2013 Theater Review

(clockwise from top left) Pippin, Kinky Boots, Laurie Metcalf and Fun Home

10. Laurie Metcalf

After years in television, the versatile Metcalf has made an auspicious return to the New York stage with mesmerizing performances in Sharr White’s The Other Place and Bruce Norris’s Domesticated.

9. Pippin

Diane Paulus’ circus-inspired revival of Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz’s ’70s hit is a triumph all over again. With its beautiful score and well-toned players, Pippin is now officially a classic!

8. The Trip to Bountiful

Cicely Tyson’s Tony-winning turn as Carrie Watts in Horton Foote’s lyrical play about a woman who wants to visit her childhood home again before she dies was magnificent. Luckily, it’s being preserved on film in 2014 by Lifetime.

7. All the Rage

Memoirist, actor and writer Martin Moran’s thoughtful and haunting meditation on attempting to connect with the larger world is a worthy follow-up and companion piece to his Obie-winning The Tricky Part.

6. After Midnight

This Cotton Club-style revue, backed by the 16-member Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars orchestra, is a thrilling 90 minutes of exceptional song and dance. The performers are out of this world.

5. The Winslow Boy

Roundabout’s stellar revival of Terence Rattigan’s treatise on the sacrifice made by an Edwardian family in their quest to exonerate their youngest son of a crime he did not commit was one of the high points of the season.

4. Kinky Boots

Last season’s Tony-winning Best Musical has proved a continuing smash. With a witty book by Harvey Fierstein and a terrific new score by Cyndi Lauper, this musical adaptation of a low-budget, indie British film from 2005 about a drag queen who comes to the rescue of a man who’s inherited a shoe factory is an utter joy.

3. Choir Boy

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s superb play struck a nerve with audiences in its depiction of African-American men dealing with burgeoning sexuality, dysfunctional families and high expectations against the backdrop of a prep-school choir.

2. William Shakespeare

Shakespeare made New York stages come alive this year (though we won’t talk about either Romeo and Juliet or the ill-advised Macbeth at Lincoln Center). From Theatre for a New Audience’s productions of Much Ado About Nothing at The Duke and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at TFANA’s new home in Brooklyn, to The Public’s rollicking staging of The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost in Central Park, to the sensational mountings of Twelfth Night and Richard III currently running courtesy of Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

1. Fun Home

Using lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir as a base, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron have written a deeply affecting and utterly surprising new musical that brims with pathos and passion.