1. Dame Edna: The Royal Tour (Wilbur Theatre). Rodgers and Hammerstein were prescient: there is nothing like a dame, at least nothing like Dame Edna Everage, the Aussie housewife turned "megastar" who this year for the first time bestowed herself on Boston. The brainchild of 67-year-old Australian writer/performer Barry Humphries, Dame Edna, shooting daggers (through Elton John specs) and her mouth off at the Wilbur, showed why she has been a gender-bent grail in England for decades.

2. The Glass Menagerie (Hartford Stage, presented by the American Repertory Theatre). Elizabeth Ashley and Andrew McCarthy spearheaded Michael Wilson’s ferocious and acerb yet delicate staging of the Tennessee Williams classic, with Anne Dudek a particularly fine Laura and Ashley ably waggling jonquils as the indomitable elder belle of Blue Mountain.

3. Hamlet (Wilbur Theatre). John Caird’s stately Royal National Theatre production of the Bard’s tragedy of a failed hit man was like a stately dark suit hung on a performance it was a privilege to witness. The English actor Simon Russell Beale, an unconventionally disheveled and pudgy teddy-bear prince, nonetheless proved a brilliant Hamlet who made us understand utterly what it is to be so self-aware and yet so self-sundered that action is impossible.

4. James Joyce’s The Dead (Huntington Theatre Company). Richard Nelson & Shaun Davey’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award–winning musical built on Joyce’s exquisite gem of short fiction opened at the Huntington on September 12. A chamber banquet of feeling as warmly set out as the goose and ham on the Misses Morkans’ holiday table, it proved a convivial yet mordant reassurance that there is still beauty in what narrator Gabriel Conroy, seemingly with an eye toward today, called "a less beautiful time."

5. The Laramie Project (Boston Theatre Works). Jason Southerland & Nancy Curran Willis’s intimate staging of the documentary theater piece cobbled by Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project from 200 interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyoming, in the wake of the fatal 1998 gay-bashing of Matthew Shepard was a triumph for Boston small theater. A compassionate attempt by its New York creators to probe the heart of a Western cowboy town, the play presents more than 60 characters, and all were deftly portrayed here by a mostly non-Equity cast.

6. The Last Letter (Market Theater). Frederick Wiseman’s almost unbearable staging, adapted from a chapter of Russian writer Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate for the Comédie-Française, was exquisitely performed by that iconic troupe’s doyenne, Catherine Samie. The piece takes the form of an acutely detailed and unsentimental letter written to a son by a Ukrainian Jewish woman who knows she and her compatriots are about to "vanish like the Aztecs" at the hands of the Nazis. The performance, chiseled, intelligent, and poignant beyond tears, was another it was a privilege to see.

7. Mother Courage (American Repertory Theatre). Hungarian director János Szász helmed a visually and aurally stunning production of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece, in which the itinerant businesswoman of the title drags her cart and children through the Thirty Years War that enveloped Europe in the 17th century. The staging radiated an Eastern European æsthetic that was both physically rigorous and stylized. And cast against type, ART stalwart Karen MacDonald (whose noteworthy 2001 turns also included a saucy, stiletto-heeled Maria in Commonwealth Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and a formidable Emilia in the ART’s Othello) proved a herculean Courage.

8. Twelfth Night (Commonwealth Shakespeare Company). Free Shakespeare on Boston Common came into its own this past summer with CSC’s sixth and best offering, a staging of the Bard’s Illyria-set comedy of misdirected love. Steven Maler’s production, spearheaded by Will LeBow’s bad-lounge-act Feste, caught the longing that swims through the play like a shark. And when Richard McElvain’s Hunter Thompsony Sir Toby Belch and his questionable crew held sway, it was also drop-dead funny.

9. Sunday in the Park with George (Lyric Stage Company of Boston). Stephen Sondheim & James Lapine’s Pulitzer-winning 1985 musical about the obsessive art ethic embodied by 19th-century French pointillist painter Georges Seurat had never had a major Boston production until director Spiro Veloudos and set designer Janie E. Howland undertook to pull off its notable coup de théâtre, the live re-creation of Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Given the theater’s technical limits, they did an impressive job. And though Veloudos is no fan of subtlety, the difficult work was well sung, especially by Maryann Zschau as Seurat’s pointedly dubbed mistress, Dot.

10. The Vagina Monologues (Wilbur Theatre). When Eve Ensler performed her own gynecological smash, an Obie-winning collection of riffs based with interviews with some 200 woman about their sexuality and private parts, it proved to be more than a cause célèbre that has raised millions of dollars to stop violence against women. It was sidesplitting, community-building, orgasmic theater, with playwright Ensler’s performance as bold and as tight as her little black dress.

If only I had 11: The Weir (New Repertory Theatre). Rick Lombardo’s staging of Irish writer Conor McPherson’s award-winning evocation of loneliness and the power of storytelling was far livelier than the long-running one I saw in London. This is an artful play in which not much happens, though many a pint is hoisted as four Irishmen and a haunted woman visitor swap lyrical ghost stories in a rural Irish pub. There were particularly rich turns by seasoned Boston Celtic thespians Richard McElvain and Billy Meleady.

More great performances: Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst, still fabulous after all these years; Andrea Martin in Betty’s Summer Vacation, a dexterous comic whirlwind; Ricky Jay in Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, a philosopher cardsharp who makes trickery an art form; and David Patrick Kelly in Enrico IV, a bravura actor playing an anguished if no less bravura one.

Issue Date: December 27, 2001 - January 3, 2002

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