The Best Theatre of 2025

Technically, I meant the best theatre in New York, but what kind of New Yorker would I be if I acknowledged other cities?

Clockwise From Top Left: Sam Tutty & Christiani Pitts in Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York); Micah Stock & Laurie Metcalf in Little Bear Ridge Road; Jessica Hecht & Bill Irwin in Eureka Day; and Jak Malone & Natasha Hodgson in Operation Mincemeat

Lots of folks post lists like these in December, but…what if you see a great piece of theatre on December 31!?!?!? I mean, I didn’t…but it could happen.¹

Some prologue before I share my Top 10:

• It was not a banner year for New York theatre. Ideally, lists like these should include only five-star productions, even if they more realistically tend to include a mix of five and four–starrers; this year, my list is mostly comprised of entries in the three-star range.

• It was an especially weak year for musicals. Only four are included in my list, and none are ranked in the top five or rated higher than three stars.

• However, it was a very good year for one-person plays. In addition to those I’ve included below, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Call Me Izzy respectively featured five-star performances from Sarah Snook and Jean Smart trapped in two-star pieces of writing. There were several more that I didn’t get to see, but, based on the buzz, wish I had: Andrew Scott in Uncle Vanya; Ari’el Stachel’s Other; and John Krasinski in Angry Alan.

• Some of my favorite performances of the year were in plays and musicals that do not, themselves, crack my top 10. These include Kate Baldwin in Love Life, Nicholas Christopher in Chess, Zachary Noah Piser in Redwood, Jasmine Amy Rogers in Boop, and Sadie Sink in John Proctor Is the Villain.

• In terms of what I chose between:

  • I excluded any theatre that I first saw in a previous year. For example, even though I made three return visits to Oh, Mary! in 2025—to see the star turns of Titus Burgess, Jinkx Monsoon, and Jane Krakowski—and would rate each experience as superior to some of those I’ve listed below, I did not consider any of them “eligible” for this year’s list because I first saw the play in 2024.

  • Because I do not post about everything I see on substack, I tried to write a little more about any production that I singled out below but didn’t fully review.

  • I did not get to see everything that opened in 2025, including some productions that many people I respect included in their top tens for the year (e.g., Just in Time). To avoid any confusion regarding omissions, I’ve included a list of everything I saw in 2025 below my top 10.

Without further ado…

My Top 10 Theatergoing Experiences of 2025

10. Floyd Collins
(rated 🌈🌈🌈)

Jeremy Jordan delivered a career-best performance in the haunting yet flawed musical that put composer-lyricist Adam Guettel on the map. Director/book writer/“additional” lyricist Tina Landau’s production created striking visuals, often from, or working in contrast to, sparseness. She made a significant misstep in casting the pivotal roles of the title character’s siblings, but stacked her supporting cast with some of New York’s most reliable journeyman actors, including Marc Kudisch, Jessica Molasksey, Sean Allan Krill, and an especially touching Taylor Trensch.

9. Operation Mincemeat
(rated 🌈🌈🌈)

The word I keep returning to in describing the 2024 Olivier Winner for Best Musical is “surprising” (and not just because it beat the vastly superior Next to Normal and A Strange Loop). At first, it may seem surprising that such a thoroughly British tale told in such a thoroughly British fashion has found an audience on Broadway. However, it begins to make sense when you look at the constantly surprising story it tells—the epitome of the old adage that “the truth is stranger than fiction”—and all the surprising ways the creators have made it sing.

8. Bat Boy
(rated 🌈🌈🌈)

It was an awesome year for Taylor Trensch. Soon after picking up a Tony nomination for Floyd Collins, he played the titular tabloid curiosity in Alex Timbers’s rollicking Encores! production of this modern cult classic. Trensch was weird, hilarious, vulnerable, and vocally stunning all at once in a way that only he can be. He was ideally matched by a flawless Kerry Butler. As his caretaker, Butler pulled off her most daring feats of comic lunacy and pristine belting since her 2008 Tony-nominated turn in Xanadu. As I said in my review, Bat Boy may not be a great musical, but it was a great time.

7. Little Bear Ridge Road
(not previously reviewed in full; rated 🌈🌈🌈)

Playwright and MacArthur genius Samuel D. Hunter excels at writing painfully intimate stories with particularly wonderful dialogue, which sounds completely true to life but still includes a few theatrical jewels you’ll think about long after the house lights turn back on. Here, in his Broadway debut, he had the perfect actress to deliver it: Laurie Metcalf. As a prickly aunt reuniting with her semi-estranged nephew (Micah Stock), Metcalf again proved herself to be a modern-day Olga Knipper—in the words of Madonna, “look it up”—capable of revealing excruciating pain in comedy and unmatched hilarity in tragedy. Her performance and Hunter’s writing were terrific; Little Bear Ridge Road probably would have ranked higher on this list if she’d had a worthier scene partner than the excessively mannered Stock. One of the play’s most memorable and poignant lines comes when Stock’s character howls, “I don’t know how to be a person in this fucking terrible world.” It would have landed even better if Stock actually came across like a person.

6. Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
(rated 🌈🌈🌈)

A delightful two-hander, Two Strangers is a romcom musical that works as well as it does—like all two-handers and all romcoms—because of its sensational casting. Christiani Pitts expertly finds ways to play the more guarded character without ever walling herself off from the audience. As the more effusive character, Sam Tutty makes the sort of explosive Broadway debut that announces a major new talent in the most exciting of ways. He’s hysterically funny one moment, heartbreakingly vulnerable the next, and altogether irresistible throughout.

Clockwise From Top Left: Lizzy McAlpine, Her Blank Stare & Jeremy Jordan in Floyd Collins; Glenn Davis & LaTanya Richardson Jackson in Purpose; Julio Torres in Color Theories; Taylor Trensch in Bat Boy; David Greenspan & John McCrea in Prince F*ggot; and Josh Sharp in ta-da

5. Eureka Day
(not previously reviewed in full; rated 🌈🌈🌈½)

Although MTC’s Broadway production was technically a revival, it was my introduction to Jonathan Spector’s uproarious satire about a progressive private school that must reevaluate its vaccine policy. On one hand, I wonder if it had special resonance for me, as I not only live in the liberal bastion of New York City, but spent several years working as a teacher here. On the other hand, I suspect anyone who loves theatre would relish how Spector and director Anna D. Shapiro pulled off the beautiful contradiction of mercilessly skewering its subjects while simultaneously showing them the utmost compassion. Their depiction of holding a meeting on Zoom may have been the most sidesplitting single scene on Broadway in 2025. Most unbelievable of all: Shapiro coaxed a performance out of Jessica Hecht that I actually enjoyed. Typically, I am bewildered by the theatre community’s widespread affection for this consistently baroque actress, but, as queen bee of the school board, Hecht’s affectations were put to perfect use and, in the scene where they all had to fall away, I saw glimmers of the artist she’s reputed to be.

4. Color Theories
(rated 🌈🌈🌈½)

I’m grateful that Julio Torres’s joyfully bizarre “East Village thing” (he recoils at the notion that it might be referred to as a play) was captured for upcoming broadcast on HBO because it was so original and strange, it practically defies description. A deep-dive into Torres’s associations with various colors, it neither shied away from more serious themes, like our collective obsession with classification, nor resisted the eccentricity of sometime just being about…color.

3. Purpose
(rated 🌈🌈🌈🌈)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony for Best Play for this family drama that reinvigorated a familiar structure and familiar story by examining it through a specifically African-American lens. Though the play evokes both classics like The Glass Menagerie and contemporary hits like August: Osage County, its exploration of “Black excellence” feels 100 percent Jacobs-Jenkins. His words were brought to life by one of the most exceptional ensemble casts on Broadway with particularly remarkable work from Glenn Davis, who’s also co-Artistic Director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which originally commissioned the play; Kara Young, who won her second consecutive Tony for her performance; and Alana Arenas, the only member of the cast who did not get a Tony nomination, but actually would’ve received my vote to take the prize.

2. ta-da
(rated 🌈🌈🌈🌈½, upgraded to 🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈 on a second viewing)

Josh Sharp’s self-authored one-man show, directed by newly minted Tony winner Sam Pinkleton with his characteristic panache and musicality, was as deliciously stupid as the best parts of Dicks: The Musical (which Sharp cowrote and costarred in with Aaron Jackson of Messy White Gays) while also being surprisingly intelligent and moving. By sheer coincidence, Color Theories turned out to be a beautiful companion piece to it, as both grappled with the question of how best to use the limited time we have in this life. ta-da, however, was the more sincere and intermittently serious of the two, and, as a result, packed a bigger emotional wallop. I’ll never water ski again without thinking about it.

1. Prince F*ggot
(rated 🌈🌈🌈🌈½,, upgraded to 🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈 with some recasting)

Probably the most talked about and most polarizing play of the year amongst New York’s showmosexuals, Prince F*ggot was simultaneously a romance, a political drama, a comedy, a family drama, an analysis of identity construction, a condemnation of the British monarchy, and a tribute to it. The remarkable magic trick pulled off by playwright Jordan Tannahill, director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, and their (mostly) incredible cast was that these various aspects of the piece fed into each other, seamlessly creating a coherent whole rather than an assortment of underdeveloped parts. As hilarious as it was thought-provoking, the Playwrights Horizons/Soho Rep/Studio Seaview production also featured two of the year’s best performances: K. Todd Freeman as “Performer 2,” a track mostly comprised of playing Prince William, and John McCrea as “Performer 6,” a track mostly comprised of playing Prince George. On my second viewing, one significant liability in principal casting was remedied with the performance of a fantastic understudy, and it left no doubt in my mind that Prince F*ggot should be crowned the best play of 2025.

ELIGIBLE:

Bat Boy
Boop
Buena Vista Social Club
Call Me Izzy
Chess
Color Theories
Curse of the Starving Class
Death Becomes Her
Eureka Day
Floyd Collins
The Great Gatsby
Grief Camp
Heathers
House of McQueen
John Proctor Is the Villain
The Last Five Years
Liberation
Little Bear Ridge Road
Love Life (Encores)
Lowcountry
Messy White Gays
Mindplay
My First Ex-Husband
Not Ready for Prime Time
Operation Mincemeat
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Pirates! The Penzance Musical
Prince Faggot
Purpose
Queen of Versailles
Real Women Have Curves
Redwood
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes
ta-da
Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
We Had a World

INELIGIBLE (i.e., seen in 2025, but first seen in an earlier year)

Chicago²
Drag: the Musical
Gypsy
Little Shop of Horrors
Maybe Happy Ending
Oh, Mary!
Sunset Blvd.³

1. Actually, my all-time favorite New Year’s Eve was December 31, 2001, when two friends and I saw a performance of Christopher Ashley’s brilliant revival of The Rocky Horror Show, which absolutely should have won the Tony instead of the over-amplified and overplayed 42nd Street.

2. My count may be incorrect at this point, but I believe my trip to see Mira Sorvino as Roxie Hart marked my 34th visit to Walter Bobbie’s revival. As my friend Steven—who was, regrettably, seeing it for the 1st time—observed, every time the music started, there was fear in her eyes.

3. Jamie Lloyd’s revival closed soon after winning the Tony for Best Revival and Best Actress in a Musical, probably because Nicole Scherzinger could not extend her contract any further. It’s a shame, though, because the three principals who were playing opposite her at closing were actually all better than the thoroughly impressive performers who originated their roles in the production: Pierre Marais was a spectacular Joe Gillis; Jordan Donica may have been an even better Max than George Hearn was in the first Broadway production; and Sydney Jones had the all the backbone Grace Hodgett Young brought to Betty while singing it infinitely better.