The experience of watching a show is usually one of total immersion. The story carries you, or the music transports you, and you are lost in an integrated whole. Yet, when we stumble out of a theater and into the night, one single image is often burned into our retinas.
During the 2025-26 season, our writers found that certain scene-stealing features — of design, of performance — shaped the conversations we had about a show, even long after seeing it. Many of the actors and designers responsible for these attention-getting instants were recognized by the Tony-nominating committee, but not everyone was singled out: For instance, Soutra Gilmour’s tunnel-to-nowhere set for “Waiting for Godot” unaccountably fell off the voters’ list. But perhaps such oversights are the cost of a season so overflowing with glittering showstoppers. Here are some examples of excellence that still glow in our memories.
Top Billing: The Wigs
Do It Like It’s 1987
In three shows this season, wigs made a startling impression while instantly defining character and time. David Brian Brown’s feathered mullets and high-top fades rooted “The Lost Boys” in 1987, with nods to the original film but also to period pop stars like Daryl Hall and Kid ’n Play’s Christopher Reid. JESSE GREEN
Fallen Angel Hair
What does hangover hair look like? For “Fallen Angels,” David Brian Brown and Victoria Tinsman created a hilarious wig, worn by Rose Byrne’s character, that was an ode to morning-after collapse. J.G.
Feline Fur
For “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” Nikiya Mathis produced an entire sociology of wiggery, keeping the felines straight in this queer reinvention of the 1982 musical. Among them: a toque of ropy braids for Junior LaBeija, nailing his faded royalty; a pin-straight, down-to-there Naomi Campbell look for the dancer Robert “Silk” Mason; and a suite of enormous hair sculptures for André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy, including a 2-foot-tall purple pompadour that turns him into a funktastic Moses. J.G.
Stage Magic and Props
Joe Mantello’s Show Stoppers
The performances in “Death of a Salesman” are big; the Great American Play is bigger. But Joe Mantello’s production manages to snare our attention with small moments, glimmers of stage magic that put us into Willy Loman’s disintegrating mind. The actors get into a car but then enter somewhere else; a pocket watch vanishes; a grave appears. By the end of the night, you’re not sure what’s real — just that you can’t forget it. HELEN SHAW
Lost Boys Take Flight
Have vampires, will fly: Such is the spectacularly upheld live-action promise of the rock musical comedy “The Lost Boys,” whose resident blood suckers take to the air on slender wires that Jen Schriever and Michael Arden’s murky, densely layered lighting does its darnedest to conceal. Swooping and levitating at high altitudes, the actors are a bit like human puppets — with the fear-factor ability to sneak up out of the darkness, within biting range. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
More Than Numbers
Bizarrely, the element in Robert Icke’s modern-day “Oedipus” that seemed the most faithful to the spirit of the ancient Greek original was the set’s big red digital clock, which counted down two hours to the play’s timed-to-the-second revelation of horror. The clock encompassed the two aspects of tragic excitement: Inexorability (those relentless numbers!) and exhilaration (here it comes, here it comes!). H.S.
Custom Fit
Rocky’s Invisible Pack
The transmitter packs actors wear for their mics are usually hidden underneath the costume. But as Rocky, the muscular hunk created by Frank-N-Furter in “The Rocky Horror Show,” Josh Rivera wears a flesh-tone wrestler’s singlet that covers just enough for our imagination to work overtime. Not that we were staring, but where the heck does he stash that ungainly accessory? ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Becky Shaw’s Dress
When we first meet the title character (Madeline Brewer) of Gina Gionfriddo’s play, she has just arrived at a friend’s apartment for a blind date with Max (Alden Ehrenreich). His greeting: “You look like … a birthday cake.” The costume designer Kaye Voyce’s pink concoction for Becky is shrewd. It relays her lack of confidence while showing that Max is quick to judge, with little interest in polite blather. It’s a master class in economical storytelling. E.V.
Less Is More
“Liberation” might have landed a Tony nomination for costume design (one of two nods this year for the designer Qween Jean), but it was a scene in which the cast members removed their outfits that resonated profoundly. As part of their consciousness-raising circle’s exploration of body positivity, the characters got naked and turned vulnerability into a strength. E.V.
Standout Performances: Musicals
A Human Meteorite
In the “Chess” revival, Nicholas Christopher muscles through the first-act closer, the epic “Anthem,” by sheer dint of his powerful baritone, superhuman breath support and gift for packing every syllable with maximum! emotional! intensity! Not since he smashed us into smithereens as the Sweeney Todd understudy have we felt the same sense of pulverization. H.S.
Shoshana Bean Gets ‘Wild’
“Wild,” a big song from “The Lost Boys,” is technically a duet, but Paul Alexander Nolan comes in fairly late and mostly acts as support for Shoshana Bean. Her performance is a marvel of dynamics control as her character reminisces about lost time and wasted opportunities, the ache occasionally manifesting as belting that shakes the rafters. E.V.
With a Song in His Heart
Joshua Henry has always been a thrilling singer, raising the roof in a bewildering variety of roles, but his Coalhouse Walker Jr. in “Ragtime” may be the pinnacle (at least for now). Raising the roof is the least of it; as a man whose story he seems personally driven to tell, he also blows down the walls. J.G.
Split Focus
In musicals this year, the rule was, if you feel too much to sing, you leap into the air and — WHAMMO! — land in a split. If you could, you did: Layton Williams, the glittering iceberg in “Titánique,” triumphantly punctuates his victory over the titular boat with a jump split; Robert “Silk” Mason, as the balletic Magical Mister Mistoffelees in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” développés right into a series of bouncing hyperextensions on the floor; even Samantha Schwartz, the saucy child-version of Cee Cee in “Beaches” — and a memorable miniature dynamo — shakes her spangles and hits the deck, legs akimbo. H.S.
Standout Performances: Plays
Taking August Wilson’s Lead
In “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” two actors in particular gleam like pearls on the play’s velvet: Ruben Santiago-Hudson — the veteran Wilson performer (and director), who already has one Tony for a Wilson part and has now been nominated again this year — and one of this year’s Broadway breakouts, the relative newcomer Abigail Onwunali, whose blistering entrance strikes a match in the play’s last scene and sets it on fire. H.S.
The Awful Truth in Thebes
The moment of tragic revelation in Greek drama — the anagnorisis — is usually seen through the eyes of the main character. But in Robert Icke’s modern-day adaptation of “Oedipus,” it was given to Lesley Manville, playing Oedipus’s wife. It was she who told him, in a 12-minute monologue, that she is in fact his mother; for once we were made to feel the woman’s pain instead of the man’s. J.G.
Diva of Ditz
When Marylouise Burke’s doorbell rang while she was on the phone with me recently, she said, “Will you excuse me a moment? I have to let the serial killer in.” That was the kind of droll zinger that had just earned her a Tony Award nomination for her performance as Penny Buell in David Lindsay-Abaire’s new play, “The Balusters.” Penny is an older woman who doesn’t seem to understand the treacherous undercurrents of microaggression and fragility the other characters are drowning in. But, like many of the Lindsay-Abaire roles Burke has played since 1997, Penny actually does understand, and shares that understanding in unexpectedly pointed ways. “Penny is a pretty strong voice of reason in a play where nobody is truly reasonable,” Burke said. So don’t let the dithery demeanor fool you; she’s a devil when given a good line. (And the serial killer was actually a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.) J.G.
The Other ‘Godot’ Twosome
The passers-by in Jamie Lloyd’s “Waiting for Godot” proved a formidable double act: Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) a poisonous Southern gentleman, sorghum-sweet, and Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton), Pozzo’s muzzled slave, a bowler-hatted showman conspiring charmingly with the audience. Dirden and Thornton pilfered the show right out from under its stars, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. L.C.H.
Set Design Stunners
Get to the Chase
A 1972 Brooklyn streetscape greeted audiences at “Dog Day Afternoon.” But about a minute into the play, David Korins’s set opened like a giant fan to reveal the gloriously bland interior of a Chase Manhattan branch. It seems only fair that in a show about a bank robbery, a bank would steal the show. J.G.
That’s Some Baggage
Taking the form of luggage piled high, Soutra Gilmour’s tricksy revolving set for the rom-com musical “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” opens up piece by piece to reveal its compact scenic secrets — most enchantingly, a restaurant in Chinatown. L.C.H.
The Behemoth in ‘Little Bear Ridge Road’
A hulking couch was the center of Scott Pask’s set for Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock. In taupe leather, the couch came fully loaded: recliner seats, headrest lights, central console with cup holders. “When the two of them, Micah and Laurie, were sitting in it,” Pask said, “they just looked like toddlers in the back seat of an S.U.V.” L.C.H.
Top Billing: The Hats
The Hat That Makes the Man
The broad-brimmed charcoal hat that Joshua Boone’s Herald Loomis wears in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” cuts quite a silhouette. The costume designer Paul Tazewell thinks of it as a slightly faded remnant from Herald’s days as a deacon and family man, before he was captured and enslaved for seven years. “What would one choose as armor to now walk through life?” Tazewell said. “Part of that armor is to be an imposing figure.” L.C.H.
Cat in a Hat
So much of the headgear that Qween Jean designed for “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is bold and oversize, but the cap on the cat Tumblebrutus, played by Primo Thee Ballerino, has a magnificent modesty — encrusted in mirrored mosaic, with kitty ears on top. L.C.H.
Gull Power
Jim Parsons needs zero help drawing attention as Ruth, Rose’s acerbic mother, in the “Titanic” spoof “Titaníque,” but he gets an eye-magnet assist from the gull hat that the costume designer Alejo Vietti has given Ruth: tasteful and understated only in that it’s merely two wing-spreading birds, not a whole flock, perched in a nest in her hair. L.C.H.
Try a Little Tenderness
‘Prime’ directive
Last fall, Danny Burstein solicitously squired June Squibb, his 96-year-old co-star of “Marjorie Prime” on and offstage, escorting her to the chair where she held court. Jordan Harrison’s play asked us to consider the melancholy of the A.I. constructs who will survive us, but Burstein’s palpable care for Squibb — his courtly arm, his inclined head — demonstrated the human concern that was the IRL heart of the show. H.S.
Purr worthy
In “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” younger “kittens” respectfully lend a paw to André De Shields, 80; attend the ballroom legend, Junior LaBeija, 68, the show’s grand eminence; and suspend their own catlike preening to give “Tempress” Chasity Moore (playing Grizabella) her flowers. These loving interactions aren’t just practical acts of assistance; they form the soul of a production about the love between generations. H.S.
We All Take a Bow
Theatergoers were eager to demonstrate care too: In “Every Brilliant Thing,” Daniel Radcliffe “casts” an audience member as a child’s school counselor, and every night, a kindhearted theatergoer turns her sock into a puppet and complies. Every one who sees the show feels it was stolen by a different participator. We find ourselves thinking about how much we, too, could help, given the chance. H.S.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
The post That Wig, Those Splits: Broadway Scene Stealers, Tonys Edition appeared first on New York Times.
