Oh, Mary! by Cole Escola

Included in Vulture‘s The Best Theatre of 2024, Jackson McHenry says of Oh, Mary!, “Its charms lie in the seriousness of Escola and director Sam Pinkleton’s commitment to nonsense (the stuff of door-slamming farce and giant heart-pattern boxers), a surprisingly well-developed gay-breakup B-plot, and the play’s positioning of divadom as a self-justifying force in the universe, which has more bite than it perhaps gets credit for.” Oh Mary! was also featured on the New York Times‘s Best Theater of 2024 and was number one on USA Today‘s Broadway’s 10 best shows of 2024.

---

Water for Elephants Music & Lyrics by PigPen Theatre Co., Book by Rick Elice

In TheatreMania‘s 5 Best Broadway Shows of 2024, chief critic Zachary Stewart put Water for Elephants in the #3 slot. “The most spectacular new musical on Broadway this year didn’t have a huge expensive set, but multiple platforms on castors that could be strung together to form the skeleton of a circus train crisscrossing America during the Great Depression (exceptionally clever set design by Takeshi Kata). And that left plenty of room for the imagination as well as the high-flying feats of agility that made this show memorable.”

---

Eureka Day by Jonathan Spector

In The 100 Word Review‘s 10 Best of 2024, Charles Passy calls Eureka Day “satire at its sharpest.” He goes on to say, “This brilliant examination of how high-minded principles can lead to near-deathly consequences also provided the year’s best laughs on stage.”

---

Brooklyn Laundry by John Patrick Shanley

In the Wall Street Journal’s round-up of 2024 theatre, Charles Isherwood writes that Manhattan Theatre Club’s year was marked by “one virtually flawless production after another.” He counts John Patrick Shanley’s Brooklyn Laundry among his favorite of MTC’s productions, calling it a “quirky romantic comedy.”

---

The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

The Washington Posts‘s 10 best plays and musicals of 2024 included the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s production of The Comeuppance. “A searing, hilarious and thought-provoking gut punch, it was an exemplary staging of a timely play by one of the best writers working today,” says Naveen Kumar.

Winner of the 2024 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play

---

Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang

Yellow Face was also featured in Vulture‘s The Best Theatre of 2024: “Over the decades, layers of sediment have built up upon the incidents depicted in David Henry Hwang’s self-immolating farce, first performed Off-Broadway in 2007, providing this Broadway production even more kindling than it had before. Leigh Silverman’s production was sprightly, with a gimlet take on its hero’s activist self-regard.”

---

Doubt, A Parable by John Patrick Shanley

This brilliant and powerful drama was named one of The Best Broadway Shows of 2024 by HuffPost. “Shanley’s play about a pair of nuns at a Catholic school who castigate the new priest on the mere rumor that he might be abusing their sole Black student has a certain pertinence,” says Candice Frederick. “Liev Schreiber, Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan and Quincy Tyler Bernstine as the student’s exasperated mother round out a deeply pensive look at reputation, race and the consequences of bad faith — on all ends.”

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama