NEW YORK — This last year was busy on Broadway, with new musicals and several impressive plays featuring ensemble casts. As always, the best shows asked the fundamental questions of human existence and focused on how human relationships can both destroy our certainty and save our souls. And the shows listed below also managed to be great nights out on the town.
Here are my 10 favorites, in order.
1. “Stereophonic”: By the end of “Stereophonic,” you were sick of the characters kvetching, arguing, loving and creating music in a 1970s recording studio, a la Fleetwood Mac. Playwright David Adjmi’s secret sauce here was to center his observations on a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern, in this case, the sound engineer, a kind of outsider. Through this laconic character’s eyes, we watched a perfectly cast ensemble explore what it is like to collaborate as well as show us why some of our most intense and important relationships come with a sell-by date and disappear into the dust. As do we, with only our creative works remaining. This show was an object lesson in the importance of detail and veracity; get the small stuff right and people will contemplate their own mortality all night long.
2. “The Hills of California”: Jez Butterworth’s richly layered drama about a Blackpool Madam Rose in northern England and her singing daughters, some talented, some not, is a superbly constructed play set in two 20th century eras, linking how families change and curdle with the falling economic fortunes of what once was the closest Britain ever came to its own Las Vegas. The show was directed by Sam Mendes and featured an all-British cast working together with great intensity. The experience was as riveting as Broadway gets. For anyone worried about becoming their mother, this play evoked echoes of Greek tragedy to suggest that you might as well just practice acceptance. A shivering, exciting piece of theater.
3. “Sunset Blvd.”: The British director Jamie Lloyd has become the No. 1 Andrew Lloyd Webber-whisperer, charged with updating his grand, fin-de-20th century spectacles for the millennial hipster aesthetic (“Evita” is next). But this was an especially effective show because Lloyd’s interest in fusing film and theater reflected the original theme of the piece and its source movie. Better yet, his minimalism, pretentious as it can seem, here became an ideal match for the florid romanticism in the Lloyd Webber score, to my mind his best. What impressed the most of all was the searing Nicole Scherzinger. This great star ditched the typical tragic turban and creaking Norma Desmond voice in favor of evoking a still-sexy beast, sizzling with desire all night long.
4. “Maybe Happy Ending”: This delightfully quirky and deceptively shrewd musical from Will Aronson and Hue Park about two Korean robots who fall in love uses battery life as an effective proxy for human mortality. Remarkably, clear rules are established, the metaphor perfectly fits the A.I. moment and the result is a show that is both adorable and creepy. Much of its appeal comes from its charming stars, Darren Criss and (especially) Helen J. Shen, but Michael Arden’s direction is notable not just for the humanity (irony intended) of the production but for how well it manipulates the audience’s eye so that the physical production reflects the growing fusion between robotic and carbon-based views of the world.
5. “Gypsy”: Madam Rose long has been known for her powerhouse belt and for being a bad mother, but Audra McDonald surely is the best actress ever to play this role and she has some different ideas. Universalized by a multi-racial cast, this “Gypsy” feels more emotional than previous incarnations. That’s partly due to McDonald’s empathetic performance, as supported by Joy Woods as a cynical, wound-tight Louise, her hopes for normalcy lost too soon, but also to the rich texture of director George C. Wolfe’s production that faults not so much Rose herself but the world beyond the theater’s doors. Here was yet another reminder of the sacrifices showfolk make: the heartbreak, the likelihood of failure and the cruel passage of time for which aging humans are never well-prepared.
6. “The Who’s Tommy”: A much under-appreciated revival of the superb rock musical by Pete Townshend and The Who, finally given a new Broadway production that had the guts to confront head-on the issue of child abuse that always informed the original 1969 album. “Tommy” always was an existential howl of boomer anger at the psychological fallout from their emotionally repressed parents; it just took years for the stakes to become clear. Alas, many tastemakers did not understand the importance of what admonitions and reconciliations were being attempted in this radically different remount, even though the show was superbly directed by Des McAnuff, who poured much of his self into this fearless, superbly performed ensemble production.
7. “Suffs”: This new Shaina Taub musical was another underrated show of 2024. Granted, a weighty topic like the history of women’s suffrage didn’t offer the kind of escapism-empowerment fusion found at “Hell’s Kitchen, “& Juliet” and “Six.” But Taub’s show, an achievement of great note for its courageous composer, lyricist and star, actually made its audience feel those things more than those other shows. Sure, this was very much a gathering of the politically like-minded and its timing was not ideal. But this was also a historical musical that did what all the best Broadway musicals do: It taught, humanized, empowered, entertained and moved an audience.
8. “Mary Jane”: Amy Herzog’s beautiful little play, written with the authority that comes from experience, is about an ordinary young mother doing her best to save her very sick child. More than that, “Mary Jane” explained far better than any murderous vigilante why ordinary people are so upset at the healthcare system. Part of our collective malaise comes from our timeless frustrations with sickness and mortality; healing is always a thankless job when it fails. But Herzog, and the play’s gut-wrenching star, Rachel McAdams, still made clear that ordinary human kindnesses on the part of those in the medical profession go an awfully long way toward stemming that pain.
9. “Oh, Mary!”: Cole Escola’s chaotic one-human version of poor Mary Todd Lincoln casts the former first lady as a wild-eyed wannabe cabaret star marinated in whiskey, paint thinner and self-delusion — and the star of an uproariously anachronistic farce that arrived on Broadway during the summer from edgier points downtown. A satiric soupçon at just 80 minutes, “Oh, Mary!” was not supposed to still be running but Broadway audiences have rightly demanded otherwise, mostly because the show packs in more hard laughs per minute than any other show. Escola’s career now seems set. This show showed the power of searing satire blended with gobs of empathy for the woman who had to follow the guy in the top hat around, losing her mind in the process.
10. “Doubt: A Parable”: An immaculate revival from director Scott Ellis and the Roundabout Theatre of John Patrick Shanley’s taut masterpiece about the now-familiar sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. “Doubt,” though, also is about the difficulty of making crucial decisions without certainty — something to which everyone can relate. In 2024, this show felt like an ode to those women, and some men, who found the courage to stand up against abusers and take the side of the young and vulnerable. Then again, every character in this production appeared to be in some kind of pain. As the central nun fighting off a sly priest, Amy Ryan revealed a character slowly realizing that her unswerving belief in the hierarchy she serves — the way she had ordered her entire life to date — is immoral. Time to stand up.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
