My 5 Favorite Plays and Musicals of 2024
From two-handers to radical reimaginings.
It was a big theatregoing year for me. By year's end, I will have seen 55 plays and musicals, plays featuring movie stars and plays written by second-graders, big Broadway musicals and music-stand readings of new works, the best of local and national productions, five Shakespeares, three Andrew Lloyd Webbers, two Agatha Christies, two Christmas Carols, and one Escape to Margaritaville. Here are the five best:
5. SUNSET BLVD. - St. James Theatre, New York City
Haunted by her memories and dreams, movie star Norma Desmond yearns to return to the big screen. A struggling screenwriter who can’t sell his scripts to the Hollywood studios may be her only hope, until their dangerous and captivating relationship leads to disaster. Drenched in champagne and cynicism, SUNSET BLVD. focuses the lens on the ambitions and frustrations of its characters and puts their intoxicating need for fame and adoration in stark close-up. sunsetblvdbroadway.com
Anyone who listened to our podcast review of director Jamie Lloyd's Sunset Boulevard staging probably thought that I didn't like it. In fact, I had a fantastic time (being in the third row didn't hurt!) and I think I just gave it a tough review because when it's great, it's brilliant - I just wanted every single moment to be like that.
Lloyd pretty clearly has a distaste for the material that is Sunset Boulevard (an opinion I don't share with him, which probably had something to do with my pining), but his thoughts and opinions on celebrity culture, paparazzi, stardom, and Hollywood's eternal search for the fountain of youth line the commentary of his production. Nicole Scherzinger is an unstoppable force, Tom Francis is the find of the decade (I will never stop obsessing over his performance of the title song), and the big-screen gimmick is hardly a gimmick. Hell, even Patti LuPone liked it.
4. Swept Away - Arena Stage, Washington D.C. and Longacre Theatre, New York City
A crew of sailors embark on a whaling expedition, braving the long days with hard work and strong whiskey. But when the ship capsizes, they’re forced to look deep within themselves to help each other survive. sweptawaymusical.com
I saw Swept Away three times in twelve months. The first time, I saw it in D.C. to review it for you all. I went back to Arena Stage to take a friend who I thought would like it - and he said it was one of his favorite theatrical experiences ever. When it announced a Broadway run, I had to be there. We reviewed the prematurely ending New York run here.
Swept Away is an excellent case study in the difference between regional theatre and Broadway expectations. Seeing the show at Arena Stage, a place that's had more misses than hits in recent memory, was revolutionary. Big names, handsome pedigree, New York money - perhaps it felt a bit flashy, but the production had to live up and it did. The show's foursome was beautiful, it had a nice bit of stage trickery, and it reintroduced me to the Avett Brothers, a band I hadn't listened to in ten years - but ended up being my Spotify Wrapped top artist in 2024.
But it was still an out-of-town tryout with some kinks to work out before a healthy New York run. Although the performances are still quirky and the sea songs still shanty, what was a regional theatre A- became a Broadway B+ without major changes to John Logan's script, issues that I and many others pointed out in our original reviews. In today's more-difficult-than-ever original musical landscape, Swept Away just couldn't catch on. It's a shame. Despite some of my misgivings, they did find something special.
3. Mexodus - Baltimore Center Stage, Baltimore
Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson blend Hip-Hop and history to tell a unique story about the Underground Railroad that led south into Mexico, highlighting the power of Black and Brown unity. A groundbreaking, theatrical experience, Mexodus is a live-looped musical, composed in real time, that explores the often-untold stories of enslaved people in the United States who sought freedom in Mexico. centerstage.org
Mexodus is a two-hander musical, but with multi-instrumental looping and co-creators Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson playing a number of parts while running all over the stage, it never felt small or low-hanging. This hip-hop history lesson spanned decades and countries, while still somehow only following two characters - teaching audiences about the underappreciated and often misunderstood Mexican Underground Railroad. But this was not, in any sense, stuffy. "Did you know this shit? We didn't know this shit!" they jammed out in the show's syllabus review.
What followed was an energetic, often surprising, audience-enveloping (and only Hamilton-adjacent) 90 minutes where accordions and trumpets met beatboxing and textbooks met libretto. Quijada and Robinson are multi-hyphenates who took the show on to D.C.'s Mosaic Theater and Berkeley Rep (I'm not exactly sure what part Baltimore Center Stage played in all this, other than having the common sense to program it - that's just where I had the pleasure of seeing it) and I'm really hoping they can record a cast album of some kind after whatever's next for the stage show.
2. Summer, 1976 - Studio Theatre, Washington D.C.
It’s midsummer in the mid-seventies—the second wave of feminism is cresting somewhere while two very different women are thrown into one another’s orbit in college-town Ohio. Iconoclast artist Diana looks down on faculty wife Alice, but their young daughters’ friendship forces them together. studiotheatre.org
This is regional theatre at its finest. Chicago thinks they're the top theatre city in the country, but they don't have Holly Twyford and Kate Eastwood Norris. We do - ha-ha, na-na na-na boo-boo. And I can't imagine not having them. Stage veterans in the DMV (and occasionally beyond) for a few decades, the two are longtime collaborators - people still talk about the 1999 Folger Theatre production of Hamlet where they shared the title role; I would've loved to have seen it, but, sorry ladies, I was only two years old - and frequently share the stage. And that's perhaps my favorite thing about their artistry - they are stage actors through and through, night after night, season after season. If it's true that you need to log 10,000 hours to become an expert in something, they're both probably acting experts four or five times over.
They've reunited in a now-playing production of David Auburn's latest play for D.C.'s Studio Theatre. It's a can't miss. Not only is it rare that ladies of a certain age get good parts to play, but it's even rarer that they get to do so together. In Studio's intimate setting (Studio, by the way, has been the city's most consistent theatre this year - productions of Love, Love, Love and The Colored Museum were both contenders for this list), they're never more than a dozen feet away from you. Sure, Studio sells tickets for their typical going rates, but for local audiences who have loved these two for years, that's priceless.
1. Cats: The Jellicle Ball - PAC NYC, New York City
Cats: “The Jellicle Ball” is a radical reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic musical based on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, inspired by the Ballroom culture that roared out of New York City over 50 years ago and still rages around the world. pacnyc.org
When PAC NYC artistic director Bill Rauch first said, "It's going to be Cats - but we're putting the ball in Jellicle Ball," you could practically hear the snickers on the Broadway World forums before you were done reading the press release. Cats has its haters, Andrew Lloyd Webber has his deniers (yes, it does please this Webber apologist that two of his top-five shows of the year are ALW reimaginings), and PAC NYC quickly had its skeptics. But I knew Bill Rauch - anyone who followed his tenure leading the Oregon Shakespeare Festival could cite his queer production of Oklahoma! and countless Shakespeare reimaginings as evidence that this just might work.
And not only did it work, it was the theatre event of the summer. When it began to blow up on TikTok, I wasn't shy with an "I told you so." When I saw the show, even better than I could have imagined, I wasn't shy with "Damn, even I didn't think that was possible." Bold, snappy, glamorous and fabulous - and one step ahead of us all. PAC, Rauch and the team, André De Shields, and the icons of ballroom culture all got their well-deserved flowers. And we can only hope it's just the beginning…
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