E-Mail This Article to a Friend Best on the boards Local theaters that made the cut in 2004 BY CAROLYN CLAY

Here’s the best of what trod the local theater stages in 2004, with a visit to Broadway thrown in.

1) Best of Broadway: Elaine Stritch at Liberty (Wilbur Theatre). Best? Hell, Elaine Stritch, who has been understudy to Ethel Merman, muse to Noël Coward, and fuel to Stephen Sondheim, is Broadway, and the 79-year-old entertainer’s one-woman show, in which she tells her life story and sings the songs that made her famous, exuding toughness and heartache in equal degree, defines all that is fabulous in the Fabulous Invalid.

2) Best Import: The Abbey Theatre production of The Playboy of the Western World (Wilbur Theatre). John Millington Synge’s tragicomic account of a lad who becomes a hero in the wilds of County Mayo by boasting of patricide remains a masterpiece, even if it no longer provokes the riots it did upon its 1907 debut at the Abbey. In artistic director Ben Barnes’s Abbey Centenary production, Synge’s impossibly lyrical evocation of primitive humanity still resonated, and what a joy it was to hear those lilting cadences roll from the Irish mouths that are their natural habitat.

3) Best Shakespeare: The Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor (Trinity Repertory Company). Trinity Rep wrapped long arms around the Bard this season. It warmed up last winter with Kevin Moriarty’s madcap Merry Wives, which was set in a modern apartment complex and featured, along with cream pies and Cyndi Lauper tunes, Fred Sullivan Jr.’s aging-playboy Falstaff — the Bard’s "gross watery pumpkin" as Hugh Hefner hipster. Then came the troupe’s vigorous, soundly acted assault on Shakespeare’s Henriad: Moriarty’s stark staging of the lyrical Richard II, dripping blood and religious allusion; Amanda Dehnert’s roistering Brechtian barnstorm of a Henry IV (a conflation of Parts I and II); and outgoing artistic director Oskar Eustis’s pointed modern-dress rendering of Henry V.

4) Best New Script: Sonia Flew (Huntington Theatre Company). The inauguration of the warm, elegant new Virginia Wimberly Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion with Melinda Lopez’s warm, elegantly written Sonia Flew was a roundly pleasing event. The play, which spins backward from September 11 and the familial crisis it creates in the life of a Cuban-American woman living in Minneapolis to her hasty evacuation as a teenager from Havana in the wake of the Castro revolution, was given a lively, well-acted production helmed by Nicholas Martin on a set by Adam Stockhausen that brought out the poetry in the piece. Across town at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, John Kuntz’s eerie-comic ensemble piece, Jasper Lake, and Kate Snodgrass’s nuanced treatment of siblings sorting through a shared past, The Glider, also gleamed, with Snodgrass’s piece spiffily mounted and convincingly acted by Laura Latreille, Birgit Huppuch, and Kimberly Parker Green.

5) Best New Spins on the Classics: The Miser and Oedipus (American Repertory Theatre). Director Dominique Serrand and the Minneapolis-based Théâtre de la Jeune Lune teamed up with the ART to produce a scabrous, expertly physical staging of Molière’s 17th-century classic about a ruthless skinflint that stinted on merriment but was positively spendthrift with bitterness and rage. Presided over by Steven Epp’s explosive wraith of a Harpagon, it was also very, if cruelly, funny. And ART artistic director Robert Woodruff helmed a desolate, soaring treatment of the 2500-year-old tragedy by Sophocles about the Theban ruler trapped by Fate into becoming Freud’s poster boy. Abetted by Evan Ziporyn’s lushly dissonant East-meets-West score, the politically reverberant production took that lemon of most productions, the Chorus, and made lemonade.

6) Best Sondheim: A Little Night Music (Lyric Stage Company) and Company (SpeakEasy Stage Company). The year brought two well-sung revivals of Stephen Sondheim musicals celebrating connection but laced with mordancy. Spiro Veloudos brought out the poignancy in Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler’s sonorous 1973 transposition of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of the Summer Night, and there was top-notch warbling by Maryann Zschau, Christopher Chew, Leigh Barrett, Drew Poling, Andrea C. Ross, and, best of all, Bobbie Steinbach as a magnificently gritty dowager. To inaugurate the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion, Paul Daigneault helmed a soulful and assured revival of Sondheim & George Furth’s landmark 1970 "concept" show about marital compromise whirling around a relationship-ambivalent Manhattan bachelor played by Michael Mendiola. Among the cast, Kerry Dowling and Stephanie Carlson contributed sweetness to counter Elaine Theodore’s bravura matrimonial meltdown and Nancy E. Carroll’s vodka stinger of a turn on "The Ladies Who Lunch."

7) Best Musical Not by Sondheim: Kiss Me Kate (North Shore Music Theatre). Alan Coats directed a polished production of Cole Porter’s sophisticated and delicious 1948 backstage riff on The Taming of the Shrew that featured crystalline soprano Rachel deBenedet both looking and sounding stunning as a feisty, furniture-kicking Lilli Vanessi. Julie Taymor’s Asian and African contributions to The Lion King are spectacular and poetic, and it’s hard to resist the potty-tongued Brechtian antics of Urinetown. But they don’t make ’em like Cole Porter any more, and the NSMT production was a smart, old-fashioned delight.

8) Best Treatment of Issues: Yellowman and Permanent Collection (New Repertory Theatre). Lois Roach directed Dael Orlander Smith’s Yellowman, a lyrical evocation of racism within racism in the American South told in alternating monologues by African-American childhood sweethearts embodied by an effervescent Adrienne D. Williams as an ambitious dark-skinned woman and a lithe Dorian Christian Baucum as her "high-yella" inamorata. And Adam Zahler, directing a crackling Clark Jackson and Benjamin Evett, made the taut most of Thomas Gibbons’s polarized examination of artistic versus racial concerns, Permanent Collection.

9) Best Road Trips: I Am My Own Wife (Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre) and Caroline, or Change (Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre). Listen up, local theaters. Someone needs to mount Doug Wright’s meticulous one-person play rooted in the fascinating life of German transvestite with an exacting passion for collectibles Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (played on Broadway with genteel precision by Jefferson Mays), who managed to dodge both the Nazis and the Stasi while wearing a dress. We also need to see Tony Kushner & Jeanine Tesori’s riveting socio-political songfest about a motherless Jewish boy and an African-American maid set in dawn-of-civil-rights Louisiana. And if Nicholas Martin knows Tonya Pinkins, whose performance in the title role of Caroline was one of the toughest and most wrenching things I’ve ever seen, could he call her?

10) Best Performances: Julie White in Bad Dates (Huntington Theatre Company); Vincent Ernest Siders in Our Lady of 121st Street (SpeakEasy Stage Company); Stephanie Roth-Haberle in Oedipus (ART); Andrea Martin in The Rose Tattoo (Huntington Theatre Company); Steven Epp and Karen MacDonald in The Miser (ART); Jonno Roberts in Much Ado About Nothing (Commonwealth Shakespeare Company); Michael T. Weiss in Burn This (Huntington Theatre Company); and the ensemble of Gem of the Ocean led by the monumental Phylicia Rashad (Huntington Theatre Company).