Scene on Stage

This year, New Yorktheater was full of echoes of seasons past: a Mel Brooksmusical adapted from one of his screen comedies ("Young Frankenstein"—nowhere near as monstrously funny as "The Producers"). A Tom Stoppard play about radical political idealism ("Rock 'n' Roll"—a lot shorter than "Coast of Utopia," and sweeter). Hollywood actresses braving the stage (Claire Danes learning her vowels in "Pygmalion," Jennifer Garner driving men to distraction, and poetry, in "Cyrano de Bergerac"). Stunning performances (Vanessa Redgrave in "The Year of Magical Thinking"; Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon"). And brilliant revivals (Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming"). Here are five of the best productions of the year.

1. King Lear starring Ian McKellan. Tickets to this Royal Shakespeare staging were harder to snag than box seats to the World Series, and the reason was simply Sir Ian. What a privilege to see this great actor create such a flesh-and-blood Lear, stripped of any theatrical loftiness—a very physical, muscular King at the start, whose disintegration over the course of the play was all the more brutal and poignant.

2. The Seafarer by Conor McPherson. In this new play from the gifted Irish playwright, who also directed, five men spend Christmas eve in a dreary Dublin house, getting stinking drunk and playing poker, with the stakes much higher than the cash on the table. But the show is not all darkness—it's laugh-out-loud funny, with crackling dialogue and the most brilliant ensemble of actors on Broadway.

3. Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard. A young Czech scholar named Jan and his Marxist professor at Cambridge spar across generations, their intellectual debate spanning the late 1960s—and the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring—to the 1990s— and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Surrounding their conversation are the small details of daily life and human suffering, all leavened by Jan's passion for rock music and the spiritual freedom it represents.

4. Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan. In 1977, David Frost conducted a series of TV interviews with disgraced president Richard Nixon, both men hoping to resuscitate their professional reputations with this journalistic coup. In Morgan's fascinating play about those two verbal duelists—with a towering performance by Frank Langella as Nixon—the real winner turned out to be the power of television itself. Politics hasn't been the same since.

5. Black Watch by Gregory Burke. A profane and gut-wrenching work about the historic Royal Scottish Regiment on a final tour of duty in Iraq, this play drew on the accounts of real soldiers. The men of the valiant 300-year-old regiment painfully question their place in the war and in the military, and, for many of them, their pride and sense of purpose is shattered by the experience.

© 2007