It was a remarkable year for theater in New York, even if some of my favorites didn’t linger for very long. In whittling down my list, I decided to exclude some shows that transferred to Broadway this year but that had made my previous year-end list for earlier incarnations of the same production — that includes the Pulitzer-winning drama English as well as musicals such as Buena Vista Social Club, Dead Outlaw, and the magnificent revival of Ragtime that transferred from New York City Center with all of its majesty intact.
Here are my picks for the best shows of the year:
1. Well, I’ll Let You Go
Off Broadway
Quincy Tyler Bernstine, one of the finest actors of her generation, was the heart and soul of actor-playwright Bubba Weiler’s transcendent new drama about grief and loss in a tight-knit community where everybody is up in each other’s business. Without ever resorting to histrionics (and seldom even raising her voice), Bernstine captured a full range of emotions in depicting a newly minted widow grappling with the force of her loss as well as her anxiety that her recently departed husband may have been harboring a dark secret.
2. Liberation
Broadway
In this heartfelt and incisive new drama, the versatile playwright Bess Wohl grapples with her relationship with her late mother as well as the promise and limits of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that consumed Wohl’s mom in the days before she married and settled into a more traditional role as a housewife and mother. (Tickets on sale through February 1.)
3. Purpose
Broadway
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s brilliantly crafted drama falls neatly into the category of fraught family-reunion plays, complete with a tea-spilling, truth-dropping dinner scene at the end of the first act that’s every bit as explosive as the one from Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County. But it also layers in contours specific to a boujee Black family that’s struggling to maintain appearances amid some inconvenient, discrediting facts about a flawed patriarch modeled on Jesse Jackson Jr.
4. Oedipus
Broadway
How do you present a millennia-old Greek tragedy for contemporary audiences? Robert Ickes’ searing new adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus unfolds like a ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller — and it benefits from pitch-perfect performances by Mark Strong, as an imperious politician whose election day-triumph is undone by a series of revelations about his past, and Lesley Manville as his devoted wife whose feelings of maternal protectiveness have an origin that will become her undoing. (Tickets on sale through February 8.)
5. Operation Mincemeat
Broadway
It’s been a decade since Hamilton exploded the possibilities of what musical theater could do with history, jam-packing a lot of narrative and footnote-worthy tangents into a lyrically complicated but harmonically rich vehicle. The effervescent British import Operation Mincemeat turns a bizarre-but-true chapter of World War II spycraft it into a genre-busting celebration of musical storytelling that bursts with both hilarity and heart. (Tickets on sale through July 5.)
6. A Streetcar Named Desire
Off Broadway
British director Rebecca Frecknall unearthed new depths in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, turning a classic that can be played as maudlin melodrama into a kinetic prize fight between two mismatched sparring partners. Patsy Ferran Ferran brings a kind of radical empathy to Blanche Dubois, a role that is so often played in very broad strokes, while Paul Mescal plays Stanley Kowalski as a feral man-child eager to bring Blanche and anyone who challenges him down to his level. As they circle each other on a spare set that suggests a mythic boxing ring, they built a tension that was palpably combustible.
7. Real Women Have Curves
Broadway
One of the year’s great tragedies is that this upbeat and timely new musical — a celebration of female empowerment, body positivity, and the indomitable work ethic of Latina immigrants striving in the shadow of INS raids — didn’t find an audience. The second act stands out with a series of show-stopping comic numbers that come in quick succession, from a hilarious celebration of women’s menstruation to a wonderfully clumsy seduction tune to the title song, a high-wattage ode to body positivity.
8. Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes
Off Broadway
Hugh Jackman cannily played against type as an unsettlingly charming author/professor whose past dalliance with a student (Ella Beatty, in an equally assured performance) comes back to haunt him. Better yet, Jackman and his producers made a conscious effort to democratize star-driven theater even in an intimate Off Broadway space, handing a quarter of the tickets to community organizations for free and reserving another quarter for an affordable $35.
9. Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York
Broadway
Every now and then, an enchanting new musical classic comes along out of nowhere. This modern musical romance, with a score of pop-tinged bops that are as catchy as Velcro, has the feel of an old-fashioned movie but also the look and sound of a story that could only take place in 2025. The two stars, Sam Tutty and Christiani Pitts, also play off each other with an energy and tunefulness that is utterly disarming. (Tickets on sale through July 5.)
10. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
Off Broadway
It was another wonderful year for solo performance pieces, from well-crafted comic pieces like Josh Sharp’s ta-da! to artful monologues of hidden depth like Weather Girl to tour-de-force performance showcases like Natalie Palamides’ Weer. But the show that lingered the longest in my memory was Julia Masli’s philosophical exercise in clowning at the Public Theater. The Estonian-born performer wandered the aisles like an ethereal Phil Donahue, drawing a group of strangers into a communal experience that felt oddly intimate, confessional, and therapeutic — while also doubling us over with laughter.
Culture Sauce 