It was a remarkable year for theater in New York City, both on and off Broadway, with thoughtful, boundary-pushing productions of material old and new. And two of the year’s best productions — Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s explosive family drama Appropriate and the new based-on-a-doc musical Buena Vista Social Club — both opened this month, after multiple major critics issued their 10 best lists (and therefore snubbed these absolutely brilliant new shows). I understand the pre-holiday deadline crunch, but why rush a top 10 list if you haven’t seen all of the contenders? (Even movie critics, and awards nominators, wait to see end-of-year films before making their decisions.)

Here are my picks for the top 10 theater productions of the year:

1. Appropriate (Broadway) Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s drama is a modern masterpiece that seems to crib elements of dysfunctional family dramas from Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Horton Foote and Tracy Letts — and then shuffle them in ways that feel entirely fresh. Sarah Paulson leads a top-shelf cast of prickly but not entirely unlikable family members squabbling over the estate of their just-deceased father, a man whose legacy proves to be far more complicated than they thought.

2. Black Odyssey (Off Broadway) Five years after his underrated gem The House That Will Not Stand, Marcus Gardley unleashed an insanely ambitious update of Homer’s epic set in modern-day Harlem, featuring a canny mix of high- and low-culture references, rhymed couplets and some of the sharpest performances seen on stage all year.

3. Buena Vista Social Club (Off Broadway) The year’s best new musical comes from an unlikely source: an Oscar-nominated documentary that was mostly a concert film featuring Cuban musicians who got their start in pre-Castro revolution 1950s. Director Saheem Ali and book writer Marco Ramirez brilliantly give the songs a narrative structure, one that’s boosted by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s energetic choreography and some wonderful onstage singers and musicians.

4. Parade (Broadway) Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt were riveting in this note-perfect revival of Jason Robert Brown’s timely musical about a Jewish man in early-20th-century Atlanta who is falsely accused of rape and then lynched by an antisemitic mob.

5. Love (Off Broadway) Alexander Zeldin’s vérité study of life in a British homeless shelter, where theatergoers were seated on stage within reach of the unactorly cast, was a study in empathy and intentional voyeurism.

6. Endgame / Waiting for Godot (Off Broadway) Samuel Beckett was blessed with two revelatory revivals this year, both of which honored the legacy of his philosophical absurdism while bringing something fresh to the material. The Irish Rep’s Endgame, starring John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin, treated nihilistic despair with a blend of avoidance, conversational distraction, constant complaint and outright farce. Meanwhile, Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks took a more grounded, less slapsticky approach to Waiting for Godot that found new depths in the classic.

7. Fat Ham (Broadway) James Ijames’s brilliant and hilarious riff on Hamlet, set at a backyard cookout somewhere in the American South, carries the weight of Shakespearean tradition lightly. Just because the characters find themselves in tragic circumstances, Ijames suggests, doesn’t mean that they have to be weighed down by the legacy of past trauma.

8. Public Obscenities (Off Broadway) Soho Rep, which produced so much great work this year, scored with Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s stunningly realistic look at a family in Kolkata, India, and the arrival of a nephew, an American PhD-student, along with the nephew’s Black boyfriend. The revelations come gradually, at the speed of life, and they carry all the more power for their understatement.

9. Here Lies Love (Broadway) Who’d have thought that a disco biomusical about Imelda Marcos would be so entertaining? A decade after a successful Off Broadway run, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s musical hit the Great White Way in a sadly short-lived production that reimagined the Broadway Theatre as a giant disco with audience members line-dancing around moving platform stages for the performers. The show could have worked in a regular proscenium staging, but the dance-forward message contributed to its power.

10. How to Defend Yourself (Off Broadway) Lilana Padilla’s brilliantly nuanced play focused on seven college students struggling with their conflicting desire for sexual intimacy and self-preservation at a time when rape culture is top of mind.

Runners-up (alphabetically):

Days of Wine and Roses (Off Broadway) Composer-lyricist Adam Guettel’s new musical, based on the 1962 movie about a married couple’s battle with alcohol, featured a sophisticated score and scorching performances by Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James.

Dig (Off Broadway) Theresa Rebeck’s remarkable new drama was a big-hearted look at some very troubled souls around a plant store in suburban Ohio.

The Fears (Off Broadway) Emma Sheanshang’s subdued, almost plot-free new play, set in a Buddhist meditation group, squeezed considerable laughter from the ways in which even good-intentioned people can get under each other’s skins.

Hell’s Kitchen (Off Broadway) Rather than adapting Alicia Keys’s hits into musical-theater arrangements, this biomusical rooted its radio-friendly score in a mix of pop, hip-hop and jazz — with Camille A. Brown’s propulsive choreography accentuating the syncopated beats. The Broadway-bound show also boasted a star-making performance by newcomer Maleah Joi Moon as the young Alicia.

Life of Pi (Broadway) Director Max Webster and his production team use magnificent stagecraft to bring Yann Martel’s acclaimed novel to glorious and dreamlike life. This is a story about storytelling, the narratives we create to cope with trauma, and there’s a visceral power in seeing the story take shape in a way that is purely theatrical.

New York, New York (Broadway) Many critics (and audiences) were cool on the final musical by 96-year-old composing legend John Kander and his late lyricist partner, Fred Ebb. But director-choreographer Susan Stroman delighted with inventive group numbers (a tap routine on the girders of a skyscraper under construction!) and interstitial scenes that made city residents more than just background players. Plus, leads Colton Ryan (as a rough-edged musician) and Anna Uzele (as an up-and-coming singer with a powerhouse voice) defied cookie-cutter musical-theater convention.

One Woman Show (Off Broadway) It was a very strong year for solo performances this year, but Liz Kingsman stood out by hilariously skewering the conventions of shows about young female storytellers (in the vein of Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who turn personal insecurities into fodder for “content.”

Primary Trust (Off Broadway) William Jackson Harper riveted as a middle-aged, deeply antisocial man in Eboni Booth’s affecting new play, a deft portrait of a trauma survivor at a critical moment of inflection, just when he might be tempted to come out of his shell, just a little.

Purlie Victorious (Broadway) Leslie Odom Jr. displayed off-the-chart rizz as a fast-talking preacher in Kenny Leon’s brilliant revival of the Ossie Davis farce, set in the Jim Crow-era South. Odom was well-matched with Kara Young, who flashed the physicality of a slapstick queen and the exaggerated line deliveries of a stand-up.

Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month (Off Broadway) The Soho Rep delivered a sui generis celebration of female genitalia that skipped the Eve Ensler-style monologue for a wacky throwback talk-show format hosted by a talking vagina (Becca Blackwell’s Snatch Adams) and a foul-mouthed taint with pillowlike testes dangling beside his head (Amanda Duarte’s Tainty McCracken). You’ve never seen anything like it before — or laughed so hard.