The theater is more than the sum of its parts; it is also the parts themselves. As I began to look back at the first half of 2025, I found myself primarily recalling those parts: the scene, not the script; the props, not the production. Here are 10 such moments, some sad, some funny, some furious, most all at once.
Audra’s Turn at the Tonys
“Rose’s Turn,” the 11 o’clock number to end them all, is often described as a nervous breakdown in song. It was certainly that when I first saw Audra McDonald slay it in the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy.” But by the time she performed it on the Tony Awards months later, it was no longer just a personal crisis: a mother grieving the lost opportunities her daughter now enjoys. The lyric “Somebody tell me, when is it my turn?” now rang out with greater depth and anger as McDonald, the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway, invoked the lost opportunities of generations of talented Black women behind her.
Read our review of “Gypsy” and our feature about “Rose’s Turn.”
A Multiplicity of Greenspans
Though he was the subject of the recent Off Broadway play “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” most people don’t. Nor will Greenspan’s astonishing quadruple performance in the Off Broadway production of “Prince Faggot,” Jordan Tannahill’s shocker about a gay heir to the British throne, help pin him down: He’s that shape-shifty. A bossy palace publicist, a discreet royal servant, even the possibly gay Edward II are among his perfectly etched characters. And the monologue in which he supposedly plays himself? Indescribable (at least here).
Read our review of the play.
A Face and a Name to Remember
Now it can be told. In the Broadway show “Smash,” based on the television melodrama about a Marilyn Monroe musical, the big number (“Let Me Be Your Star”) was deeply undersold in the opening scene. That was a marvelous feint because, at the end of Act I, to bring the curtain down with a huge surprise bang, out came Bella Coppola, as a suddenly promoted assistant choreographer, performing the same song when no one else could. Can you oversell something? Turns out, no.
Read our review of “Smash” and our feature about “Let Me Be Your Star.”
Nurse, Hand Me the Clarinet
Two-thirds of the way through Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” about a post-human museum of human life, comes the big reveal: an exhibition of the technology we supposedly treasured. Hilariously (thanks in part to Matt Carlin’s props) they include a shampoo bottle, a clarinet and a Betamax cassette. But like paleontologists inferring huge dinosaurs from tiny bones, the future gets so much wrong, misconstruing the shampoo as a soft drink, the clarinet as a medical instrument and the cassette as a treasure requiring refrigeration. It’s a great joke that’s also a great warning: Everything becomes obsolete.
Read our review of “The Antiquities.”
Father of the Bride
“He is affectionate, then solemn, then glad, then solemn, then amused, then solemn,” read Sarah Ruhl’s stage directions for “Eurydice.” It took just five sentences of similarly plain description, along with a lifetime of stage experience, for Brian d’Arcy James to produce one of the season’s most exquisite scenes with no words at all. Miming a father’s walk down the aisle with his daughter, he embodied all the designated variations of feeling, while overlaying great sadness because death had made the moment impossible. His death, that is; he was in all senses late to the wedding. On earth, his daughter was getting married, but stuck in Hell he couldn’t give her away. Instead: “He walks.”
Read our review of “Eurydice.”
Mother-Daughter Reunion
Near the end of “Liberation,” Bess Wohl’s play about the women’s movement in the 1970s, a time warp allows the current-day narrator (Susannah Flood) to speak with her late mother (Betsy Aidem). A moment of huge emotional release from grieving, it is also a challenge to her version of history — and ours. “You’ve got most of it wrong, of course,” says the mother. “We weren’t like that at all.” Be careful what you wish for: The dead may still love us but they do not need our illusions.
Read our review of “Liberation.”
Stella! Stella!
One star of the musical “Redwood” was Idina Menzel. The other was a tree. The tree, called Stella, was 14 feet wide and 300 feet tall and centuries if not millenniums old. The director Tina Landau and her crack design team gave Stella an entrance for the ages, her trunk rotating into place like an animated Richard Serra sculpture, her canopy swirling around it with the help of more than a thousand immersive LED panels and, finally, actors dancing in air as they climb. Technology, too often used in the theater to flatten audiences into submission, in this case lifted us into wonder.
Read our review of “Redwood,” our feature on Menzel and our feature about the aerial choreography.
Green Light on Broadway
In a series of classroom discussions, Kimberly Belflower’s play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” about high school girls reading “The Crucible,” develops a logical argument about male predation and false heroism. At the same time, it sneakily and wonderfully reinterprets the witchcraft tale on its own terms. In the final scene, a class project that is also a kind of exorcism, the girls, led by Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo, erupt in a wild, exhilarating, power-retaking dance to the music of Lorde. It is no less witchy, and also no more so, than the supposedly satanic revels of Salem.
Read our review of “John Proctor Is the Villain” and our profile of Sadie Sink.
Andrew Scott, a Sadness Machine
That Andrew Scott played all eight characters in “Vanya,” Simon Stephens’s adaptation of the Chekhov classic, would have been little more than a brilliant stunt if he weren’t brilliant in each of the roles. And by brilliant I mean heartbreaking; for Scott, sadness is a base coat priming everything. Crying, even in mid-laugh — as he does in the despairing 90-second speech at the heart of the play — seems to be his natural state, evoking the same Chekhovian response in us.
Read our review of “Vanya” and our profile of Andrew Scott.
Gossip of the Gods
Long an Off Broadway goddess, Deirdre O’Connell became a literal one in “Kill,” one of four short plays in a Caryl Churchill compendium called “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” that ran at the Public Theater this spring. In a 12-minute monologue, she portrayed an amalgam of Greek and Roman deities looking down with regret on the doings of Greeks and Romans — and us. Not many actors could have parsed the tangled, maniacal language, basically a catalog of lust and slaughter, let alone delivered it with the boozy wit and chatterbox nonchalance of a barfly bending your ear at last call.
Read our review of “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.”
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
The post The Best Theater Moments of 2025, So Far appeared first on New York Times.