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Lea Michele’s star turn in “Chess.” Kara Young as an 8-year-old. A 12-minute monologue delivered from a cloud. These are our favorite scenes from this year.

Clockwise from top left: Deirdre O’Connell in “Kill”; Kara Young and Nicholas Braun in “Gruesome Playground Injuries”; Lea Michele in “Chess”; and Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in “Oedipus.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Dec. 10, 2025Updated 9:46 a.m. ET

Some of this year’s most inspired moments fit nicely into a few themes: once-overlooked actors given bigger spotlights, acclaimed stars impressing us anew, and directorial flourishes that heighten our experiences. Here, we revisit some of the stage moments that especially stood out. — Nicole Herrington

Laura Collins-Hughes

A Charge in the Air

Of Gods and Mortals

“Make the weird art” was Deirdre O’Connell’s advice from the podium when she won her Tony Award in 2022, and she walks that walk herself, taking on roles that might as well be dares. Case in point: portraying the Gods, plural, in Caryl Churchill’s short play “Kill,” part of a program of one-acts called “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” at the Public Theater, where she perched on a cloud to deliver a headlong, 12-minute monologue as if it weren’t unhinged. “We take this small box and shut the furies up in it,” she began, and her torrent of words became the story of humanity as told in classical myth — bloody, relentless, so often senseless. And, filtered through O’Connell, riveting.

Willkommen, Bienvenue

To my mind, Sally Bowles, the nightclub singer in “Cabaret,” had always been annoyingly too much. I never found her fascinating, never regarded her as more than a caricature. Then the London-based star Marisha Wallace donned Sally’s fur coat in Rebecca Frecknall’s Broadway revival, and all was revealed: a warm, kind, funny mess of a woman, looking for a safe place to be. When Sally arrived at the door of the novelist Clifford Bradshaw, comically lugging a giant suitcase and determined to move in even though they’d barely met, I fell head over heels. For the first time, it made sense when he let her stay.

‘Take Route 88 West’

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Maya Hawke, left, as Eurydice and Brian d’Arcy James as Father in “Eurydice” at Signature Theater in Manhattan.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The father’s monologue, late in Sarah Ruhl’s play “Eurydice,” is only a series of directions, plain as could be: the driving route to an Iowa house on the Mississippi River, then the downhill path to reach the water on foot. But the Mississippi here is a stand-in for the River Lethe of Greek mythology, whose memory-erasing powers the father is resolved to seek, as a balm for his desolation at losing his cherished daughter. In Les Waters’s revival at Signature Theater, that quiet speech was the culmination of Brian d’Arcy James’s extraordinarily moving performance — restrained, unadorned and devastating.

‘I Like the Nurse’s Office’

In her plaid school pinafore and Mary Janes, with her hair in pigtails, Kayleen is an adorable 8-year-old — nonchalant nose-picking aside. She is also unusually intriguing for a child in the school nurse’s office with an alleged stomachache, but that’s because she’s played by Kara Young in the current Off Broadway revival of Rajiv Joseph’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries.” Only in the first scene do we see Kayleen at that age, jumping on the bed and eager to touch another student’s head wound. But she is so funny and unconstrained, so fully, unimpeachably hatched that you find yourself thinking: I would watch a whole play about that child.

Hiding and Hoping

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From left, Tatianna Córdoba, Aline Mayagoitia and Christopher M. Ramirez in “Real Women Have Curves” at the James Earl Jones Theater in Manhattan.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Broadway musical “Real Women Have Curves” was willfully upbeat — an immigrant tale set in 1980s Los Angeles that wanted its bright colors and bubbliness to overwhelm any somberness and danger. Still, its most potent moment was its most viscerally distressing: when the Latina employees at a dress factory, almost all of them undocumented, hid in terror as immigration agents raided the business next door. Out of the factory’s darkness, once the clamor died down, we heard the breathing of frightened workers, and their quiet weeping. In 2025, that had a staggering immediacy. Sometimes the real world won’t let us leave it outside the theater doors.

‘My Son, My Son’

Mrs. Antrobus, the mother in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Skin of Our Teeth,” has always been a woman persevering through grief. That fact might escape the audience’s notice; in most productions, the death of her child isn’t given much weight. Not so in Ethan Lipton’s new musical adaptation, “The Seat of Our Pants,” directed by Leigh Silverman at the Public Theater. With just the slightest rebalancing of text, and the gentlest compassion, it allows that pain its own primal, searing moment: Ruthie Ann Miles’s Mrs. Antrobus crouched alone onstage, channeling one of the deepest kinds of suffering into art. In a show about the human condition, that feels like a restoration.

Alexis Soloski

Big Gestures, Big Feelings

A Countdown

A clock onstage is usually a disaster, an invitation to any bored audience member to count down the seconds. In Robert Icke’s “Oedipus,” the blood-red digital clock in the background of the campaign headquarters set is a summons to catastrophe. Ostensibly a countdown to election results, it also times when the revelation about Oedipus’s parentage will be brought into glaring light. The clock isn’t a distraction; it’s a terrible promise. And courtesy of Mark Strong’s Oedipus and Lesley Manville’s Jocasta, his wife and mother, that promise is kept.

A Messy Meet-Cute

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Natalie Palamides playing both Mark and Christina in “Weer.”Credit...Cherry Lane Theatre

Mark and Christina are meant to be. But only after they’ve been splashed with orange juice and curb water. In a delirious, demented flashback in Natalie Palamides’s solo show “Weer,” Mark and Christina run into each other on the street. Literally. The complication: Palamides, her body split down the middle, plays both the male and female roles, so she is running into herself. And she does that while spilling and splashing plenty of fluids. There’s a reason ponchos are issued to ticket holders in the front rows.

Breaking the News

It’s hard to be upbeat about environmental collapse, but that’s the job of Stacey Gross, the terminally perky meteorologist for a network affiliate in Fresno, Calif. As played by Julia McDermott in Brian Watkin’s solo show “Weather Girl,” Stacey has to deliver the latest about out-of-control fires and ungodly air quality with unwavering charm and upspeak. But that happy voice falters, even in the first scene, with Stacey ostensibly filming in front of a burning house. Inside, the residents are dead. And outside, Stacey, her heels high and her travel mug brimming with sparkling wine, is just barely hanging on.

Checkmate

When a performer has spent so long on television, it can be hard to remember that they have Broadway bona fides. But Lea Michele, a star of “Glee,” proved her belter’s worth in the revival of “Funny Girl.” And she proves it again in “Chess,” particularly when she sings the power ballad “Nobody’s Side.” In the midst of chessboard feuds and relationship rivalries, Michele stands firm, center stage, singing a song of romantic realpolitik with enough force to rattle the theater’s walls.

A Scream to End All Screams

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From left, Maggie Kuntz, Morgan Scott, Fina Strazza and Amalia Yoo in “John Proctor Is the Villain.”Credit...Emily Rhyne for The New York Times

Being a teenager is almost never easy. Being a teenage girl in a small, conservative town, that’s worse. And in one galvanizing moment from Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” the teen girls let it all out. First one screams, and then the others join. In the director Danya Taymor’s production, social contagion never felt so electric, so good. The stage direction reads, “They scream so loud and for so long/ it’s a lifetime of screams/ it’s awesome.” The scene made me wish that as a teen girl I’d screamed more.

Elisabeth Vincentelli

Taking Loud and Quiet Risks

Naked Truths

It’s a pretty safe bet that when Broadway audiences have to secure their phones in a Yondr pouch, someone’s going to get naked onstage. At the top of Act II in Bess Wohl’s play “Liberation,” the women in an early-70s feminist consciousness-raising group casually take off their clothes. They then sit there on folding chairs, some more comfortably than others. The scene is matter of fact, but the nudity is not unexamined: It is very much the point, especially when the characters must discuss one thing they love and one thing they hate about their bodies. Vulnerability and strength: It feels as if all of “Liberation” is contained there.

High Camp

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Jinkx Monsoon in “Oh, Mary!” on Broadway.Credit...Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

I thought Cole Escola’s performance as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” could not be bested. Then I saw Jinkx Monsoon in the role in August, and her take on the “madcap medley” that ends the show made me laugh even more than Escola’s — who wrote the play, too. Monsoon’s mastery of pregnant pauses and sideways glances was laser-precise, the stuff cabaret legends are made of. Escola’s turn felt so integral to “Oh, Mary!” that recasting seemed as if it would be a fool’s errand. Now we know that the play is built on such a sturdy comic structure that it will endure.

Budget Lines

I hope many aspiring actors and theatermakers had the opportunity to see Carl Holder’s solo show “Out of Order,” which played in the tiny East Village Basement this summer. In a particularly candid segment, Holder provided a line-by-line analysis of one of his recent bank statements, which was projected on a wall for all to see. We discovered a litany of small debits (transit rides, takeout orders, etc.) and marginally bigger credits (Holder works in hospitality to complement his erratic theater income). It’s a life of precarity and uncertainty, and seeing it presented that way, without regret, self-pity or anger, was bracing and dispiriting, and a little heartbreaking.

Now You See Her

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Fly Davis’s ridiculously detailed, two-story set in “Paranormal Activity.” Credit...Evan Jenkins for The New York Times

When the first major visual effect happened in the play “Paranormal Activity” — an original stage addition to the film franchise’s universe, directed by Felix Barrett with illusions by Chris Fisher — a woman sitting behind me let out a loud profanity, followed by a chant-like “no no no no no.” A good portion of the audience at Chicago Shakespeare Theater let out loud yelps. A character we had been watching prepare dinner in one part of Fly Davis’s elaborate set suddenly popped up somewhere else. Yet she was still in full view in the kitchen, so in effect we could see someone in two places at once. It was perfectly timed sleight-of-hand, a magic trick conceived to awe and to spook by the illusions designer Chris Fisher, and months later I still puzzle about it.

Active Listening

As Ranevskaya in “The Cherry Orchard,” Nina Hoss pulled off something that’s a lot harder than it looks: She made the act of paying attention to others mesmerizing. When her character, the matriarch of a cash-strapped Russian family, wasn’t directly involved in a scene, Hoss usually sat among the audience members, watching the play with us. And since Benedict Andrews’s staging at St. Ann’s Warehouse was in-the-round, we could watch her watch. Hoss (an experienced stage actress who’s better known in the United States for “Tár”) certainly can act up a storm when given the opportunity — just check out her performance as the alcoholic lesbian scholar Eileen Lovborg in the Nia DaCosta movie “Hedda.” Yet she burrowed just as deep while doing seemingly little.

A correction was made on

Dec. 10, 2025

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the playwright of “Weather Girl.” He is Brian Watkins, not Bryan.

Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: When the Spotlight Shines Even Brighter. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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