From the very first moments of Lincoln Center’s ravishing The King and I, it feels like a privilege just to be sitting in the audience. First the 29 musicians play Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lush overture in an orchestra pit that looks to be in the middle of the auditorium. Then suddenly a magnificent ship slides all the way out over that orchestra pit in a rolling fog.

The four redcap porters – members of the ensemble Rick Faugno, Richard Riaz Yoder, Phillip Attmore and Drew King – steal the show several times with their carefully coordinated song-and-dance routines, such as the novelty number “Life Is Like a Train,” whose lyrics demonstrate that life is not like a train, but whose train-like dance moves show otherwise. In the scene here, the porters are tapping their way with crazy Miss Primrose (Mary Louise Wilson) in tow.

Katie Boeck and Sandra Mae Frank as Wendla and her voice, with Camryn Manhein as their mother, Frau Bergman. Wendla and her mother, Frau Bergman: Wendla insists that her mother finally explain the birds and the bees to her. Pressured by this persistence, Wendla’s mother agrees to do so, but stumbles and stutters, and finally says: For a woman to bear a child, she must love her husband, only him, “with her whole….heart.” End of lesson. This gets an enormous laugh, and not just because she’s chickened out. Camryn Manheim, who plays the mother (the one stand-out adult performance), is both speaking and signing her part. After she says “whole,” she puts her hands together near her waist to form the ASL sign for “vagina,” but then quickly moves it up to her heart and says the word “heart” instead. (The reason why everybody in the audience can get this joke, even those who know not a single ASL sign, is that the sign for vagina – the outstretched thumb and forefinger of both hands touching one another — looks unmistakably like a vagina. That took forever just now to describe in print, but it happens in a moment on stage.)

In “Once Upon A Mattress,” Jackie Hoffman belts “I’m Shy” in the song “Shy” with such force that she knocks out the ensemble.

After a lifetime of being told, and believing, that she’s ugly, Celie as performed by Cynthia Erico sings out I’m beautiful, yes I’m beautiful, and I’m here” – which provokes the audience to rise up, tear up and cheer.

In Hamilton, at the moment when Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr realizes he’s been outsmarted and betrayed, he sings “I wanna be in the room where it happens,” a spectacular rhythm and blues number that is as insightful about political power as it is exciting to watch.

In the song “Ring of Keys” in Fun Home, Sydney Lucas as 12-year-old Small Allison sees a butch lesbian in a diner, and is thunderstruck to realize “we’re alike in a certain way”

In The Nether, a play that imagines a near-future when people start to live almost exclusively in a virtual world with fake personas, there is a moment when a little girl (who is actual an avatar of an old man) is raped and axed to death — done discreetly, but memorably nonetheless.

In “Empanada Loca,” Daphne Rubin-Vega is a New Yorker living in the subway who tells a tale of horror that’s an urban update of Sweeney Todd. There’s a terrifying and sickening moment when we realize she’s been speaking the whole time to a rat, to whom she apologizes because she’s about to roast it.

When Annaleigh Ashford as Sylvia the dog is brought home for the first time, she runs around Greg’s apartment half-exploring, half-rejoicing – just as a dog would, but not disguised as a dog. She’s not doing this on all fours; she’s not wearing a dog suit. She’s a human distilling the essence of dog – which is far more persuasive, and entertaining. When she yells out “Hey, hey, hey,” it’s an exact human interpretation of a dog barking, not a boring reproduction of a dog’s bark.

In Barbecue, after a scene where we see a dysfunctional family staging an intervention for a self-destructive relative, there is a blackout, and when the lights return, the four siblings who were portrayed by four white actors are now played by four black actors — which can’t help but confront audiences about their own racial attitudes.

When Phoebe Fox as Catherine jumps into the arms of Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone, we are struck by several things at once — how much bigger he is than she; how childish she acts; how somehow inappropriate their physical interaction seems. In that early moment in A View from the Bridge, we are get a succinct foreshadowing of the tragedy that is at the heart of Arthur Miller’s play — Eddie’s lack of awareness of his attraction to his surrogate daughter.

Amazing Grace

In Happy Days, Tony Shalhoub as Willie tries to reach Brooke Adams as Winnie, buried up to her neck but ever cheerful.

In an often-satirical First Daughter Suite, there is a touching moment when Marty Testa as Barbara Bush opens up to Rachel Bay Jones as her daughter-in-law Laura Bush about her daughter Robin (Theresa McCarthy) who died as a child, but to whom she speaks as if she were still alive and grown into adulthood.

The hundreds of New Yorkers from all five boroughs gather on stage at the end of The Odyssey at the Delacorte in Central Park, singing “Welcome Home.” It felt like a declaration: We all belong.