Going to live theater is one of the main things I do in my life, so I have decided to highlight some of this year's productions that particularly excelled in categories that I just now made up.
Best Conceit
The one-ish-man show Out Of Order starts with Carl Holder's writer's block, which has led him to write a bunch of prompts on cards that he will pick out at random to create a spontaneous performance in front of an audience of about 20. Some make Holder teach the audience about some aspect of playwriting. Some ask participation of said audience (I had to yell something out the door at one point). Some are intensely intimate, like when Holder has to take us line by line through a recent bank statement. They seem haphazard at first, but over the course of the night the cards (which can't be that random) form a deftly constructed story of an artist struggling with both tangible concerns and a lot of self-doubt. The complete lack of a fourth wall reveals Holder's talent for melting the ice between strangers, leading to a climax where, whether you realize it or not, the whole show finishes up just fine without him.
Best Script
Jen Silverman's version of the 1889 August Strindberg play Creditors was one in which I was hanging on every single line. It's a sparse play without a lot of action, and it demands plenty of self-control from the audience. But at the intimate Minetta Lane Theatre, it slowly tightens its grip with tense, enrapturing dialogue. Each sentence feels like it has multiple meanings, and as those sentences built on top of one another, I was in awe of what they constructed.
Best Two-Hander
This was not a year for maximalist productions, with a lot of cash-strapped theater companies relying on more manageable one- and two-person shows to counter funding cuts, inflation, and subscription drops. It's a worrying thing, overall, but sometimes all you need are the basics. Samuel D. Hunter's Grangeville has a cast of two—polar opposite half-brothers who do almost all of their talking on separate continents as their mom moves closer to death. It's 90 minutes with no intermission, and not much more than one guy on one side of the stage and another guy on the other, but the intensity makes you crave a smoke break. I will always love Hunter for A Case For The Existence of God, and in both plays he displays a talent for peeling back the layers of a character until a set of assumptions gives way to real empathy.
Best Set
Bowl EP featured good skateboarding and amazing rapping, but this off-Broadway production at the Vineyard Theater was most notable for the literal bowl (in the skating sense) that its team constructed for the show. Some audience members sat on the border of the skating area for this physically demanding show, and others (like me) sat high above. What a thrill, especially given the recent trend of minimalism, to be able to transform a space into something that it hasn't ever been before.
Best Portrayal Of High School
Kallan Dana's Lobster, about a small-town cool girl trying to direct a production of Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth with three misfit classmates, turns up all the hormones to 11. It's extremely funny in the beginning with its teenage earnestness, awkwardness, and cluelessness, and then it flips into something much darker, digging into what it's like when heartbreak feels apocalyptic. I always get excited to go to The Tank—a precarious-feeling haven for burgeoning theater right by Madison Square Garden, which presents several shows at a time—and Lobster was a testament to all the sweat, sincerity and teamwork that goes into everything they do there.
Best Big Event
Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire, which wasn't a Broadway show but took place at the 120-year-old Harvey Theater in Brooklyn. Patsy Ferran's Blanche DuBois ended up stealing the show for me, but overall this was a stone-cold classic with a big Hollywood celebrity in a gorgeous old palace filled with giddy young people. It was the most "I have got to wear my best dress tonight" show of the year.
Best Chaos
The cult-favorite comedian Chris Gethard takes charge of a recurring slot at UCB that's filled with a diverse mix of talented comics, a live band, and pure ridiculous anarchy. By the end of the night, there were something like 14 shirtless men on stage, several audience members just kind of hanging out up there, and a whole bunch of sandwiches that had been distributed to the crowd, because it was Sandwich Night.
Best At Making Me Cry
Dead As A Dodo was like a Pixar movie come to life. The puppet-based production from Wakka Wakka created a fantastical world inhabited by dastardly villains and innocent heroes. The puppeteers' portrayal of water was particularly breathtaking, but it was the water coming from my eyes that made the show especially sticky. Like some of the best kids' movies, there was a refusal to shy away from the rawest emotions and fears that we all share, and the purity of our protagonists meant that nobody could possibly bear to imagine anything bad ever happening to them.
Best At Feeling Way Too Relevant
Sanaz Toossi's English, about a group of Iranians learning how to speak the titular language, is a show that fits into the genre of "friendly, fairly apolitical peek into a foreign culture." In other years, I might have been more judgmental about the ways that it flatters its audience more than challenges it. But along with the Real Woman Have Curves Broadway musical—not a commercial success but one I think the people who went to see it very much enjoyed—it felt significantly more urgent that it should have simply because those currently in power don't want to affirm the humanity of people who aren't cis white men. In that way, both shows were politically rebellious even if they were something short of calls to action.
Best Flute Solo
The band in Buena Vista Social Club is such a red-hot inferno that it literally doesn't even matter that this show has some of the worst dialogue on Broadway. It's still maybe the most fun thing you can see right now. Of the many showcases for these incredible musicians, "Candela" in the first act is one of the magic moments. With the action set in a recording studio, the out-of-retirement diva played by Natalie Venetia Belcon vetoes the idea of the producer adding a flute solo to this track. When the flute player comes in anyway, she gives him a withering look. But then he keeps playing, and she slowly gets into it. She dances a little, and then a lot, and all together, the performers tear the house down.
Best Fuckboy
In Adult Relationships, Jess Barbagallo plays a man reconnecting with an old flame at a wake for a complicated mutual friend. He has a wife and kids and seemingly a pretty cushy job as a private chef, but he keeps talking to this ex, finding new excuses to keep the night going. Anything that even kind of reminds me of The Big Chill already has me hooked, but Barbagallo's performance brought an extra crackle of life to Ben Gassman's already-strong writing. He sits right on that line between attractive and frustrating, showing just enough slickness to make you want him to keep speaking and just enough sliminess to make you not trust him. That grey area is an especially effective spot for an actor to live.
Best Venue On A Summer Night
It sure feels good to watch the sun set right on the Hudson during a $25-a-ticket Little Island Amphitheater cultural event. It's worth the risk that you might end up waiting out a rain delay.
Best Rewatch
Sometimes I feel a twinge of melancholy after seeing a spectacular performance, because I know I might not experience it again. I'm not sure when or if Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 will come back to Broadway, but in 2017 it was an exhilarating trip for a 22-year-old intern who still saw theater tickets as a rare luxury. This August, I got to see it again at Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre. Dave Malloy's musical is literate and quirky. It's occasionally raucous and filled with so much heart. Catching it for a second time was a reassuring reminder that a work of art doesn't simply disappear after its original run.
Best Theater Geek Moment
Masquerade is attempting to fill a void in fancy dress-up immersive experiences following the wind-down of Sleep No More and the abrupt shuttering of Life And Trust. The difference here is that, rather than the dream-like choose-your-own-adventure ballet of those other two shows, this is a relatively straightforward, kind of scrappy staging of Phantom Of The Opera that happens in a large Manhattan building where the audience moves from room to room. I'd say it loses a bit of its spark in the last third (sometime after the live fire-eater, which I found terrifying), but if you're a phan it's worth it just to be part of the title track and the descent into the Phantom's lair. It's not the kind of high-budget magic that makes you wonder "Oh my god how did they do that?", but it's such a cool realization of an iconic sequence, and it left me with so much admiration for those who brought it to life.
Best Corpse
Andrew Durand does a lot of acting in the early part of Dead Outlaw, but in the show's second half, he plays the real-life attempted train robber Elmer McCurdy as a dead body that passes through a series of strange uses over the decades. I had a very close seat to this show for one of its final performances, so I had an ideal view of Durand as he did absolutely nothing—not a twitch, not a smirk, just total lifelessness. On multiple occasions, I almost talked myself into the idea that he'd been replaced by a wax figure with some sort of sleight-of-hand, but nope. It was him the whole time.
Best Card Trick
Ta-Da! is first and foremost a hilarious, often raunchy stand-up comedy show, but it ends with Josh Sharp showing off his magician skills with a classic "Is this your card?" misdirection. I was sitting right next to the guy he did the trick on, and I have no clue how the correct card ended up under his butt on the seat.
Most Easily Swayed Audience
The folks who cheered for the Nazis at the start of Operation Mincemeat's second act. It's a wonderful show, and I'm making that part sound worse than it is, but still: Don't cheer the Nazis!
Best Wallace Shawn
Taylor Mac's Prosperous Fools is a bonkers satire of the lengths to which highbrow artists will go to appease uninterested donors—in this case a vapid starlet and a crass Musk-coded billionaire. The most absurd of the many running gags is that in order to say anything that anybody will take note of, Mac's character must don a Wallace Shawn disguise, complete with voice, that completely fools the starlet and the billionaire. Elisabeth Vincentelli at the Times disapprovingly thought the butt of this joke was Shawn himself, but I couldn't disagree more.
Best Monologue
Prince Faggot felt like a pretty major off-Broadway success but somehow seemed to avoid the controversy that I think the play itself assumed and/or worried it would court. It imagines a future where Prince George, son of William and Kate Middleton, is an out gay member of the royal family, and it gives the audience a fairly normal romantic drama alongside a meta-theatrical thing where the actors—all gay men and trans women—sometimes break away and make personal remarks about what they're seeing on stage. The best comes from the legendary David Greenspan, who begins with a laugh: that a friend once told him his small hands would be ideal for fisting. It starts an unavoidably kind of funny monologue, because it's about fisting, and it also breaks your heart as it zooms out. It's the early '90s, where gay men are actively trying to learn alternate forms of sex to try to outrun HIV, and those small hands of Greenspan's would go on to hold too many hands of those on the verge of death. It may sound strange that these reflections sit on top of a plot that's not unlike the fluffy titillation of Red, White, & Royal Blue, but in looking toward a more normalized future for queerness, it's still impossible to shake the past.
Best Use Of Nudity
I wanted so badly to love Bess Wohl's Liberation, the hugely ambitious dramatization of a feminist consciousness-raising group in 1970s Ohio, filled with the best collection of actresses assembled since The Welkin. It tries to reckon with a problem that I think is on a lot of our minds, something like: The generation of Wohl’s mother was filled with awesome women who fought hard for what they deserve. Same with the generations since. And yet, here we are. But too often this play went overboard with its emotion, dulling promising ideas by turning them into verbal sparring matches and rote blowouts until every scene felt like an audition showcase.
The one spot I really gravitated toward was the part right after the intermission, which is the reason you have to lock your phone in a pouch when you go to the show. Following a trend apparently publicized by Ms., the women in the group do a portion of their meeting nude, where each has to say something they like and dislike about their bodies. It’s the best-written scene of the night, exploring the contradictory emotions of pride, jealousy, and shame that women can feel or are made to feel about themselves and each other. It’s also useful because, just inherently, it forces restraint on each character, as they’re in no position to start wildly gesticulating, shouting, or calling all the attention to themselves. It brings the heightened tension down to something more human, more relatable. The scene is a risky choice—I’ll even say brave—but it’s one whose lessons could have been better internalized through the rest of the script.
Best Dungeon Master
I've never played Dungeons & Dragons, but in every fictional representation I've seen of people playing, the fantasy world starts to nudge itself into the real world. There are sound effects, or lighting flourishes that make the characters' imaginations tangible, like they have one foot in the room they're in and the other foot in some far-off universe. So it's magical, then, that while watching Else Went's sprawling Initiative at The Public Theater—partially about a group of misfit high schoolers in the early 2000s who find camaraderie in D&D—I saw not adults playing teenagers on a sparse stage with the loosest of delineations between basement and classroom, but a vividly rendered small town inhabited by actual kids with actual dreams. Crucial to this immersion is the group's dungeon master, played by Greg Cuellar, who takes to the hobby with bombastic theatricality and extraordinary storytelling. This five-hour play made me fall in love with its characters, to the point that I would have happily stayed for two or three more.
Best Over-The-Top Musical Number
I saw Guys And Dolls on the harbor in Sydney, with the Opera House in the background. For the Cuba number, a giant crane carrying a big neon sign that said CUBA provided the backdrop, those inflatable floppy used-car guys bordered all the dancers, and actual fireworks lit up the sky for the song's ending. What a night at the theater!
Best Fusion Of Tap Dance With '90s Hip Hop
Ayodele Casel put together a charismatic session at the landmark Joyce Theater with a singular marriage of two seemingly disparate genres. You get the very broad gist of her crew's deal if you imagine someone expertly tap-dancing to "Shook Ones," which is in itself a fun thing to see, but that description alone undersells the loose hangout vibe that these performers were able to convey while still displaying such awesome physical feats on stage.
Best Reaction To An Audience Disruption
I saw Sarah Ruhl’s beautiful, tragic Eurydice on a weekend matinee in a fairly small off-Broadway room. Probably a little over halfway through, someone in the very back started snoring—loud enough to fill the entire space. For reasons unknown to me, nobody nearby chose to wake this person up. Instead, the whole audience kind of teetered between laughter and annoyance, and that feeling extended past the fourth wall. After the snoring had gone on for a few minutes, one of the actors had to climb through a small opening on-stage and then close a door behind them. That guy slammed the door shut about as loud as you could have slammed it, making this gunshot-like WHAM that should have roused even a heavy sleeper. Somehow, that didn't work.
Best To Stream
The tickets for Andrew Scott's one-man version of Chekov's Vanya were too much for me to stomach, so I streamed a British recording of the show on National Theatre At Home. The concept of the Scott performance—playing every character simply by switching voices and positions on stage—seems goofy at first glance, but his performance is so committed that you disappear into the story all the same. Deserved credit goes, too, to Simon Stephens, whose adaptation strips the original play of its specific time and place and turns it into something a little more modern and welcoming to an English-speaking audience. With Scott at the helm, it's amazing to see this quintessentially Russian work melt into something that feels so Irish, like a sad story someone tells at a pub.
You should also check out Angels In America and Yerma while you have that month of National Theatre At Home going.
Best Site For Site-Specific Theater
Oh, Honey, about a support group of mothers whose college-aged sons have all been accused of sexual misconduct, felt like it drew packed houses in large part because its action was staged at an actual Brooklyn brunch spot after it closed for the evening. For my money, the script was too focused on catfighting and not interested enough in pricking itself on its thorny premise. But Carmen Berkeley, as the waitress, gets to do a pretty gnarly monologue up on the counter.
Best Rubbernecking
The most generous case I can make for Rob Lake Magic with Special Guests The Muppets is that maybe it really was an honest effort to test out whether the logistical demands of The Muppets could survive a live-theater setting. But then, something like three weeks after this planned holiday extravaganza closed on the same weekend it officially opened, I saw this very outdated feature in a Playbill and decided I could not give it any benefit of the doubt.
How many minutes would you guess Kermit and his fuzzy pals were in this show based on this page? Would you guess 10? It's 10. Ten minutes of Muppets in a show that has "The Muppets" in its title. That's what I learned from preview-goers on Reddit as I, a Muppets fan, searched for something that might invalidate the very bad feeling I got from the show's advertising. Everyone who went, as far as I know, felt bait-and-switched by a mediocre magic guy who got a cup of coffee on Broadway thanks entirely to some half-baked interludes with the puppets that the crowd paid to see. The Kermit I know would never have produced this flop.
Silliest Trend (On-Stage)
I caught multiple productions this year that had actors essentially read the stage directions out loud. Like, "Lauren furrowed her brow as she read that last sentence, wondering whether or not to cut the word 'essentially.'" I'm not saying it never worked in the favor of the writing's rhythm or the rapport it established with the audience, but it goes against my every screaming instinct to show, not tell.
Silliest Trend (Off-Stage)
The vaccine-card era caused big back-ups at theater entrances, making shows delay their start times, and we never got back to normal. If anything, shows are starting later and later past their advertised hour. I'm not getting mad at the tardiness in itself—it's sometimes annoying, but it's also nice to feel totally relaxed even as your late ass walks in at 7:02 for a 7:00 show. But I do roll my eyes when a confirmation email says something like "Please plan to arrive at the box office no later than 30 minutes before the show. The event will begin promptly at the advertised time, and there is absolutely no late seating." Lies!
Best Totally New Experience (For Me)
The National Noh Theater in Tokyo is a place of understated beauty (a woman inside picked a cherry blossom out of my hair that I'd caught while reading under a tree before the show), and there I saw a program of two classical dramas, not all that unlike Western opera. The first, about a young priest who struggles to fix his grandfather's back, was the quicker and funnier of the two, though both carried these unfamiliarly stilted, slow rhythms that were a bit jarring for a newcomer. Still, there were also stretches were I could very much lock into the vibrations the performers were putting out.
Best Imaginary Dog
The monologuist David Cale's Blue Cowboy is a fictional story told by a New Yorker about his trip to Idaho, where he begins a relationship with a mysterious stranger who's working through a lot of baggage about his sexuality. Cale is masterful at telling—gentle with his characters and rich with specific details that help you call up a mental picture of what he's describing. Incidental to the story, and then much more important at the end, is the Idaho man's Australian shepherd, Shelley, who is perceptive and intelligent and ultimately quite down for an adventure to the big city. Sitting in the front row at the Bushwick Starr, I just really liked the idea that everyone in this room had, thanks to Cale, communally conjured up this idea of a good dog.
Best Ballet
I saw the American Ballet Theatre do the classic Giselle at Lincoln Center, and I love the contrast between the two halves. The first is a charming and folksy series of festive dances in the center of an old-timey European village, and then the second is a hardcore ghost story with eternal stakes.
Best Time Travel
I learned this year that Mamma Mia! the Broadway musical is not as much of a whirlwind as the movie, but I still feel happy that I saw the time-capsule touring production loop back into its parent venue for an engagement at the Winter Garden Theatre. It's funny that these inert, paper-thin characters, of all the ones that have ever graced Broadway, populate such an enduring smash hit, but I can't deny those songs and the ensemble dances that accompany them, especially when I'm smashed over the head with three of them in a row at curtain call.
Most Token Woman
Ilana Glazer made her Broadway debut in the George Clooney vanity project Good Night And Good Luck, and she was given nothing interesting to do. Kind of a waste!
Best Tribute To Another Performer
Morgan Bassichis channels the persona of Frank Maya, an openly gay comedian and performance artist who died young of AIDS, in a solo act titled ... do you want to guess? ... Can I Be Frank? Bassichis is very funny in a desperately vain, bitchy way, and they also, without getting too heavy-handed, draw a meaningful parallel between our time and Frank's, giving us a bit of direction for navigating the world we inhabit. They do some of Maya's kooky, petty, slice-of-life material word for word, and they also educate the audience about ACT UP and what that group was fighting for at the same time as Maya was aspiring to fame. That paradox—doing stand-up sets where you're complaining about a boyfriend who didn't want to stay out late dancing, while you and you friends are suffering and dying—reminds us of the ways in which history repeats. There's not a solution there. But it's true.
Best Thing To Hope For
If it were up to me, we'd be getting a production of every single Tom Stoppard play in New York by the end of next year. Given the state of the business, I'll settle for five. I just hope they don't go with, like, Hugh Jackman and Jim Parsons in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and then call it a night.
Best Broadway Opening To Look Forward To
Cats: The Jellicle Ball
Best Thing To Do If This Blog Is Making You Want To Check Out More Random Small Productions In New York City Next Year
Go to something at The Exponential Festival! January is usually the worst month for anything, but the folks who make this long-running winter event happen do an incredible job shining a light on weird, freaky, hilarious, and thrilling theater.
Best Ending
John Proctor Is The Villain
If you know, you know.
