an Afro-queer playwright, Donja R. Love has written a trilogy that deals with the experience of being gay and black at pivotal points in American history. This first, which played at Manhattan Theatre Club, was set on a southern plantation during the Civil War, where a group of slaves dream of freedom and two of the men unexpectedly fall in love. Director Saheem Ali created a lovely frame for Love’s lyrical language and passionate story and the audience the night I saw the show was filled with weeping male couples, grateful to see themselves finally reflected in history.

 

Usual Girls: Several plays by promising young female playwrights offered glimpses of how difficult it still is to be a young woman coming of age in this society. Clare Barron’s Dance Nation popped up on many Top 10 lists and I liked it a lot too. But I was struck even more by the Roundabout Underground's production of this one by Ming Peiffer, which tells the story of a young Korean-American woman struggling with sexism, racism and the damage that oppressed people can turn on themselves. Under Tyne Rafaeli's flint-eyed direction, it managed to be equal parts raunchy, funny and heartbreaking.

As I said, it was a great year for theater.  Here's hoping that 2019 brings us just as much to cheer. In the meantime, I wish you and yours good health, much happiness and the chance to see as many shows as your heart desires.