Below are my favorite stage performances from 2023, listed (more or less) alphabetically — first by 20 outstanding individual human beings (some of them in pairs or trios), then four ensembles and six puppets.

Hiran Abeysekera 

In a play, “Life of Pi,” where  the stars are really the puppetry (see below) and the stagecraft, Hiran Abeysekera, a Sri Lankan-born, British-trained actor, managed to be extraordinary as the central (human) character. A lesson in endurance (never leaving the stage) and in heavy lifting (and being lifted aloft by the other actors), Abeysekera was also agile and expressive, persuasively channeling his character Pi’s distinctive mix of innocence, intelligence, unusual spirituality and mischievous wit.  

Shoshana Bean, Brandon Victor Dixon, Kecia Lewis

 Maleah Joi Moon made an impressive professional debut as Alicia Keys’ stand-in I “Hell’s Kitchen,” but it was these three consummate pros   who give the show its juice  — Bean as Ali’s mother, Dixon as her father, and Lewis as her first piano teacher, each of whom stomp our hearts into pieces delivering Keys’ most rousing and poignant songs.

Marylouise Burke

Marylouise Burke is one of the grand ladies of the theater who portrayed the characters at a pain clinic in Annie Baker’s “Infinite Life,” who spend most of their time resting on lounge chairs.  Her character Eileen turns out to more complicated than she at first appears. I was particularly struck by the slow, tentative way she  walked to and from her chair, as if a marionette held up by strings, unconvinced that the ground will be firm. It felt like something of a metaphor for all of the characters’ relationship with their bodies because of their chronic conditions. I wondered whether this was just the way Burke walks – I mean, the actress is in her eighties – which is why I watched the (non-gingerly) way she walked during the curtain call.

Starr Busby

She made her first outsized impression this year as the convivial host and Brechtian narrator of Liz Swados’ “The Beautiful Lady,”  written in 1984 but never before produced in New York, portraying a character quite clearly different from herself – the mid-twentieth century Russian poet Boris Pronin.  Five months later, she brought her powerhouse as a church soloist singing to  “(pray),” interpreting her own musical compositions, which were sometimes as rousing as an old spiritual, sometimes as pleasingly complex as classical jazz. 

Jodie Comer

Comer made a remarkable Broadway debut as the sole performer in “Prima Facie,” portraying a defense attorney specializing in clients accused of sexual assault who becomes a victim of sexual assault herself, She gave an emotionally raw and physically demanding performance that drives home the humiliation, betrayal, and feelings of helplessness that accompany sexual assault and its aftermath. Comer’s bruising portrayal of Tessa went a long way towards persuading us to accept a script that in other hands we could have more easily dismissed as implausible. 

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Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe

The three leads of “Merrily We Roll Along,” in its first Broadway revival, make the most of what’s always been best about the show – Stephen Sondheim’s songs. It’s thrilling when they sing as a trio, especially as idealistic youth in “Opening Doors” and “Our Time,” and each has solos that show off their golden voices. We are won over by the three main performers who are portraying such off-putting characters, even Franklin, because, yes, they are talented and appealing – but also because we know them from their previous roles. We wind up rooting for the characters because we are rooting for the actors.

William Jackson Harper

Harper played a genial small-town striver in “Primary Trust” whom, we eventually learn, has been greatly affected by childhood trauma, to the point of mental illness.  His winning smile and loveable manner might have made it difficult for us to buy into his insecurity and isolation, had his vulnerability not seemed so tangible. At one point, a prospective employer asks him “So are you good with people?”  Harper has a one-word reply – “yes” – but that was enough to spark waves of affectionate laughter: We felt we’d gotten to know him.

Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara 

The breathtaking performances by Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara in “The Days of Wine and Roses” were enough justification for this stage adaptation of the sad, dark story about a couple who fall in love with alcohol. The two, among the greatest living musical theater performers, are the heart of the show, doing  almost all the singing, and credibly tracking their characters’ emotional journeys, which are dizzying and unsettling, reflecting self-satisfaction, engagement, jubilation, wariness, neediness, fury, frustration, denial, recklessness, repentance, resoluteness, resentment, relapse

 Liam Pearce 

Pearce is the clear stand-out among the seven autistic performers portraying autistic characters in “How to Dance in Ohio” whose talent is so palpable that their autism comes to seem irrelevant. He leads in the show-stopping song of the show,  “Building Momentum,” and his acting ranges from playful to poignant. 

Ben Platt

Platt, returning to Broadway after his star-making role as the nerdy, socially awkward title character in “Dear Evan Hansen,” felt ideally cast as the nerdy, emotionally remote Leo Frank in “Parade.”. Platt has a remarkable ability to use his singing to reveal the inner emotions that his character has trouble communicating to other people

John Rubinstein

Rubinstein’s performance as the title character (and sole performer) in “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” quietly and effectively brought out what was funny and poignant in the script, just the latest performance from the Tony-winning theater veteran who made his Broadway debut 51 years ago originating the role of Pippin.

Jay O Sanders

Jay O. Sanders has been a stalwart of the New York stage for almost half a century, and this year demonstrated his skills as a character actor in two productions. In “Primary Trust,” acting off of William Jefferson Harper (see above), he made the most of his three roles. He was the caring, chain-smoking bookstore owner Sam; the bank president Clay, a secretly kindly, overtly glad-handing type whose life seems to have been forever shaped by his having been a college quarterback; he even made the most of a snooty waiter in the town’s French restaurant who with great pomp lit the candle on the table, and then elaborately and hilariously flicked out the match with his finger. He also portrays the irredeemable racist plantation owner Ol’ Cap’n Stonewall Jackson Cotchipee in “Purlie Victorious,” who manages  to make his horrid outbursts comic.

Juliet Stevenson

Stevenson’s nuanced, intense, eminently watchable performance in the title role in “The Doctor” was her first on a New York stage in twenty years.  As Dr Ruth Wolff she was unyieldingly arrogant and didactic, sure of her principles and the rightness of her worldview, but through all that, she also somehow managed to communicate a flicker of vulnerability. 

Ensembles

Flex

The actresses in “Flex” conveyed true teamwork as members of a women’s high school basketball team who we actually saw playing basketball, moves that felt somewhere between authentic court play and lively choreography. If Erica Matthews emerged as the unmistakable star of the production, because she was the only one whose prowess on the court determined the direction of the play (there were different scenes written depending on whether she made or missed a crucial score at any particular performance), each performer gave us a persuasive glimpse into their specific desires, secrets or ambitions. 

 

Here We Are

If several individual characterizations shine, especially those by Rachel Bay Jones as the rich hostess and David Hyde Pierce as a reluctant bishop, the starry and game 11-member cast of this last of Sondheim’s musicals cast work as an ensemble, with most of the actors on stage together most of the time.

Love

The eight cast members in “Love” spent ninety minutes in the day-in/day-out lives of eight characters staying at a homeless shelter in the U.K.  All of the cast members are professional actors but there felt little space between the actors and the characters they are portraying, as if they were living this experience. 

Swing State

The four members of the cast — Mary Beth Fisher,, Kirsten Fitzgerald, Bubba Weiler, Anne E. Thompson – are pitch-perfect in their portrayal of characters devastated by profound losses. These are flawed characters depicted with such sympathy and warmth that they find the sunshine for us in Rebecca Gilman’s sad dark play.

Puppets

The first three of these puppets were major characters in their shows, one of them the title character.

Little Man in Poor Yella Rednecks 
Michael K in Life & Times of Michael K
Richard Parker in Life of Pi
The man-eating tomato in Puppetopia (Deeper Closer Warmer)
The polar bear and her cub in Dimanche
The emaciated-looking purple wedding cake (or perhaps it was a gigantic tassel) in Psychic Self Defense