Shakespeare Theatre Company

Led for 27 years by noted director Michael Kahn and hailed by the Economist as "one of the world’s three great Shakespearean theatres", the Shakespeare Theatre is unquestionably the top classical company in the US—and now it’s added an $85-million second house to its portfolio, the better to produce plays in rep and host visiting troupes. (Helen Mirren’s Phèdre, the Tricycle Theatre’s The Great Game: Afghanistan and National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch have all played at the company’s sleek new Sidney Harman Hall.) The STC stages its own season of major works, of course, serving up not just intelligent, inventive Bardolatry (Coriolanus and A Winter’s Tale in 2013), but classics from the likes of Ben Jonson (an uproarious Silent Woman), Eugene O’Neill (a titanic Mourning Becomes Electra) and Aeschylus (The Persians). The company also makes a specialty of Tennessee Williams and Oscar Wilde, while experimenting with rarities by such writers as Alfred de Musse and Pierre Corneille—which is why it regularly attracts big-name directors (Chicago’s Mary Zimmerman, Australian Gale Edwards, rising American light Ethan McSweeny, who launched his career here) and actors (Keith Baxter, Kelly McGillis, Marsha Mason, Hal Holbrook). Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein, directed by Michael Kahn, ran in 2013.