Below is a list of worthwhile shows I saw in 2023 that are still running, but closing within the next month. Some I liked better than others; a few I loved. I list them according to their scheduled closing dates with their titles linked to their websites, and excerpts from my reviews.

Closing December 23

Manahatta 
Public Theater
“Manahatta” dramatizes two pivotal, and shameful, moments in New York City history, occurring four centuries apart — the Dutch West India Company’s “purchase” of the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians (who had no concept of land ownership), and the world-wide financial crisis of 2008, In Mary Kathryn Nagle’s sharply written play, which is wonderfully acted under Laurie Woolery’s seamless direction, the two events tell much the same story.
Playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle is an attorney who works on behalf of Indian Nations, and she is herself a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. There’s no denying that “Manahatta” is in part her effort to impart her love and respect for Native American culture…But it seems clear that “Manahatta” is not just a play about indigenous people. Deftly, like the plays of Ayad Akhtar (Junk, Disgraced, The Invisible Hand), it offers a morality tale about capitalism.  Full Review

Life & Times of Michael K
St Ann’s Warehouse
There is a stunning kind of poetry in the puppetry employed to dramatize Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s forty-year-old novel about a simple man who makes an epic journey through the physically and morally depleted landscape of South Africa. Like some of the most evocative poetry, the effect of “Life & Times of Michael K” at St. Ann’s Warehouse is often wondrous even when its exact meaning is not always clear. Full Review

Is It Thursday Yet?
PACNYC
“Is It Thursday Yet?” is  an eclectically inventive work created just three years after Jenn Freeman’s autism diagnosis at the age of 33 that explains and explores the way she perceives the world, using dance, theater, voiceover therapy,  original songs, a dozen video monitors, several unusual props,  even innovative graphic design…and more. Nothing feels out of bounds: At one point, Freeman wears a lampshade on her head, which serves as a screen for home movies from her childhood. Full review

Waiting for Godot
Theatre for a New Audience at  Polonsky Shakespeare Center
On this, the seventieth anniversary year of the signature work of Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett, a play in which (as one Beckett scholar famously put it) “nothing happens, twice,” Paul Sparks and Michael Shannon, friends in real life and frequent co-stars, portray the latest Didi and Gogo whom I’ve seen waiting for Godot…In the new Theater for a New Audience production of “Waiting for Godot,” the Oklahoma-born Sparks and the Kentucky-born Shannon portray Didi and Gogo convincingly as Midwestern hobos, Sparks nearly unrecognizable beneath a bushy beard. They look like characters from “Grapes of Wrath.” This is probably not what Beckett had in mind: The play was originally written in French, and Didi talks about the two of them climbing the Eiffel Tower. Still, the performers make their characters feel like real people; not easy. Unfortunately, real people are sometimes dull. Full Review
(I need to point out that this production was popular enough to be extended twice.)

Closing December 30

I Need That
Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater on Broadway
Theresa Rebeck’s play about a hoarder is the slightest of comedies. Its plot is paltry. Its insights are fleeting. It promises more laughs than it delivers. It even promises more junk than it delivers: Before the curtain rises, there’s a tantalizing pile-up of old papers and boxes resting on the lip of the stage. But “I Need That” does deliver Danny DeVito, and for some, that will be enough. Full Review 

Some Like It Hot
Shubert Theater on Broadway
 “Some Like It Hot” is glitzy, excessive, frenetic and funny,  with hyperactive choreography, a game, talented cast, and a jazzy score with multiple 11 o’clock numbers. Much of this reminded me of the Broadway revival of “The Music Man,”  in that it amps up the entertainment in hopes of blasting us into submission. Whether you leave feeling entertained or overwhelmed probably depends on how eager you are for a fun time. Full Review
(This show actually opened at the end of 2022, not 2023; close enough)

Closing December 31

The Gardens of Anuncia
Lincoln Center
Graciela Daniele, a Broadway luminary for six decades, directs this lovely and peculiar musical written by her good friend Michael John LaChiusa, who uses Daniele’s life as the inspiration for a story about the family of strong women who nurtured her. “The Gardens of Anuncia” features a cast of golden-voiced actresses, but also a stag stand-up – by which I mean a deer (a hoofed mammal) who cracks jokes. Full Review

Closing January 14

Shucked
Nederlander Theater on Broadway
What might come as a surprise in “Shucked” is the sheer volume and variety of jokes — corny, sure, but also clever, crass, questionable and surreal: silly one-liners, crafty wordplay, groan-inducing puns, borderline dirty jokes (“I grew up so poor that if I hadn’t been a boy, I’d have had nothing to play with.”) There is even one mildly political quip, and some running shtick…. the barrage of jokes dominates “Shucked.” They hit the spot more often than the score by successful country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which I found memorable precisely once, in the rousing showstopper “Independently Owned,” by Alex Newell…Full Review

Closing January 21

Here We Are
The Shed
“O, isn’t this wonderful?!” Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) exclaims upon seeing her old friends at her door. It is the first line in Stephen Sondheim’s first new musical in two decades, produced two years after his death. Long-gestating, long-awaited, “Here We Are” can itself be considered wonderful just for existing, like an unexpected visit from an old friend….directed by the much-esteemed Joe Mantello and performed by eleven of New York’s most exciting stage actors,  with a book by experienced playwright David Ives inspired by two of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s most acclaimed surrealist films — “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” — and a score by Sondheim of under a dozen songs marked by his characteristically clever lyrics. Full Review