My yearly list of New York stage shows for which I’m most grateful, which I started posting every Thanksgiving more than a decade ago, returns more or less to normal this year, as the theater itself has returned more or less to normal, after a year of shutdown (and online innovation), a second year of reopening, and a third year of recovery. This year’s normal, though, is relative. The shutdowns, cutbacks, and layoffs are not just some distant news stories; I’m the only person I know among my previously theatergoing family and friends who has returned to the theater with the same frequency or fervor as before the shutdown.
Which makes it feel especially important to highlight work this year, listed alphabetically below, that mostly didn’t get the attention (or attendance) it deserved.
Amid Falling Walls
A devastating musical revue by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, composed of songs and poems (In Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles) created by Jews during the Holocaust. It is undeniably a history lesson, but also an artful work of theater, and a surprising entertainment. My review
The Beautiful Lady
What may be most astonishing about this delightful, unconventional musical about Russian poets who fell victim to early authoritarian regime of the Soviet Union, is that, although Elizabeth Swados created its terrific score in 1984, it took until this year (seven years after her death) for a production of it in New York — a wonderful one directed by Anne Bogart at La MaMa. My review
I can’t praise this musical about hounded 20th century Russian poets at La MaMa without at least mentioning another production at La MaMa this year by a 21st century Russian director, Dmitry Krymov, hounded out of his country after he opposed the invasion of Ukraine; he put together an entertaining group of avant-garde dramatic adaptations under the title “Big Trip,” including “Three Love Stories Near A Railroad,” which weren’t all love stories and weren’t all near a railroad. My review
Between Riverside and Crazy and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, digital editions
Both plays about New Yorkers — an ex-cop and a group of women immigrants from Africa — received first-rate productions on Broadway. I list them here together, because they also brought digital theater to Broadway. “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning play, was “simulcast” (simultaneously presented in person and live online) during the final week of its run in February, 2023; “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a new play by Jocelyn Bioh, was simulcast during the final week of its run this month. Both were presented into living rooms across America by the League of Live Stream Theater .
Dark Disabled Stories
Ryan Haddad’s play presented some dozen entertaining, eye-opening and well-staged personal stories about life for people with disabilities, told in this production at the Public Theater by three people: Haddad, who has cerebral palsy, Dickie Hearts, who is Deaf and also supplied the artful American Sign Language interpretation, and Alejandra Ospina, who uses a wheelchair, and also supplied the audio description. The accessibility, in other words, was fully integrated into the play in a way I’ve never seen before. I left “Dark Disabled Stories” wondering: Why must a play be about people with disabilities in order to get ASL-interpreted, audio-described and Open Captions at every performance? My review
Days of Wine and Roses
The breathtaking performances by Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara are enough justification for this stage adaptation at the Atlantic of the sad, dark story about a couple who fall in love with alcohol – originally a 1958 teleplay starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie, then a 1962 film with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. But there is also a brilliance that suffuses Adam Guettel’s score, and periodically poke out in Craig Lucas’s book, that make any shortcomings I might see in the show feel irrelevant. It’s coming to Broadway in January. My review
Life of Pi
Whether or not his fantastical tale of sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days on the open seas could “make you believe in God,” as promised by the 17-year-old shipwreck survivor named Pi Patel (portrayed by the tireless Hiran Abeysekera), the Broadway adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel gave me faith in the power of puppetry and in the magic of stagecraft. My review
While we’re talking about the innovative use of puppetry, I can’t leave out: the puppet child in Poor Yella Rednecks (a show I also loved as a whole), as well as the MicroTheater mini-festival at Teatro Sea’s third annual International Fringe Puppet Festival, and the La MaMa Puppet Festival
Love
An intimate theatrical experience at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, where we spent ninety minutes in the day-in/day-out lives of eight characters staying at a homeless shelter in the U.K. The dramas were small but subtly devastating. My review
Plays for the Plague Year
Suzan-Lori Parks’ chronological account of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was presented as a kind of cabaret year-in-review revue at Joe’s Pub. It was an unconventional approach given the material, but the informality and intimacy offered the opportunity for a sense of community and of catharsis. My review
Season of Sondheim
The outpouring of appreciation for Stephen Sondheim transcends any quibbles I might have about each of the three high profile, fervently-attended productions of his musicals that opened this year, all still running: “Here We Are,” a world premiere at The Shed, billed as the last Sondheim, based on two surreal films by Luis Bunuel, and two Broadway revivals, “Merrily We Roll Along,” widely touted as a long-time flop finally fixed, and “Sweeney Todd,” reverting to its initial grand scale from the more intimate productions that have lately been the norm.
Sondheim died two years ago tomorrow, and I also labeled 2021 a season of Sondheim, what with the Broadway gender-reversed revival of Company, Assassins Off-Broadway, and the new movie of “West Side Story.” And 2022 was arguably as well, with the Broadway production of “Into the Woods” and the pre-Broadway run of “Merrily.” It would be easy to picture every year from now on being a Season of Sondheim.
Watch Night
In this first theater piece commissioned by the new performing arts center at the World Trade Center, Bill T. Jones and his collaborators were responding to two infamous mass shootings by white supremacists. It was a gorgeously sung-through opera and stunningly staged dance theater piece. It felt like a lesson in the triumph of masterful stagecraft. My review.
So, in a very different way, did another show which I feel compelled to mention: “Psychic Self Defense.” The show was, I suppose, the theatrical equivalent of abstract art, a triumph of puppetry and set design over character or story (since there was no discernible plot, nor any real characters.) But there were a LOT of theater curtains, always in motion, and I found the experience gorgeous, impish and enveloping.
