So everyone else has their tyear-end top 10 lists, and I figure that after seeing 117 shows this year, I'm entitled to my own. They're fun to make. And making this list led me to learn a lot about what I like. Even after watching all those Off and Off Off Broadway shows, when it comes down to it, I prefer Broadway. So be it.
1. The Light in the Piazza
Some people hate this musical, but I’ll stand behind it till the end. The mentally disabled daughter makes more sense than people think, and she must, since this show moved me more than anything I’ve seen this year. Some critics thought the music was too high-brow, but I thought it was a revelation – complex, catchy, touching, everything. Just put the CD in and listen to it again.
2. The Pillowman
How often does theater actually scare me? How often does a moment in a play cause an entire Broadway audience to shriek and jump back in its seats? I’m thinking of the one where that girl suddenly sits up in bed with her arms stretched forward like a zombie. That’s what theater should be. And remember when she enters splattered in green paint? The whole thing was utterly original. Billy Crudup and company get extra points for reciting a story on stage – one of my pet peeves – without boring me. And I’ll watch Jeff Goldblum in anything.
3. Billy Elliot
You know how at the end of most musicals, we smile and nod at the pleasant lesson we’ve learned, and maybe we realize how banal that lesson is, but we just think, “Well, that’s what a musical does”? Like at the end of “Hairspray,” we learn the lesson of racial equality, a lesson that most Americans learned decades, if not centuries, ago? Well forget all that. “Billy Elliot” tackles genuinely complex emotional questions. Should a family support something so frivolous as Billy’s dance lessons when a miner’s strike has rendered them virtually penniless? What place does art have in a small town – in a world, even – where most people can’t even find food for their families?
4. Two Gentlemen of Verona
I heard hardly any chatter about this Public Theater revival in Central Park this summer, but someone should laud John Guare and Galt McDermott for their brilliantly goofy, groovy, juvenile and ultimately hilarious early 1970s musical send-up of Shakespeare. Guare isn’t a lyricist by trade, but his rough-around-the-edges style fits perfectly. As with “Hair,” McDermott manages to be catchy without making “catchy” a bad word. Renee Elise Goldsberry, who played the Duke’s daughter, was fantastic, not afraid at all to go over the top along with the material.
5. Brooklyn Boy
Not one Tony nomination? Come on. Where are the Jews on Broadway when you need them? This play was masterful at demonstrating how the place in which you grow up affects you later in life.
6. Glengarry Glen Ross
Yes, an excellent, starry production, but it’s such a fun play that it’d be hard to ruin. I liked Alec Baldwin’s recent “Saturday Night Live” sendup, in which he intimidates Santa’s elves with the phrase “Always Be Cobbling.”
7. Sweeney Todd
Yes, a clever production, but it’s such a fantastic musical that even if the audience played the instruments, I’d still love it. It could have been even creepier – I loved the few moments when Patti LuPone recited her lines with a bitter monotone, but she spent most of time hamming it up like a typical Mrs. Lovett.
8. Doubt
It’s nice to see something so well-structured that it makes playwriting look easy. It’s just Person A accusing Person B of something, and Person B denying it. And that’s enough to set off fireworks. Go figure.
9. Hurlyburly
A little long, but playwright David Rabe, director Scott Elliott and the performers somehow took a cliché – Hollywood types who are clearly full of shit but don’t know it – and made it fresh and exciting again through crackling dialogue and brilliant performances ranging from understated to manic.
10. Spamalot
I didn’t laugh out loud as much as I thought I would, and not much is cutting edge. But Idle, Nichols and Co. still managed to successfully translate the Python style onto the stage. Like I always recall the dancers shouting “hey!” as a guy walks by with a wheelbarrow full of hay. The show’s also clever commentary on the Vegas-ization of Broadway. And when it comes right down to it, what musical would you most want to see again? Though maybe that’s because tickets are so hard to come by.
Honorable Mention: “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” “Jersey Boys,” “Naked Girl on the Appian Way,” “Abigail’s Party.” “Primo,” “Mr. Marmalade,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Romance”
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