The Best Theater of 2024

In my first full year back on the job, I’ve been heartened, especially in recent dark days, to see collaboration everywhere. Theaters are reaching out to each other. Producers are getting creative, teaming up to give inventive, extraordinary productions a first or even a second life. Fully half the plays that ended up on my best-of-the-year list were co-productions, and not among the big dogs — institutions like Transport Group, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, En Garde Arts, HERE, Rattlestick, and Theatre for a New Audience have been coming together to pool resources and share premieres. What it means is, despite a climate of continuous scarcity, and despite some infuriating losses, more brave art. For me, the miraculous has often been scrappy this year, and vice versa. Theater at its best has been heeding the call, in the words of a hero of mine, to “show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.”

10.

On Set With Theda Bara

On the list of shortcuts to a great production, “Get David Greenspan to do it solo” must rank in at least the top five. I’d argue that in 2024, the best Norma Desmond in New York wasn’t played by Nicole Scherzinger after all, but by Greenspan in the funhouse-mirror-warped persona of Theda Bara, another kohl-eyed silent-movie titan who watched the pictures shrink beneath her. In Joey Merlo’s slippery, camp-laced noir, Theda herself was one of a quartet of characters embodied by Greenspan, an actor for whom taking on a character always feels more like being taken by one — performance as a kind of grand, semi-erotic possession. He also played a runaway genderqueer teen named Iras, obsessed with Theda and in danger of becoming the Joe to her Norma; an organist named Ulysses with a voice straight out of The Sound and the Fury; and one of Iras’s adoptive fathers, a gumshoe named Detective Finale, who had all of Sam Spade’s vocabulary if not, perhaps, the full hardness of his boil. In Jack Serio’s production, which was making a return at the Brick in Williamsburg, mirrors and long shadows ruled, identity was as slick as black ice and as mutable as water, and between the imaginary curls of cigarette smoke, there was a subtle sweetness in the air, a story about queer kids and queer parents and the weird lengths we go to for love.

➼ Read our full review of On Set With Theda Bara.

9.

Illinoise

Leave your irony at the door. Director-choreographer Justin Peck’s staging of Sufjan Stevens’s game-changing 2005 indie album Illinois was a sincerity-only affair, and I was here for it. Peck and playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury crafted a flexible internal narrative to weave some character arcs through Stevens’s suite of soaring, fluttering songs about the Prairie State, and in the central roles Ricky Ubeda and Ben Cook danced gorgeously, Ubeda channeling Stevens himself with a delicacy that, true to the music, cut deep (especially considering Stevens’s own recent heartbreak). Peck’s choreography went on to win a Tony when the show transferred to Broadway, and Timo Andres’s full orchestral arrangements sounded lush and glittering underneath the production’s three stellar vocalists, including Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond. Whether it was Cook and Gaby Diaz sharing a devastating duet to “Casimir Pulaski Day,” or Byron Tittle exploding into a tap whirlwind in “Jacksonville,” the dancers of Illinoise felt charged with longing and life, glowing like fireflies in the black prairie night.

➼ Read our full review of Illinoise and conversation with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury.

8.

The Marriage of Figaro

One countertenor, ten principal characters, several hours of some of the most beloved music in all of opera — how hard could it be? On the outdoor stage at Little Island, with the lights of New Jersey sparkling on the Hudson in the background, Anthony Roth Costanzo made the wild endeavor of a one singer Marriage of Figaro look, if not exactly easy, then certainly like an absolute blast. Directed with madcap, let-the-seams-show wizardry by Dustin Wills—and co-starring a quintet of wonderful comic actors as a crew of harried stagehands who eventually morphed into characters, Costanzo’s voice pouring out of each of them like so many Lena Lamonts—this Figaro was a grand experiment in anarchic play. (And thanks to Dan Schlosberg’s deft arrangements, the whole thing came home in 90-ish minutes.) Yet alongside the slapstick and door-slamming and precarious vocal gymnastics, Will’s production also accessed the original story’s subversiveness, as well as its heartache. In a golden gown and a crown of flowers, Daniel Liu fully inhabited the heartsick Countess Rosina, and when Costanzo’s soprano flowed from Liu’s body during “Porgi amor” and “Dove sono,” Wills pulled back on the reins of the racing carriage and let us sit for a moment in beautiful stillness.

➼ Read our full review of The Marriage of Figaro and conversation with performer Anthony Roth Costanzo.

7.

The Following Evening

Talking Band, the stalwart downtown devising troupe comprising married mischief-makers Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet along with their collaborator Tina Shepard, has had a hell of a year. This was the company’s fiftieth anniversary, and they packed 2024 with sly, whimsical productions, including this visually spare and deeply moving collaboration with 600 Highwaymen. Like Talking Band, 600 Highwaymen is a company with a couple at its heart — Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, theatermakers who happen to be just about half the age of Maddow and Zimet. They wrote and directed and eventually joined Maddow, who’s sprightly and riveting, and Zimet, who moves like a thoughtful stork, onstage, creating a clever, curious duet of the generations. As much a work of dance as a play, The Following Evening watched four creators — a pair of ancestors and a pair of descendants — mirroring each other’s forms and dipping gently in and out of each other’s memories and uncertainties. It wasn’t nostalgic; if anything, it was somehow both unsentimental and infinitely delicate in its embrace of theater’s essential ephemerality. “Here we are. Again again again again, starting again starting again,” mused Maddow as she floated across the stage. “You work so hard to make it great. And was it great? Who knows.”

➼ Read our full review of The Following Evening.

6.

Grief Hotel

An eventual anthropological study of theater of the early 2020s will unearth a boatload of plays about grieving, but how many will sparkle with as much elegance, wit, and weirdness as Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel is another question. Visiting the Public in an encore performance after its 2023 premiere with Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks, Birkenmeier’s play had a phenomenal cast, beautiful staging by Tara Ahmadinejad that straddled the comedically precise and the otherworldly, and a messy, joyous karaoke finale that should probably go in the dictionary under “catharsis.” At its center was Susan Blommaert’s blunt, birdlike Aunt Bobbi, midwestern dog-lover and aspiring entrepreneur, who’s pitching us on her idea for the titular Grief Hotel: “a luxury and bespoke experience,” she promises us, where you can go to receive some ethically sourced, Brené Brown–style healing “if your sibling gets deathly sick or if you find out that the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter.” Birkenmeier’s humor is drought-dry, and Ahmadinejad’s actors nailed it. Everyone in Grief Hotel is hurt, lonely, lost, and freaky, and somehow you didn’t want your time with them to end. (Side note: Help save the Wild Project! Among myriad other weird and brilliant projects, Summerworks is housed in this East Village gem, and we absolutely cannot afford to lose another space like this.)

➼ Read our full review of Grief Hotel.

5.

The Wind and the Rain

Sarah Gancher’s site-specific marvel was subtitled “A Story About Sunny’s Bar,” but it packed eons of history and strata upon strata of rich, loamy earth into its deceptively local container. Championed by En Garde Arts and the Vineyard Theatre and performed almost entirely on the old barge that houses Red Hook’s Waterfront Museum, Wind told the story of the Balzano family, proprietors for over a century of the nearby bar on Conover Street, these days known as Sunny’s for its most recent philosopher-patriarch. Pete Simpson flawlessly conjured up both the charisma and the dangerous frailties of this self-professed poet, but the show’s soul belonged to Jen Tullock, understated and heartbreaking in her portrayal of Sunny’s wife, Tone. Tone (Norwegian, a sculptor/musician, and pronounced “tuna” like the fish) kept Sunny’s and all it stood for — including a regular gathering of local folk musicians, among them Gancher — alive and afloat even through the nightmare of Hurricane Sandy, and Jared Mezzocchi’s spare, graceful production both celebrated her legacy and expanded beyond it. Five performers took us down through the ooze of Red Hook and back to its days as an English fishing village, as a Dutch settlement, as a hunting ground for the Lenape and the Wickquasgeck, even to its dormancy beneath a great glacier. Gancher stacked layers of time onstage and let us peer through them, creating a gorgeous, music-tinged meditation on what lies beneath the places we live, on how we change them, and how they change us.

➼ Read our full review of The Wind and the Rain.

4.

We Are Your Robots

“What do playwrights and computer programmers have in common?” asked the playwright Ethan Lipton, benign and understated, from the lip of Theatre for a New Audience’s stage. “They both want to be musicians.” If that’s the case, Lipton is currently living his dream in We Are Your Robots, his outstanding new concert play in which he and his real-life bandmates — the extremely talented Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy, and Ian Riggs — play a troupe of friendly musical robots, joining us for an exploratory 80-minute “demonstration” to find out what we, their “human friends,” want from our machines. Sly, smart as heck, and somehow both extremely tender and laugh-out-loud funny, Lipton’s offbeat conceit more than worked: In its unassuming way, it took us all the way to the edge of the abyss, then offered a gentle hand to bring us back again. Dressed like a quartet of electronic Elvis Costellos, the robots promised us songs in “a fun combination of many unpopular genres,” and boy, did they deliver. Both the band’s charming tunes and Lipton’s clever lyrics conjured up a little Tom Waits here, a little They Might Be Giants there, a little Cake and Randy Newman over there. Meanwhile, Lipton’s robot informed us that we could trust the extent of his data storage, considering that he’s read every Wikipedia entry “as well as every digitized novel — except for My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård, which I hear is great.” He also introduced us to his Grandpa Morrie, a sentient Roomba, and shared some of the ways he’s learned to process and replicate human emotion. (“I know, for example, that if I were your friend, and I saw you in a stage play, that afterward, when greeting you on the street, my assignment would be to tell you that I loved it.”) Then — plot twist — he almost made me cry with a song that offered a translation for the plaintive warbling of Humpback whales. There’s a lot of theater tackling Intelligence of the Artificial variety right now, but We Are Your Robots shines among it, a rare and humane gem in an android’s disguise.

➼ Read our full review of We Are Your Robots.

3.

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!

Giant goldfish puppets! Phantasmagoria! Walt Whitman! Sexy lady cockroaches, BDSM ponies, and meta-shenanigans! Both on its own delightfully zany terms and as a farewell to Soho Rep’s space on Walker Street, this collaboration by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the performance artist Alina Troyano (often known as her stage persona, Carmelita Tropicana) couldn’t have felt more right. Sometimes, comes the moment, comes the wacko piece of theater, and in the dismal week after the election, Carmelita Tropicana was exactly the shot in the arm I needed. Bravely silly, brilliantly performed, and deeply generous, the show followed the dizzying adventures of Alina, played by herself, and Branden, played flawlessly by Ugo Chukwu, after he (her former student) offers to buy her unwieldy alter ego. (Cut to Chukwu, fully possessed by Carmelita a few scenes later, limply stammering to the brassy persona that’s got a hold of him, “I didn’t understand that there was this whole other metaphysical element to it. I just thought we were talking about … you know … IP?”) In the uniformly excellent ensemble, Will Dagger stood out as a mustachioed, self-pitying horse (one of the creatures from Alina’s fantasy-verse) and as the manipulator and maniacal voice behind an ever-growing fleet of goldfish puppets, designed by Greg Corbino and somehow cute, hilarious, and fearsome all at once. At once a trippy journey down the rabbit hole and a protest against everything “beige and unfree,” Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! was — still is — the hero we need.

➼ Read our full review of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!

2.

Terce: A Practical Breviary

January’s Prototype Festival of experimental opera was bountiful enough to give us a new piece by the luminous composer Heather Christian, who makes my very short list of actual living geniuses. Early in the pandemic, Christian — who often draws from her mystical Southern Catholic upbringing — created an audio performance called Prime: A Practical Breviary. She was meditating on the first mass of the day in the Catholic liturgy, using a sacred structure to explore personal, spiritual, and philosophical tunnels that stretch far past the narrowly doctrinal. Terce, named for the mass that occurs at 9 a.m., three hours after Prime, was her follow-up, crafted over a year with director Keenan Tyler Oliphant and more than 30 performers, and it was sublime. I was lucky enough to see a performance at the eponymous hour, and filing into Fort Greene’s old Irondale space early on a Saturday in January, with the cold high light streaming from the stained-glass windows and people stamping their feet as they greeted each other at folding tables of coffee, tea, and biscuits — it was all enough to renew one’s faith. “You’re shedding skin / Let’s go again,” sang Christian and her thirty-strong chorus, all either mothers or caregivers, all gathered in celebration of Terce’s interpretation of the Holy Spirit as the “Divine Feminine” — the “mother piece” that lives in all of us, “a caretaker, a generator who can make something out of nothing.” Hail Heather, full of grace!

➼ Read our full review of Terce: A Practical Breviary.

1.

Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

When the fascist starts talking, are you going to let him? In Portuguese playwright and director Tiago Rodrigues’s jaw-dropping Brechtian play of ideas, it’s a choice you really have to make. Rodrigues, who runs the Festival d’Avignon, began working with a group of actors early in 2020 to create a play about a family that kills fascists. “It’s an old tradition that every family member has followed,” he prompted them. “Today … one of the young members of the family, Catarina, is to kill her first fascist, who has been kidnapped to this end. It’s a day of celebration, beauty, and death.” The results, four years later, were nothing short of astonishing. Staged with both immense care for emotional detail and a theatrically galvanizing eye for abstraction, Catarina took more than 800 people nestled comfortably into BAM’s Harvey Theater and shook them into visceral, physical response. The play’s eight actors, all knife-sharp and marvelous, began easily — a family in the country preparing for a shared meal on a bright summer day. All wearing long dark dresses and shawls, like so many Lorca heroines, and all calling each other “Catarina my brother,” “Catarina my sister,” or “Catarina my uncle,” they seemed both familiar and surreal, of our time and eerily removed from it. Eventually, as the day’s ritual was thrown into disarray by one Catarina’s doubt, we learned the whole story: Years ago, under the Salazar dictatorship, a family ancestor witnessed the murder of her friend Catarina at the hands of the fascist police, while her own husband, a soldier, stood by and watched. That night, she shot her husband for his complicity and dedicated her family to the yearly killing of a fascist in perpetuity. “In this house,” she wrote to her descendants, “you will all be Catarina: all women, all reapers, all rebels.” Rodrigues’s stunning script pits its characters in the most urgent debates: What does true resistance look like? Is violence right in service of the oppressed? What is our duty? Then, it drops its bomb: For the last twenty minutes of the show, a fascist politician who has so far been a silent body onstage begins to talk. And talk, and talk, and talk. His diatribe gets more and more explicitly hateful, more and more racist, manipulative, and violent, and the audience has a choice to make: How long will we let him go on unchallenged? People booed, screamed, shouted “Fuck you!” and “Shoot him!”, stood and turned their backs, stood and left the theater. It was bedlam, it was incredible, and it was at once a flawless demonstration and a ruthless dismantling of Brecht’s principles of audience responsibility. Rodrigues calls theater “an anteroom to action,” and in the room with his actors, we had to rehearse being brave.

As it turns out, 2024 has been a year of successful straight plays, even measured by the metric at which they traditionally do poorly: ticket sales. Partially, that’s thanks to the influx of Hollywood stars who have come to Broadway to prove themselves with “serious” work as the film and television industries contract. Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons (twice), Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most impressive stage debut of the year), Rachel Zegler, and more have all touched down in New York for limited engagements, some more artistically successful than others but all doing pretty good business. More impressive, however, have been the plays that became hits based on the strength of their actual work and sustained long runs. Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s reimagining of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours sessions, which transferred to Broadway early in the year, has succeeded in the marketplace without any celebrity names attached, and Oh, Mary! turned Cole Escola, previously familiar only to cabaretgoers and internet-comedy fans, into the talk of the season, principally through the power of Mary Todd Lincoln’s curls.

10.

Yellow Face

Over the decades, layers of sediment have built up upon the incidents depicted in David Henry Hwang’s self-immolating farce, first performed Off Broadway in 2007, providing this Broadway production even more kindling than it had before. This version’s DHH, played by TV’s Daniel Dae Kim, is reflecting upon several discourse shifts in representational politics on his involvement in the protests against the casting of Jonathan Pryce in the 1991 Broadway run of Miss Saigon and his own subsequent flop Face Value. Packed with real history (Off Broadway MVP Shannon Tyo makes a hilarious Cameron Mackintosh) and invention (this DHH unknowingly launches the career of a white guy who pretends to be Asian), Leigh Silverman’s production was sprightly, with a gimlet take on its hero’s activist self-regard, and it found its heart in an incredible Francis Jue, returning to the role of DHH’s father, a man in love with the promise of America (and a big Miss Saigon fan) who becomes, with another twist of the screw, its victim.

➼ Read our full review of Yellow Face.

9.

An Enemy of the People (as interrupted by Extinction Rebellion)

The most urgent, unsettling few minutes of theater I experienced this year happened within another performance. The night I saw Enemy of the People, during the town-hall scenes of Sam Gold and Amy Herzog’s production of Ibsen’s drama, three protesters from the group Extinction Rebellion rose from the audience one by one. “I object to the silencing of scientists!” shouted one. As they were eventually forcibly removed by security, to the cheers of some in the crowd, the protesters shouted “no theater on a dead planet!” With the lights up and Jeremy Strong, seemingly both in character and just being himself, insisting that people listen to the protesters, the moment read, initially, like one of Gold’s meta-theatrical directorial swerves. But the protest was rawer and darker than the production itself, which settled, after the interruption, into a more optimistic dénouement, and a nod toward a future generation that might get Ibsen’s characters out of their mess. The intrusion, however, gnawed at the thing, complicating and challenging it: What future, when this audience applauds the silencing of dissent?

➼ Read our full review of An Enemy of the People, a conversation with playwright Amy Herzog and director Sam Gold, and our piece on the Extinction Rebellion interruption.

8.

Jonah

We’re lucky to have Gabby Beans performing in New York. She’s an actor with quicksilver emotional sensitivity who can anchor pretty much anything thrown at her, and in Rachel Bonds’s head-spinning play, Beans was at once a teenager at boarding school inching out of her shell toward a new crush, an abused daughter seeking solace wherever she could find it, and an adult woman looking back. The conceit could easily dissolve into artifice, but Beans, under Danya Taymor’s direction, never lost the thread, binding all three characters into a whole, revealing the many folds of the self.

➼ Read our full review of Jonah.

7.

Maybe Happy Ending

An originally Korean musical that lies somewhere between rom-com and Klara and the Sun with a score that braids Burt Bacharach and Joe Hisaishi, Maybe Happy Ending is a rare and delicate thing among the already small number of original musicals that come to New York each year. It dips gently into the new future where two retired domestic-servant robots (Darren Criss and the stunning newcomer Helen J Shen) fall in together over a shared charger, bicker in the style of The Odd Couple, head off on a road trip, and fall in love. Director Michael Arden leans hard on an impressively high-tech set, but what makes the show click is the way its whimsy is cut by shadings of melancholy, with its robots ever-aware of their impending obsolescence and yet still trying to be human.

➼ Read our full review of Maybe Happy Ending.

6.

Usus

Bros, what are we going to do about our crisis of faith? In T. Adamson’s theologically-dense play about 14th-century Francisans, a clique of brothers in Avignon (cast across the gender continuum but all referring to each other as “bro”) face a schism with the pope, who wants them to give up their disavowal of property, though all their debating happens by way of contemporary slang, as if Bible verses were subject to stan wars. In Clubbed Thumb’s production, with feather-light direction by Emma Miller, the conceit came off like charm, I think, because it invested earnestly in the soul-heavy weight of those arguments. Also, Usus is only play I’ve seen where a monk self-mutilated while Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” blared in the background.

5.

you don’t have to do anything

Watching Ryan Drake’s play, directed by Ryan Dobrin, about a gay teenager’s charged largely electronic relationship with an older boy felt a little like being stuck with poison daggers — I’ve got a few psychic incisions from it that aren’t yet healed. Those include the unsettling directness of Yaron Lotan’s performance, as a wiry, unreliable “please like me” narrator, and the pure chill of Will Dagger’s as that boundary-pushing older figure, predatory and pathetic, as well as an atmosphere that, vibe wise, was as unsettling and yet darkly funny (a line about gay men being like dogs, because you’re never sure when they meet if they’ll be friends or attack, really sticks with me) as scrolling through a dating app at 2 a.m.

➼ Read our full review of you don’t have to do anything.

4.

Jelly’s Last Jam

I’d seen Nicholas Christopher as an excellent Pirelli in Sweeney Todd, but his turn as Jelly Roll Morton was supernova stuff — whether singing, tap dancing, or blustering his way through his claim to have invented jazz. In George C. Wolfe’s twist on a bio-musical, given a thrilling revival via Encores! and director Robert O’Hara, Jelly faces an inquisition in the afterlife for obscuring his Black ancestry (led by Billy Porter, in high-dudgeon mode). Wolfe’s book is exceedingly ambitious — and breathless when summarizing the latter part of Morton’s life in the second art — but the ambition is thrilling when it aims at nothing less than putting the edifice of American musical history on trial too. Watching this in February, amid a faltering spring of Broadway openings, was a reminder that musicals can function both as works of spectacle and ideas.

➼ Read our full review of Jelly’s Last Jam.

3.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball

You do have to give it to Andrew Lloyd Webber: He’s un-precious about letting directors muck around in his catalogue. This year brought us Jamie Lloyd’s hi-def, stunt-y revival of the murky musical Sunset Blvd., with Nicole Scherzinger’s showy Norma. More effective than that, however, was Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch’s remix of Cats into a ballroom competition. The Jellicle Ball located the Venn diagram overlap between the bathos of 1980s British megamusicals and that moment’s queer history — ballroom glamor was, after all, a warped farce of Reaganite excess — and reshaped the former through the ingenuity of the latter. In a new context, the rickety illogic of Cats, with its felines on a quest to ascend to the Heaviside Layer as they constantly repeat their own names, became perfectly sensible: people, by force of pageantry, transfiguring themselves.

➼ Read our full review of Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

2.

Dead Outlaw

David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna, and Itamar Moses’s musical unspools with the homey charm of broadcast heard on a fuzzy radio transmission on a winter night in the prairie. An ungainly outlaw (Andrew Durand) we meet in the first act becomes, after his death, a carnival attraction in the second, his corpse bouncing across an American West filled with hucksters and showmen, accumulating more exaggerations than facts. The real history of that corpse is a true-in-a-way-that’s-unbelievable yarn, heightened by Yazbek and Della Penna’s concisely deadpan music and lyrics. (“Your mama’s dead, you’re daddy’s dead, your brother’s dead, and so are you,” goes a call-and-response refrain.) The MVP among the delightful grotesques you encounter along that journey had to be Thom Sesma’s mortician, who delivered a show-stopping ode to — what else? — the joys of dissecting a cadaver.

➼ Read our full review of Dead Outlaw.

1.

Oh, Mary!

It’s been years since I’ve witnessed a gag funnier than the moment when Cole Escola’s Mary Todd Lincoln shouts “mother!” at a portrait of George Washington, and I probably won’t laugh that hard again for a long time to come. Escola, a beloved niche cabaret performer, fashioned a star vehicle for themselves as a deranged First Lady intent on returning to the nightclub stage despite the objections of her closeted husband. In a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, Mary Todd’s madcap medleys went over like gangbusters when Oh, Mary! opened Off Broadway this spring, and the play has both improbably and inevitably become a Broadway hit. Its charms lie in the seriousness of Escola and director Sam Pinkleton’s commitment to nonsense (the stuff of door-slamming farce and giant heart-pattern boxers), a surprisingly well-developed gay-breakup B-plot, and the play’s positioning of divadom as a self-justifying force in the universe, which has more bite than it perhaps gets credit for. For good or ill, never let anything stand in the way of a star who’s been told (shudder) to stick to character parts.

➼ Read Jackson McHenry’s full review of Oh, Mary! off-Broadway, Sara Holdren’s full review of Oh, Mary! on Broadway, and a conversation with Cole Escola.