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The 20 best Broadway and Off Broadway shows of 2016
Our theater critics rank the best Broadway shows and Off Broadway plays and musicals of the year, from uptown to downtown
Last year at this time everyone knew that 2015 had been the year of Hamilton. Now the wealth is spread a bit more evenly. Broadway musicals continue to evolve and experiment: Witness the thrilling success of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (starring Josh Groban and Denée Benton) and Dear Evan Hansen (with a star-making turn by Ben Platt). Those shows will surely do battle at the Tony Awards next June. As for the rest of the list, it’s an excitingly diverse group: all-too-timely dramas about disgruntled factory workers (Sweat); Shakespeare in traditional form (King and Country) and radically re-imagined (Othello); fresh new playwrights (Sarah DeLappe with The Wolves); and great work from writers we’ve loved for years (Adam Bock with A Life). Below is our consolidated and ranked list, followed by honorable mentions. For David Cote's individual top-ten list, click here; for Adam Feldman's individual list, click here.
RECOMMENDED: Full guide to best of 2016
Best theater of 2016
11. Underground Railroad Game
Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard enacted amusing and unsettling scenes from America’s divided past and present in a time-hopping, bruise-pressing two-hander on themes of racial guilt and role play.
12. King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings
The Royal Shakespeare Company delivered 12 hours of ultra-traditional, uncut history play—Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V—to BAM for top-shelf Bard-binging. Antony Sher’s Falstaff was perhaps the greatest we’ll ever see.
13. Vietgone
The immigrant experience never seemed so cool or full of kickass fights as in Qui Nguyen’s culture-jamming comedy-drama about South Vietnamese fleeing the war at home: rap battles, ninjas and plenty of sex and drugs
14. The Encounter
One of the year’s more daring and divisive Broadway offerings, this audio-intensive odyssey from Simon McBurney explores much territory: telepathy, civilization and the nature of time. It was kind of mind-blowing.
15. The Harvest
Set in a shabby church basement in rural Idaho, Samuel D. Hunter’s probing drama shone light into minds and motives of young Christian missionaries whose search for meaning drives them to extremes.
16. Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education
Anna Deavere Smith’s latest solo documentary piece, based on interviews she conducted around the country, plumbed the school-to-prison pipeline with sensitive intelligence and protean virtuosity.
17. Falsettos
William Finn and James Lapine’s 1992 groundbreaking gay-themed musical about a Jewish family in crisis—divided by divorce and sexism, then united in pain by the AIDS epidemic—returned in all its deeply idiosyncratic glory.
18. Troilus and Cressida
Corey Stoll was a magnetically creepy Ulysses in Daniel Sullivan’s insightful, action-packed Shakespeare in the Park production of the Bard’s pitch-dark Trojan War play, which punctures all notions of heroism and romance.
19. Rancho Viejo
A bit like Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick, this suburban comedy-drama by Dan LeFranc moves at a patiently unhurried pace over three hours, telling the story of several neighbors’ intertwined lives. As with Baker, the organic, “slow theater” approach leads to unexpected depth and plenty of laughs.
20. Golem
Embedding actors in digital animations projected on a stage, the British multimedia troupe 1927 achieved astonishingly precise tableaux. The story was a grotesque and weirdly sweet variation on the Yiddish fable about a man-made puppet come to life.
David Cote’s best (and worst) theater of 2016
What shows on Broadway and Off made David Cote's best (and worst) theater of 2016?
End-of-the-year lists are dropping faster than the temperature, so I've been sorting through my 2016 clips to see which shows deserve extra laurels and a few more adjectives.
Adam Feldman’s best (and worst) theater of 2016
Time Out theater critic Adam Feldman chooses his top ten shows of 2016
Looking back at the end of the theater year is always an interesting process: Some shows that made a strong first impression on me have faded somewhat with time; others have grown.
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