Best Theater of 2024
In 2024, the city’s theatrical fortunes are mixed: Broadway has returned to boom times, and many commercially produced shows have done blockbuster runs at smaller theaters, but off-Broadway non-profit companies continue to struggle. Seasons in the downtown strip, which were already short, are getting shorter, and some places of interest seem to be closed forever. However, much of what made the city artistically exciting this year required it everyone Parts of the ecosystem thrive. For example, Pulitzer finalist Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities” went from the small Soho Rep stage to a triumphant tour of the larger stage for a new audience. The Tony Awards were essentially a roll call of works that had begun at non-profits: Playwrights Horizons sent its precise “stereophonic sound” to Broadway; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ sharp family comedy, Suitable, enjoyed its fullest expression at Hayes after its premiere, years ago, at Signature; And Shayna Top’s “Suffs” walked uptown from the crowd, to name a few. I hope everyone realizes what we are giving up if we stop supporting such spaces, and that the wave of outgoing money will turn and flow again.
The New Yorker reflects on the highs and lows of the year.
Perhaps in response to this sense of creeping trouble, this year’s productions have tended to be outrageously brilliant or grandiosely communal. We enjoyed another season of amazing freak shows, always exuding a sense of togetherness, but we also participated in a surprising number of shows that, in their immersive presentation and evocation of ritual, seemed religious or, at least, religion-adjacent. “Theatre is the church,” Ossie Davis once told us. This year it seemed true more often than not. At performances large and small, whether serious or not, the audience was like rallies, clustered close together in the seats.
Here are ten of the best books of the year, in the order in which they opened:
“Tirès: A Practical Breviary”
Composer and lyricist Heather Christian has followed up her stunning Oratorio for Living Things from 2022, with this new liturgical work, which premiered at the New Model Opera Festival, in January. Christiane, who created a dazzling community experience, paid tribute to different ideas about the “Divine Feminine” by bringing together a huge choir of all kinds of caregivers to sing along with her. They raised their voices to count the legal clock, and to make sure that they too would be counted. (You can listen to “Prime,” another part of the same breviary project, here.)
Moving Cole Escola’s wild-eyed, curly-wigged performance of Mary Todd Lincoln from downtown to a Broadway ballroom made this funny comedy even stronger. With pride unconcerned with any actual facts, the comedic genius Escola played Mrs. Lincoln as a virile woman with dreams of club success, and an endless appetite for attention and stolen booze. (The Civil War actually did that no Ring the bell.) Escola’s brash attitude toward historical institutions we all once held sacred has turned this production into the final play of a very strange season.
“1-800-3592-113592”
It’s hard to describe this hypnotic acid trip of dance and theater undertaken by the experimental group child Directed by choreographer and dancer Lisa Fagan, it persistently challenges human logic. We seem to be inside a suburban jewelry store — the address is the store’s phone number, as well as the main lyric in its maddeningly catchy jingle — but we’re also lost in a dream center, where customers transform into zebras. Did you understand it? What am I? He does What we do know is that it was a great year for avant-garde work: Joey Merlo’s stunning monologue “On Set with Theda Bara” and Cosimo Pori and Travis Amiel’s “Das Ersatz” were both at The Brick; The Wooster Group had a (comeback) hit with “Symphony of Rats”; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Carmelita Tropicana collaborate at Soho Rep; And the Object Collection premiered a new work by Richard Foreman, an artist for whom I respect so deeply that even in that pile of riches I helped hold a reunion celebration at NYU. childThe ecstatic earworm show was the pinnacle of my personal life; I hear him still calling me. “1-800-…”
The gifted playwright Amy Herzog had two productions on Broadway last spring: An Enemy of the People starring Jeremy Strong, which she adapted from Ibsen, and this profound but lightly handled drama about a mother, played by Rachel McAdams, caring for her child. A child who will never get out of bed, walk to a window, or even play. Herzog was as precise and lively here as a medieval manuscript painter. Many of the kind and funny women who come to Mary Jane’s aid glow in halos of light like patron saints, yet they are all just ordinary people whose help arrives when it is needed most.
“Usos”
One of the finest and smartest productions I’ve ever seen at the always excellent Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival, held at Wild Project, was this year’s ‘Usus’, written by T. Adamson, and directed by Emma Miller. In 1318, a group of Franciscan friars, speaking the modern vernacular, tried to fight their way through a conflict with the church. Monks see material poverty as a path to God, and luxury-loving Pope John XXII is not as cold as he once was. The downtown all-star cast consisted of the funniest assortment of monks possible — Ugo Chukwu, David Greenspan, Crystal Finn, etc. — but there was also a secret seriousness to this comedy, which spoke to the pain and necessity of division.
It’s been a big year for Andrew Lloyd Webber, with his film “Sunset Blvd.” Back on Broadway, but all (glowing) eyes were on him Buck New York City, where directors Zilon Livingston and Bill Rauch reinvent one of Weber’s craziest acts as a ballroom competition. The legendary Andre De Shields played the charming community leader in ancient Deuteronomy, and a group of extraordinary dancers and fashion experts affirmed their solidarity with each other and the elderly. This new framework, simple and highly effective, completely transformed Weber’s work, stripping the original of its commercial artifice to find the purring realism underneath.
The Elevator Repair Service’s marathon masterpiece, in which an office worker (Scott Shepard) reads “The Great Gatsby” aloud while his colleagues act out the famous love quatrain around him, has returned to New York several times since it was first here in 2010. But it’s this elegant show that His six hours in front of an audience — his last in New York, ERS tells us — seemed particularly bittersweet. It was a reminder not only of Fitzgerald’s unfortunate love for a country so colorful and decadent, but also of our capacity to care, which has changed beyond recognition over the decades of the series’ life.
“Katarina and Jamal killed fascists”
The last twenty-five minutes of this play, written and directed by the director of the Avignon Festival, Thiago Rodriguez, actually contained my emotions. least Favorite part of this theatrical year, which is absolutely terrible, but also somewhat necessary. Rodriguez and the Portuguese-speaking company — including sexy actress Isabel Abreu — imagine a family that shoots one fascist every year, and then, when we’ve become concerned enough to condemn this kind of bloody censorship, they let us hear the alternative: a fascist congressman insistingly talks about… His terrible and hateful opinion of immigrants and women. Production at Bam It was difficult to sit deliberately, and the audience screamed angrily. But if you leave the room, you know you have chosen to give up the fight.
Sometimes, my brain needs a little rest, and my brain was at its happiest — wiggling its metaphorical toes, wrapped in a cozy blanket — in Marco Bennett, Julia Mathieson, and Noel Carey’s silly, quip-filled musical adaptation of Robert Zemeckis’ film Zemeckis. The nineties. I could lie down comfortably: all the heavy lifting was being done for me by Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard. These two outrageous comediennes compete with each other, nominally for a man (Christopher Seeber), but really for the love of a screaming audience, for whom they will do anything, including throwing themselves (or rather their body doubles) down a flight of stairs.
At the end of the year, with winter approaching, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald returns to Broadway for another triumph of her serial career. Rose, the terrifying stage mother from the musical masterpiece by Jules Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, may at first glance be thousands of miles away from MacDonald’s palpable warmth and golden, operatic voice – other famous Roses have run over audiences like a freight train. But MacDonald and director George C. Wolfe found a way to use its soaring tone to explore how the story might change, when played by a black actor, in a separate stage play. The contrast between her weary, rough exterior and the pure, almost painful voice inside told us all we needed to know about how this rose got its thorns. ♦