Our Favorite 2023 Shows (Outside of New York City)

TheaterMania doesn’t only cover theater in New York City. We polled some of our critics across the country for their thoughts on the best productions they saw this year in their own necks of the woods. Here, in alphabetical order, is what they had to say.

Camp Siegfried — Theatre Exile, Philadelphia
by Cameron Kelsall

Bess Wohl’s sneakily unnerving play investigates the subtle creep of fascism through the lens of what seems like an innocuous love story. Set at a summer camp designed to engender Nazi sympathies in German-American teenagers on the precipice of World War II, it follows an impressionable young couple whose budding romance is subsumed by propaganda. By keeping the action at a bare simmer throughout, Wohl suggests that losing oneself to a dangerous ideology happens in imperceptible ways. Deborah Block’s tense production matched the energy of the script, moving from cloying meet-cute to shocking descent before the audience’s eyes. As the central pair of campers, Adam Howard and Jenna Kuerzi enacted a chilling courtship. With anti-Semitism worryingly on the rise once again in America, this necessarily play looks back toward history to show, as one character says, how “anyone can be seduced.”

Exorcistic: The Rock Musical Parody Experiment — Three Clubs, Los Angeles
by Jonas Schwartz

Twisted and hilarious, Exorcistic: The Rock Musical Parody Experiment didn’t merely copy the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. With a cohesive score by Michael Shaw Fisher, it used the film’s storyline to comment on the theater as a whole. The shrewd script jeers at the egos that put their ambitions before the work, while also lovingly remarking on the sweat and tears that go into the gargantuan task of putting up original productions with no money. Shaw Fisher, who also wrote the libretto, brilliantly exposes the obvious joke, and then veers off in outlandish directions. His score melds punk, country, alternative, and ballads — several song titles that cannot be published without expletive marks — to enhance and build on the humor.  Emma Hunton, who played the possessed Regan, led the ensemble to a gory, hysterical conclusion.

For the Love of a Glove — Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles
by Jonas Schwartz

Here’s a provocative elevator pitch: an original musical on the life of Michael Jackson told with X-rated puppets. In For the Love of a Glove, creator Julien Nitzberg revealed an irreverent, insane version of MJ’s life, introducing the audience to his best friend and source of all his talent, an alien vampire in the shape of MJ’s bedazzled glove. The score, with lyrics by Nitzberg and music by Nicole Morier, Drew Erickson, and Max Townsley, lifts motifs from Jackson’s famed catalogue so the audience can glean what song they’re spoofing, but the adroit melodies and lyrics take off like the glove’s spaceship. The cast, led by Eric B. Anthony and Patrick Batiste, were perfect mimics of their characters, and took the melodramatics to heightened levels. But they also found sweetness and tragedy in their roles, which elevated what could have otherwise been offensive. Robin Walsh’s puppets of young Michael, Donny Osmond, and Corey Feldman, among others, were uproarious vehicles for blowing up sacrosanct issues like religion and sexual misconduct so that the play was piercing but not didactic.

Kill Shelter — Theatre of Note, Los Angeles
by Jonas Schwartz

A world premiere, Ashley Rose Wellman’s Kill Shelter dived into the tragic world of underfunded animal shelters and the workers required to euthanize due to lack of funds, lack of interest from potential owners, and lack of space. Juxtaposing the kill shelter with both right-wing rhetorical hypocrisy and the personal subject of abortion, Kill Shelter couldn’t have been timelier. Director Shaina Rosenthal sensitively told this story with a remarkable cast, led by Ashley Romans, and with abstract puppets of the dying animals, designed by Emory Royston. The use of unconventional materials for the animals rendered them more representational, but they became flesh and blood when voiced and controlled by the actors, and broke the audience’s heart.

A New Brain — Barrington Stage Company/Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts
by Joseph Guglielmo

It was a thrill to revisit William Finn and James Lapine’s A New Brain at Barrington Stage this summer. Adam Chanler-Berat Infused anxiety, neurosis, and joy as Gordon, a character based on Finn and his own bout with a brain tumor in real life. Mary Testa, who played the homeless woman in the original off-Broadway production, this time played Gordon’s mother and infused her with heart and the need to just keep moving and cleaning to get through the day. This powerful and uplifting musical about love, life, and new beginnings really deserves to be a staple in the repertoire and it was thrilling to see a such a well-conceived and performed production.

Sunset Boulevard — Savoy Theatre, London
by Alex Wood

When Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger was announced in a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Christopher Hampton, and Don Black’s Sunset Boulevard in London’s West End, a few eyebrows across theaterland felt themselves being tugged skywards. Luckily, director Jamie Lloyd (who made Jessica Chastain sitting on a chair feel captivating on Broadway) was streets ahead of everyone else in making everything about this potential museum piece feel fresh. Using Scherzinger’s career-best performance (a blend between quietly enchanting and objectively unhinged), an army of gimbal-toting camera operators and some rising star co-leads in the form of Tom Francis and Grace Hodgett-Young, this was a brooding, chiaroscuro-swamped, exciting twist on a classic. Broadway seems sure to follow.

tick, tick…Boom! — Bucks County Playhouse, Pennsylvania
by Cameron Kelsall

Bucks County Playhouse’s superb production of tick, tick…Boom! served as a living memorial to Jonathan Larson, the brilliant composer who died suddenly in 1996, when he was just on the precipice of fame. It felt impossible to watch this story of his early, lean years as a starving artist in New York City and not curse the fates that robbed us of decades more music, yet the overwhelming emotion of gratitude for what he left behind took hold as the talented Andy Mientus brought him vividly back to life. Eric Stern’s focused direction also summoned a bygone era when young, ambitious artists could stake their claim on the American dream, by creating a world as scrappy yet hopeful as the subject himself.