The Best Theatre of 2024
In 2024, the theatrical fortunes of the city diverged: Broadway returned to boom times, and several commercially produced shows did gangbusters business in smaller theatres, but Off Broadway’s nonprofit companies continued to struggle. Seasons in the downtown sector, already short, got shorter, and a few crucial venues seemingly closed for good. Yet a lot of what made the city artistically exciting this year required that all parts of the ecosystem flourish. The Pulitzer finalist “Public Obscenities,” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, moved from the tiny Soho Rep to a triumphant run at the larger Theatre for a New Audience, for instance. And the Tony Awards were basically a roll call of works that started at nonprofits: Playwrights Horizons sent the meticulous “Stereophonic” to Broadway; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sharp-toothed family comedy, “Appropriate,” enjoyed its fullest expression at the Hayes after premièring, years ago, at the Signature; and Shaina Taub’s “Suffs” marched uptown from the Public, just to name a few. I’m hopeful that everyone will realize just what we’re surrendering if we stop supporting such spaces, and that the tide of outgoing money will turn and flood back in.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Perhaps in response to that sense of encroaching trouble, this year’s productions tended to be outrageously fabulous or solemnly communal in feeling. We enjoyed another season of spectacular queer extravaganzas, which always exude a we-will-survive esprit de corps, but we also participated in a surprising number of shows that, in their immersive staging and conjuring of ritual, felt religious or, at least, religion-adjacent. “The theatre is a church,” Ossie Davis once told us. This year it often felt true; at big shows and small, serious and not, the audiences were like congregations, huddling a little closer together in the pews.
Here are ten of the year’s best, in the order in which they opened:
“Terce: A Practical Breviary”
The composer and lyricist Heather Christian followed up her stunning “Oratorio for Living Things,” from 2022, with this neo-liturgical work, which premièred at the Prototype new opera festival, in January. Christian, creating an exalting, communal experience, paid homage to various ideas of the “divine feminine” by assembling a huge choir of all kinds of caregivers to sing with her. They raised their voices to count the canonical hour—and to make sure that they, too, would be counted. (You can listen to “Prime,” another installment in this same breviary project, here.)
Transferring Cole Escola’s wild-eyed and curly-wigged performance of Mary Todd Lincoln from downtown to the Lyceum, on Broadway, only made this zany comedy stronger. Proudly uninterested in any actual facts, the comic genius Escola played Mrs. Lincoln as a virago with dreams of cabaret success, and a seemingly bottomless appetite for attention and pilfered booze. (The Civil War just really did not ring a bell.) Escola’s raucous attitude toward historical institutions we all once considered holy turned this production into the definitive play of a very strange season.
“1-800-3592-113592”
It’s difficult to describe this hypnotic dance-theatre acid trip by the experimental collective CHILD directed by the choreographer and dancer Lisa Fagan, because it so insistently defies human logic. We’re seemingly inside a suburban jewelry store—the title is the phone number of the shop, as well as the main lyric in its insanely catchy jingle—but we’re also lost in a mall-of-dreams, where customers turn into zebras. Got it? What I do know is that it was a wonderful year for avant-garde work: Joey Merlo’s mindbending 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 (returning) hit with “Symphony of Rats;” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Carmelita Tropicana collaborated at Soho Rep; and Object Collection premièred a new work by Richard Foreman, an artist I revere so deeply that I helped throw his reunion celebration at N.Y.U. Even in that pile of riches, CHILD’s ecstatic, earworm-y show was my personal pinnacle; I hear it calling to me still. “1-800- . . .”
The gifted playwright Amy Herzog had two pieces on Broadway last spring: “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong, which she adapted from Ibsen, and this profound yet lightly handled drama about a mother, played by Rachel McAdams, caring for a child who will never get out of bed, or walk up to a window, or even play. Herzog was as precise and vivid here as an illustrator of a medieval manuscript. The many kind and funny women who come to Mary Jane’s aid glow in halos of light like intercessory saints, yet they are all just regular folks whose help arrives when it’s needed most.
“Usus”
One of the finest, slyest works I’ve ever seen at the always excellent Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival, held at the Wild Project, was this year’s “Usus,” by T. Adamson, directed by Emma Miller. In 1318, a bunch of Franciscan friars, who speak in up-to-date slang, try to “bro” their way through a tussle with the Church. The monks see material poverty as a way to God, and the luxury-loving Pope John XXII is not, as it were, chill. The downtown-superstar cast comprised the funniest lineup of friars 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 schism.
It was a banner year for Andrew Lloyd Webber, with “Sunset Blvd.” returning to Broadway, but all (glowing) eyes were on PAC NYC, where the directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch reinvented one of Webber’s goofiest works as a queer ballroom competition. The legendary André De Shields played the glamorous community leader Old Deuteronomy, and a cast of extraordinary dancers and voguing experts emphasized their solidarity with one another, and with their elders. This new framing, so simple and effective, utterly transformed Webber’s work, stripping away the original version’s commercial kitschiness to find the purring realness beneath.
The Elevator Repair Service marathon masterpiece, in which an office worker (Scott Shepherd) reads “The Great Gatsby” aloud, as his colleagues act out the famous love quadrangle around him, has been back in New York a few times since it was first here in 2010. But this elegant, six-hour remounting at the Public—the last one in New York, E.R.S. tells us—felt particularly bittersweet and resonant. It was a reminder not only of Fitzgerald’s rueful fondness for an energetic, decadent country but also of our own capacity for attention, which has changed out of recognition in the show’s decades of life.
“Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists”
The last twenty-five minutes of this play, which was written and directed by the Festival d’Avignon’s director, Tiago Rodrigues, actually contained my least favorite part of this theatrical year, something both gut-knottingly awful, yet somehow also necessary. Rodrigues and the Portuguese-speaking company—including the firebreathing actress Isabel Abreu—imagine a family that self-righteously shoots one fascist a year, and then, when we’ve grown queasy enough to condemn that sort of bloody censorship, allows us to hear the alternative: a fascist congressman doggedly speaking his awful, immigrant- and woman-hating mind. The production at BAM was deliberately difficult to sit through, and the audience shouted its fury. But if you left the auditorium, you knew you had chosen to abandon a fight.
Occasionally, the brain needs a little rest, and mine was happiest—wriggling its metaphorical toes, wrapped in a cozy throw blanket—at Marco Pennette, Julia Mattison, and Noel Carey’s ridiculous, joke-stuffed musical adaptation of the Robert Zemeckis movie from the nineties. I could recline in comfort: all the heavy lifting was being done for me by Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard. These two outrageous comic divas compete with each other, nominally for a guy (Christopher Sieber), but really for the love of a screaming audience, for whom they will do anything, including fling themselves (or, rather, their body doubles) down the stairs.
Right at the end of the year, just as winter was closing in, the six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald came back to Broadway in yet another of her serial career triumphs. Rose, the terrifying stage mother from Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents’s musical masterpiece, might at first impression be a thousand miles away from McDonald’s palpable warmth and golden, operatic voice—other famous Roses have run over audiences like a freight train. But McDonald and the director George C. Wolfe found a way to use her soaring tone to explore how the story might change, when played by a Black performer, in a segregated vaudeville. The contrast between her weary, bristling exterior and the pure, almost haunting sound within told us everything we needed to know about how this particular Rose got her thorns. ♦
