Theatreboard Top 5 of 2023

Someone in a tree I thought there wasn't any point because so few people will have voted for any operas or ballets in comparison with musicals & plays that my vote wouldn't get anywhere. Also I'd be voting as more for particular casts rather than for productions as a whole, whereas this poll is more about productions.

My top five of the year are
1- Accidental Death of an Anarchist - Theatre Royal Haymarket
2- Village Idiot - Stratford East
3- Ulster American - Riverside Studios
4- Standing at the sky's edge- National Theatre
5- Dancing at Lughnasa- National Theatre

1. Bat Out Of Hell
2. Oklahoma!
3. Crazy For You
4. Bake Off- The Musical
5. Cabaret

No surprises for my top show for this year! I had a lovely 6 weeks of it back in town this year, I just wish Bat would go back out in tour again!

1.Pandemonium
2.Phaedra
3.Wozzeck ROH
4.Rheingold ROH
5.Old Friends

1. Sunset Boulevard
2. Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends
3. Guys + Dolls
4. A Streetcar Named Desire
5. Accidental Death of an Anarchist

My top 5 of 2023:

1. Operation Mincemeat (Fortune Theatre)
2. The Little Big Things (@sohoplace)
3. Standing at the Sky's Edge (National)
4. Dear England (Prince Edward)
5. Ride (Southwark Playhouse)

1. Groundhog Day
2. The Lehman Trilogy
3. Standing at the Sky’s Edge
4. Sunset Boulevard
5. From the Rehearsal Room Live at The Savoy
with Hadley Fraser & Ramin Karimloo

1. Sunset Boulevard
2.Next To Normal
3. In Dreams
4. Bonnie & Clyde
5. Bloody Elle

I just can't narrow it down to 5, so I'd like to give half a point to 10, please:

SUNSET BOULEVARD was incredible in every way. The video screen closeup Van Hove approach has never been more called for than in a musical about the power of the close-up. Jamie Lloyd dragged Tom Francis out of that anonymous body bag and made him a towering star, and Nicole Scherzinger's ott performance and turbocharged desire were absolutely overwhelmingly entertaining!;

Sheridan Smith gave the funniest and the most relatable female performance of the year in SHIRLEY VALENTINE;

Daniel Rigby gave the funniest male performance of the year in ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST;

Best musical ensembles of the year were tied, for me, between NEXT TO NORMAL, which had me weeping buckets, and GUYS AND DOLLS, which was rousing and hilarious from first to last. Half a point to each lol;

Best dramatic performance by a male, for me, was Francis Lovehall in RED PITCH, who embodied the best and worst of humanity all at once, without ever striking a false note;

Best dramatic performance by a female, for me, was Kate O'Flynn in ALL OF IT at the Royal Court, where she lived a whole ordinary life from cradle to the grave in one unforgettable hour;

ULSTER AMERICAN proved David Ireland's Cyprus Avenue was no fluke, expanding his probing of Northern Ireland identities to include the perspectives and identities of careless outsiders. From the opening, in which Woody Harrelson bandies around the slur "fenian" cluelessly, to the moment Louisa Harland shows up, casting aside her softhearted Orla McCool Derry Girls character to be hilariously anything-but-cool, this show is funny, dramatic, topical and revealing in equal measure;

And my last two top shows of the year both featured Patsy Ferran, with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE revealing Blanche Dubois to be a pretty normal person just trying to exist in an emotionally corrupted and damaged world, and PYGMALION at the Old Vic suggesting a chasm in the ways people's brains work, with Ferran's all-feeling Eliza Doolittle unable to connect with Bertie Carvel's ebullient yet neurodivergent on-the-spectrum Professor Higgins. Carvel was remarkable in the role.

So that's my ten.

PS: Of note also this year were the flawless Rodgers and Hammerstein Concert, "My Favourite Year," the equally flawless Sondheim concert, "Old Friends," Ruth Wilson's 24 hour improv show at the Young Vic (of which I caught a thrilling 8 hours), "The Second Woman," the exquisite "Dancing at Lughnasa" production at the National, the thoughtful and comic "Marjorie Prime" at the Menier, with an emotive Anne Reid, Beverley Knight killing it in "Sylvia" again, Mark Gatiss and Johnny Flynn so perfectly becoming Gielgud and Burton, again at the National, Adrian Schiller being torn apart by compromising choices in "The White Factory" at Marylebone Theatre, the astonishing set and ensemble of "House of Bernarda Alba," again at the National, the ever-changing casts of "Cabaret," with Aimee Lou-Wood an exceptional comedienne of a Sally Bowles, Joseph Fiennes beautifully becoming Gareth Southgate in "Dear England," with Will Close making the most of every single line of his hilarious Harry Kane by appearing to do the absolute least, and the wonderful, marvellous, modest and uber-talented Haydn Gwynne giving us one more affecting character in the "Great British Bake off Musical."

Goodbye 2023. You were a horrible year, except at the theatre.

My top 5

1. My Neighbour Totoro (Barbican)
2. Marjorie Prime (Menier Chocolate Theatre)
3. Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Theatre Royal Hammersmith)
4. A View from the Bridge (Chichester)
5. The Phantom of the Opera with Earl Carpenter (His Majesty's Theatre)

Runners up
Old Friends (Gielgud Theatre)
Best of Enemies (NT Live)
4000 Miles (Chichester)
Next to Normal (Donmar Warehouse)
Mother Goose (Chichester)
Guys and Dolls (Bridge Theatre)
Meetings (Orange Tree Theatre)
Frank and Percy (Other Palace Theatre)
Operation Mincemeat (Fortune Theatre)
Assassins (Chichester)
The House of Bernarda Alba (National Theatre)
The Lord of the Rings (Watermill Theatre)
Dear England (Prince Edward Theatre)
Groundhog Day (Old Vic)
Ghosts (Sam Wanamaker)
Cymbeline (RSC)
Frozen (Theatre Royal Drury Lane)
The Motive and the Cue (National Theatre)
Newsies (Troubadour Theatre)
Ulster American (Riverside Studios)

And the worst
Aspects of Love (Lyric Theatre)

Also left at the interval
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Watermill Theatre)
Edward I (Winchester Great Hall) - an okay production that I wish I could hear from the back of the audience

Well what a theatre-going year that was! Thank you to the over 100 board members who posted. We got over 510 nominations for shows, across a range of 144 different plays. musicals, opera, dance, events and concerts - a significant increase over last year. And it’s clear that 2023 was very definitely the Year of the Musical. Normally in terms of overall votes, plays get about the same number of votes overall as musicals, but because a bigger range of plays are listed compared to musicals, the ‘average’ play gets fewer votes.

Not this year! Overall musicals got about 310 votes but plays just over 180 - the first time since we first did this in 2018 that we’ve seen that level of difference. That means that for a large part of December it wasn’t clear whether a play was going to make into the overall Top 5, and indeed it took Hogmanay’s votes for a play to squeeze in to fifth position overall.

So without further ado and to nobody’s surprise if they’ve been following this thread, the Theatreboard Favourite Show of the Year is…. Sunset Boulevard! With 45.16 votes this was a runaway victory - the only other show in previous years to have dominated so much was Anything Goes in the weird post-pandemic year of 2021 when lots of us seemed to be in the mood for something light and fluffy. Not sure what Sunset Blvd. this year says about how we are all feeling…

The next four musicals were as follows:
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends (Gielgud) 34
Next to Normal (Donmar) 31.33
Standing at the Sky’s Edge (NT) 24
And then a two-way tie between Operation Mincemeat (Fortune) and Guys and Dolls (Bridge) with 18.83.

Mincemeat’s achievement is significant given that it is its third consecutive appearance in this annual list, after it got 6.5 in (post pandemic) 2021 and 8.83 in 2022 whilst still in its Fringe incarnations.

On the Plays side, it was all much closer (and I’ve had to redraft this post several times during 31st December), but in the end the Theatreboard Favourite Play of the Year is Dear England (NT) with 20.83. I’m not sure many of would have guessed this time last year that a play about Gareth Southgate would have topped this list, even with James Graham’s reputation!

Below that, very closely came
A Streetcar Named Desire (Almeida) just .5 behind at 20.33
The Motive and the Cue (NT) on 18.83
A Little Life (Pinter) at 12.5
Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Haymarket) with 11.33

Top Fringe show this year was La Cage aux Folles at the Open Air Theatre which got 9.83, and the top non-London show was Chichester’s Assassins with 5. It was another good year for the NT - in addition to the three listed in the Top 5s, Phaedra, Grenfell, Infinite Life, Marjorie Prime, Crucible, Dixon and Daughters, Ocean at the End of the Lane, Lehman Trilogy all getting votes…

Big names that we might have expected to appear that seem to have disappointed include The Pillowman (1), Andrew Scott’s Vanya (1) and “Chuckles” Branagh’s Lear which nobody listed. And given the hype and level of buzz, who’d have thought that Lyonesse would also end up with zero?

Remember it’s all just a bit of fun - it’s always interesting to see what different people really liked, and as I said before, it’s nice to see the smaller shows which are never going to top the lists get a callout at this time of year. See you in twelve months?