The Best Theater Moments of 2025, So Far

The theater is more than the sum of its parts; it is also the parts themselves. As I began to look back at the first half of 2025, I found myself primarily recalling those parts: the scene, not the script; the props, not the production. Here are 10 such moments, some sad, some funny, some furious, most all at once.

Audra’s Turn at the Tonys

“Rose’s Turn,” the 11 o’clock number to end them all, is often described as a nervous breakdown in song. It was certainly that when I first saw Audra McDonald slay it in the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy.” But by the time she performed it on the Tony Awards months later, it was no longer just a personal crisis: a mother grieving the lost opportunities her daughter now enjoys. The lyric “Somebody tell me, when is it my turn?” now rang out with greater depth and anger as McDonald, the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway, invoked the lost opportunities of generations of talented Black women behind her.

Read our review of “Gypsy” and our feature about “Rose’s Turn.”

A Multiplicity of Greenspans

Though he was the subject of the recent Off Broadway play “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” most people don’t. Nor will Greenspan’s astonishing quadruple performance in the Off Broadway production of “Prince Faggot,” Jordan Tannahill’s shocker about a gay heir to the British throne, help pin him down: He’s that shape-shifty. A bossy palace publicist, a discreet royal servant, even the possibly gay Edward II are among his perfectly etched characters. And the monologue in which he supposedly plays himself? Indescribable (at least here).

Read our review of the play.

A Face and a Name to Remember

Now it can be told. In the Broadway show “Smash,” based on the television melodrama about a Marilyn Monroe musical, the big number (“Let Me Be Your Star”) was deeply undersold in the opening scene. That was a marvelous feint because, at the end of Act I, to bring the curtain down with a huge surprise bang, out came Bella Coppola, as a suddenly promoted assistant choreographer, performing the same song when no one else could. Can you oversell something? Turns out, no.