FIFTEEN STANDOUT THEATER PERFORMANCES FROM 2016

From the list of 163 plays and musicals I've seen this year on and off Broadway, I'd like to highlight 15 performances I found to be standouts.

Some on the list are seasoned veterans, while others seemingly popped out of nowhere to grab hold of the stage and shake it to its core.  

Those I have identified are, of course, representative of my personal viewpoint and tastes. They appear below in alphabetical order.  

Annaleigh Ashford is always a delight, but she really stood out in the roles of Dot and Marie in the brief fund-raising run of Sunday In The Park With George at City Center in October. Much of the publicity centered on Jake Gyllenhaal as George, but it is Ashford who knocked it out of the ballpark and should only get better as the Sondheim musical moves to Broadway for a 10-week run starting in February.  Go for Jake if that's the draw for you (he's very good in the role), but stay for what is likely to be a Tony nominated-performance by Annaleigh.  


Ato Blankson-Wood (along with Vondie Curtis Hall, featured below) blew the roof off the Public Theater during the production of Heidi Rodewald and Stew's latest show, The Total Bent. Blankson-Wood and Hall appeared as a son and father, and represented the shift in the black music scene from church-style gospel to the world of mainstream funk.  Terrific show.  Terrific performances.

Stephanie J. Block will surely be nominated for a Tony for her performance as Trina is the revival of William Finn's resplendent musical, Falsettos. Her show-stopping "breakdown" song alone is worth the price of admission.  

Alex Brightman in School of Rock. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical cleaved too closely to the movie to provide anything new or surprising, but it sure rang up a winner when it tapped Brightman, a dynamo of energy, for the lead role as Dewey Finn, the rock ‘n’ roll slacker who becomes a long-term substitute teacher at an upscale private school  and bumbles his way into becoming an inspiration to his students.  

Timothée Chalamet exuded charisma and self-assurence by the bucketful as the troubled and troublesome title character in John Patrick Shanley's memory play The Prodigal Son.    

Carmen Cusack gave one of those sit-up-and-take-notice performances as the lead character of Alice Murphy in the Steve Martin/Edie Brickell bluegrass-inspired musical Bright Star.  The original cast recording of the show is up for a Grammy.  Got my thumbs up! 

Vondie Curtis Hall, as mentioned above, shared the spotlight with Ato Blankson-Wood in The Total Bent at the Public Theater and gave an unforgettable performance as a preacher and gospel singer, very unhappy with his gay son's embracing of a personal and musical lifestyle that is totally alien to him.   



Katrina Lenk is Broadway-bound in Paula Vogel's Indecent, which I missed during its acclaimed off-Broadway run. Instead, her appearance on this list is for her performance in the little gem of a musical, The Band's Visit.  She was dazzling as the owner of cafe in an isolated Israeli town that is unexpectedly visited by the members of an Egyptian band,  lost while on their way to another venue. I hope she and the musical, with its lovely score by David Yazbek, get another production (after Indecent, of course).  

Kecia Lewis, like Ms. Lenk, caught my attention at the Atlantic Theater Company.  She wowed in Marie and Rosetta as the gospel and R&B singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Her powerhouse performance, including some mighty fine singing, lifted the show far above its bio-play roots.  


Judith Light is an actress who continues to show an undying

love of and commitment to live theater despite her successful career in the television world. Never one to take on easy, lightweight fare, this year we got to see her in Neil LaBute's one-character play All The Ways To Say I Love You, a disconcerting confessional by a school teacher who is a ruiner of lives, including her own. Another splendid performance from the two-time Tony winner.     

Janet McTeer is currently starring on Broadway alongside another terrific actor, Liev Schreiber, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Her place on this list, however, reflects her glorious performance as Petruchio in the all-female Shakespeare In The Park production of Taming of the Shrew in June. Her turn as the raunchy swaggering misogynist was the awesome highlight.



Patrick Page is an imposing presence in any show that

allows him to use his barreling baritone in service of his craft. He has made this list for two performances:  one in the non-singing role of the patrician Menenius in the Red Bull Theater's fiery production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and the other as the sinister character of Hades in the musical version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hadestown, so wonderfully performed in its Off Broadway production under Rachel Chavkin's pitch perfect direction.  

Ben Platt has been rightly identified as the top contender for a 2017 Tony for his bundle-of-twitchy-nerves performance as a troubled teen in Dear Evan Hansen. The show has made a smooth and easy transition from Off Broadway to Broadway and is consistently drawing sell-out crowds to the Music Box Theatre. Best comparison to Platt's performance is with Alex Sharp's 2015 Tony-winning turn in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  

Jennifer Simard in Disaster. Simard was a comic standout as a nun with a gambling addiction in this spoof of the genre of disaster movies that were all the rage in the 1970s. The show incorporated songs from that era, and Simard knocked it out of the ball park with her rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed and Delivered" as a passionate ode to a slot machine.  


Bobby Steggert always gives 110% in the plays and musicals in which he appears (Ragtime, Yank!, Big Fish, Mothers and Sons, among others). His place on this list is for his performance in a small Off Broadway show, based on a true story, called Boy. In it, he gave a richly layered performance as a young man whose parents attempted to raise him as a girl on the advice of physicians and a renowned psychologist after a botched medical circumcision left him without a penis. This forced transgender role ruined his life even more than the accident. Steggert suffused his performance with warmth, gentle humor, and without an ounce of pathos. This was his best work since Yank!

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

BRIGHT STAR: Old Fashioned Musical With A Big Heart and a Shining New Star At Its Center

Dear Broadway theatergoer, please set aside your cynicism and let me tell you about the sweet and tender new musical at the Cort Theatre called Bright Star that is as embraceable as the lovely spring weather.

You probably already know that Bright Star is the result of a collaboration between two celebrities with no prior experience writing a musical: singer-songwriter Edie Brickell and comic, actor, and occasional story and play writer Steve Martin.

If you need reminding, Mr. Martin’s most famous brush with songwriting fame came in 1978 with the novelty number “King Tut,” while Ms. Brickell’s biggest hit, “What I Am,” dates to a decade later when she sang with a group called The New Bohemians.  So some initial cynicism about their capacity to write a Broadway musical is understandable. 

But bear with me.   

For in the ensuing years, Mr. Martin began to delve most seriously into his lifelong love of banjo music. He began touring with a bluegrass group, the Steep Canyon Rangers, picking up the top award of the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2011. Eventually, he joined up with Ms. Brickell, and together they produced a couple of bluegrass albums. 

So it comes as no surprise that Bright Star boasts a lively and lovely bluegrass score, performed here by a gifted orchestra under the baton of Rob Berman, an accomplished theatrical musical director possibly best known to New Yorkers for his stellar work with City Center’s Encores! productions. If you like the toe tapping sounds of banjos, fiddles, and guitars, there’s plenty of that on hand, and it’s all good. 

Of course, there is more to a musical than the music. The story Brickell and Martin tell falls in tone somewhere between realism and folk tale, a mix that doesn’t always blend smoothly (possibly director Walter Bobbie could have done a better job joining the seams) but one that gets the job done and opens the way for the excellent cast to win our hearts as they take us back and forth in time between the 1920s and the year 1945-46, immediately following the end of World War II and the homecoming of the troops.  

With Bright Star, the “home” in homecoming is in rural North Carolina, with side trips to the city of Asheville. We follow the lives of two separate but ultimately intersecting couples, whose connection becomes clearer as the show progresses.  (You’ll probably have your own “aha” moment well before the big reveal, but that won’t stop you from appreciating its impact on the characters when they work it out for themselves).     

At the center of Bright Star is the show’s own bright star, Carmen Cusack, making a most impressive Broadway debut as Alice Murphy, the strong-willed editor of a major literary magazine, whose story of loss and redemption this is. Hers is one of those magical debuts that can launch a performer to stardom, and you will know it from the moment she opens her mouth to deliver the opening song, “If You Knew My Story,” through to the show-stopping 11 o’clock number, “At Long Last.” That song, one of two with both music and lyrics by Ms. Brickell, is a real highlight and nearly redeems her overreliance on generally (and probably intentionally) folksy and repetitive lyrics that can get under your skin. 

As good as she is, Ms. Cusack does not carry the show alone. A. J. Shively exudes down-home charm as Billy, the young man back from the war and eager to make a name for himself as a writer. Paul Alexander Nolan is excellent, as well, as Alice’s great love Jimmy Ray. Hannah Elless does nicely as Billy’s love interest, though she does have do a lot of waiting around while he figures things out. Every good show needs its villain, of course, and Michael Mulheron amply fills the bill as Jimmy Ray’s controlling and heartless father. 

By some confluence of coincidences, New York theatergoers have been treated to three different bluegrass musicals of late. There was Southern Comfort, which just closed at the Public Theater, and The Robber Bridegroom, still going strong at the Laura Pels Theater.  But Bright Star, despite a few structural flaws, decidedly outshines the rest.  

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.