Below are works of theater that I saw this year in New York for which I’m most grateful. I have been posting such a list around Thanksgiving Day every year since 2013, which is my annual “Top 10” list, although this year’s shows, listed more or less alphabetically, add up to more than ten (I group some together), and I wouldn’t necessarily rank all of these productions highest on aesthetic grounds. I’m thanking them for making a difference in some way, not least for offering fond, pointed or sustaining memories.
The titles are linked to my reviews (from which my descriptions below are largely derived.) An asterisk means that, as of this writing, the show is currently running.
Edinburgh Festival Fringe NYC transfers
Almost a dozen shows that I saw this year in New York originated at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which I might not even have noticed had I not traveled to Edinburgh for the festival for the first time this summer, a memorable trip for which I’m intensely grateful. If these shows seem on the surface to offer a uniform sensibility – most of them were hour-long one-woman comedies — the best of them had an electric inventiveness and a surprising resonance that enlivened my year of New York theatergoing.
I saw “*What If They Ate The Baby?” by the absurdist clown duo Xhloe and Natasha, first in Edinburgh, where they have been award-winning stars of the festival four summers in a row, and then last week during its current run in New York, where they are just beginning to get the recognition they deserve.
Among the other noteworthy Edinburgh transfers: “Famehungry,” “The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows,” “The Least Problematic Woman in the World,” “Weather Girl,” which is being made into a Netflix series, and “*Weer,” which launched the newly renovated, A24-owned Cherry Lane Theater.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Where is our Edward R. Murrow? That is the implicit question that animated George Clooney’s play in an elegant, meticulous and timely production directed by David Cromer, which dramatized how Murrow, the veteran CBS journalist, stood up to a demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy. If there was not much change in content from his 2005 movie of the same name, “Good Night, and Good Luck” was transformed by its context. On the night I attended, the audience treated the play like the gathering of the like-minded at a public square, responding to this real-life drama from the 1950s as if a comment on life in America under Donald Trump. Clooney has since gotten more mileage from this production – and my greater appreciation — by streaming it live and free, on CNN, not CBS. (“Good Night and Good Luck: Live From Broadway,” as the live-capture is called, is now available for sale of streaming platforms, alongside the original movie.)
*Just In Time
This jukebox musical about the singer Bobby Darin is not just for his fans, which is a good thing, because I can’t count myself one. Indeed,Darin frankly does not strike me as having either the endurance in the culture or a uniquely compelling enough story to be the most obvious figure to build a Broadway show around. This is where Jonathan Groff comes in. While telling of Darin’s life, Groff in effect stars in a nightclub act, combining his talents and charm with those of the ostensible subject of the show, as well as with other first-rate performers portraying the women in Darin’s life.
*Liberation
Bess Wohl’s warm, funny play, about a group of feminists meeting weekly in 1970, looks back at a time when “women’s lib” was neither pejorative nor ironic. The real-life gathering that inspired the consciousness-raising group in the play was led by her mother. “Liberation” is another dramatically inventive play by a writer who has a long list of them, starting (for me) with “Small Mouth Sounds,” which tells the story of six characters at a silent retreat using almost no dialogue.
*Little Bear Ridge Road
The latest quietly amusing and powerfully affecting drama by Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright making his long-deserved Broadway debut. Like the many excellent plays I’ve seen Off-Broadway written by Hunter over the past dozen years, all of which are set in Hunter’s native state of Idaho – including “Grangeville” earlier this year — “Little Bear Ridge Road” somehow transforms what seems to be a simple story about ordinary people – focusing on the warming relationship between Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock as initially estranged aunt and nephew — into a cosmic contemplation of loss and hope.
*Masquerade
“Masquerade” is sensuous and you-are-there in a way that “The Phantom of the Opera,” the earlier version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, was not. The approach that director Diane Paulus et al take in this intricate, intimate, interactive new production could well appeal to audiences who have never seen Phantom, or even those who saw it and didn’t care for it. But the continuing popularity of Phantom is the main reason why “Masquerade” could conceivably serve as a model for an exciting, sustainable new wave of immersive, site-specific theater in New York.
*Prince Faggot
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to see this play, given its deliberately offensive title and off-putting premise, imagining a grownup Prince George of England (currently 11 years old) as an out gay man. The play, written by Jordan Tannahill and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is, yes, meant to shock in several ways. But it is also wonderfully acted, artfully staged, and surprisingly earnest; sometimes profound. Chowdhury also directed a wonderful open-air production of The Gospel at Colonus this year and wrote, directed and starred in the deeply different “Rheology” with his scientist mother – a stellar year for a theater artist who is going places, and taking us with him, not necessarily kicking and screaming.
Purpose
This new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, which won him both the Tony Award for Best Play for the second year in a row and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was clearly inspired by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his family – not just their accomplishments, but their scandals. It was a consistently entertaining production, with a terrific cast, and something more, a subtle, intelligent contemplation of the various ways the characters search for purpose, and how sweet it is to have one.
*Ragtime
The revival of “Ragtime” has taken on more of the epic feel to which it aspires, thanks to its intact move from last year’s Encores series concert to a full Broadway production on the Vivian Beaumont’s grander stage, turning an already superb production into a sumptuous spectacle. One can question whether “Ragtime” will be considered one of the great American musicals and still feel grateful to have been able to witness Joshua Henry, the Baritenor of Broadway, deliver a shattering “Make them hear you.”
Well, I’ll Let You Go
By the end of this masterfully constructed and impeccably acted drama, we have observed an exceptional study of grief, pieced together a portrait of both a good person and a complicated community, and solved an unconventional murder mystery…To gush effusively about “Well, I’ll Let You Go” would feel like a violation of its restrained tone, which is such a crucial aspect of the enterprise that it feels like a deeply held ethos. But I can’t help expressing astonishment that this was the first produced play by a young actor with the unlikely name of Bubba Weiler.
Bonus: *Wicked on Broadway
This is not a new show. It’s the third longest-running musical on Broadway, the fourth-longest production ever. But, in part inspired by the movie adaptations, I saw it again in 2025 for the first time in many years. What struck me this time around, as I write in my review, was “how palpable it is. The first characters we see are the flying monkeys in the flesh (and fur and wings.) The dense cloud of little bubbles that wreathe around Glinda as she descends in her big pink bubble somehow seem solid even as they quickly disappear. The imposing (Tony-winning) sets are sturdy enough to climb up on, which those monkeys do. When Elphaba offers to share her lunch with her professor Doctor Dillamond, who’s a goat, it’s somehow funnier that he eats the sandwich wrapper rather than the sandwich because the wax paper is so visibly and noisily chewed up. Everything looks so tangible, touchable, that that in and of itself turns the production into an argument for live theater.”
