The best Broadway and Off Broadway plays and musicals of 2015 so far

A cunning and cipher-like Ben Miles played Tudor fixer Thomas Cromwell in this two-play version of the novels by Hilary Mantel. Though Mike Poulton's swift and dense script could have used more poetry, it was a totally engrossing pageant of gossip, backstabbing and morally dubious scheming. The Royal Shakespeare Company made historic drama in every sense.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's adaptation of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault's once-popular 1859 racial melodrama felt brisk and angry; having whisked the cobwebs off his troubling source, Jacobs-Jenkins spanked us with the same broom. Sarah Benson staged a tremendously exciting production, moving and chilling and surprising at once.

Anyone who has endured a tech rehearsal knows how painstakingly dull it can be. But genius playwright Anne Washburn used this limbo-like onstage-backstage world as a locus of humor, complexity and even menace. Immersing you in illusion—and illusion-breaking—the densely layered Les Waters–directed production was a deconstructed love letter to playmakers.

Writer-director Richard Maxwell specializes in stripping drama down to its bones, using forms of deliberately awkward stagecraft to cut through the conventions of naturalism. His latest work, the first part of a trilogy inspired by The Divine Comedy, focused on a fighter, his manager and a prostitute seeking redemption at a dive bar.

Eugene O'Neill's 1946 masterwork about varieties of delusion in a crummy saloon is nearly five hours long, and you feel it. But Robert Falls's gorgeously designed and acted revival (transferred from Chicago's Goodman Theatre) made it worth the bender. Anchored by a splendid Nathan Lane and the volcanic Brian Dennehy, this production got you drunk on O'Neill's punchy, jagged lyricism before slapping you sober.