The 2025 Best & Worst of Broadway/theater lists — Page 2

I know that I'm in the minority here, but I just couldn't stand Purpose. Getting to the end of that play felt like swimming through jello. That's the only show that I've seen that's popping up on these lists that I really don't think deserves to be there.

An aggregation and analysis: Top 10 Lists of Top 10 NYC Theater in 2025: Liberation is number 1

"Liberation” is by far the most critically acclaimed theater of 2025, featured in nine of the ten Top 10 lists below. Bess Wohl’s play about a woman’s liberation group in the 1970s is followed by “John Proctor Is the Villain,” “Purpose,” “Ragtime,” and “Vanya,” each of which were listed by five of the critics."

People Magazine’s Best Theater Performances of 2025:


1) The cast of PURPOSE

2) Sarah Snook, DORIAN GRAY

3) Jasmine Amy Rogers, BOOP

4) Sadie Sink, JOHN PROCTOR…

5) Jonathan Groff, JUST IN TIME

6) Jinkx Monsoon, OH, MARY!

7) Joshua Henry, RAGTIME

8) The women of LIBERATION

9) Kristin Chenoweth, THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

10) Nicholas Christopher, CHESS

The New Yorker:

Liberation

Vanya

The Picture of Dorian Gray

John Proctor is the Villain

Lobster

The Brothers Size

Ragtime

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella

The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire

Practice

ER765 said: "Is The Times not doing their standard “best of” list this year?"

Right? Super weird.

Star Tribune: 10 best Twin Cities theatre performances of 2025

^ Great list. With the exception of 7 and 10, I completely agree with it and every one of the misses except Chess, which was incredible. I also enjoyed their 2026 look ahead, with Fallen Angels being at the top of my list so far. Kelli O'Hara and Rose Byrne doing a Noël Coward play? Cannot wait.

Deadline’s Theater Critic Greg Evans Picks His Top 10 Broadway Shows Of 2025

1. Liberation

2. Ragtime

3. John Proctor is the Villain

4. Dead Outlaw

5. Operation Mincemeat

6. Marjorie Prime

7. Little Bear Ridge Road

8. Purpose

9. Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York)

10. Stranger Things: The First Shadow

Honorable Mentions:

Buena Vista Social Club, English, Just In Time, Oedipus, Waiting For Godot, Picture of Dorian Gray and the casts of Art (particularly James Corden), Call Me Izzy (Jean Smart, gripping), Floyd Collins (Jeremy Jordan, proving his Broadway mettle yet again) and Boop! (Jasmine Amy Rogers, rising high above the material).

Broadway 2025 Misses:

The Last Five Years — Starring Nick Jonas and a deserves-better Adrienne Warren. Five years? Nah, it only seemed that long.

Glengarry Glen Ross — It wasn’t terrible, but with a cast that included Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean and Bill Burr, the David Mamet classic should have soared to the rhythms of the playwright’s language.

Good Night, and Good Luck — It was a monster money-maker, but c’mon, Clooney could have played Betty Boop and audiences would have lined up for the privilege. Imagine if Clooney had chosen to use his star power to spotlight a genuinely worthy project — the way, say, Sarah Paulson did with Appropriate or Keanu Reeves is doing with Waiting For Godot — rather than the stuffy, moribund, on-the-nose hectoring that was Good Night, and Good Luck? The same, actually, could be said of Washington, whose somber performance in the modern-dress Othello did nothing that hasn’t been done in any number of Shakespeare in the Park’s lesser offerings.

The Queen of Versailles — Oh, please. It had nothing to do with Kristin Chenoweth’s kind words for a slain right-winger. The musical is just plain tedious, full of forgettable songs, muddled intentions and dumb-to-the-point-of-surreal ancien régime flashbacks. I’m still not sure if this musical even likes Jackie Siegel, its subject-turned-investor, and I was paying attention. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, and its not about gilded ambition or lousy parenting or money can’t buy happiness. Maybe its about deep pockets and artistic compromise and wanting to be liked so intensely that you lose any chance for a Rose’s Turn all your own. And maybe someone, someday, will make a musical about it.

Chess — While audiences seem to like it, reviews were mostly mixed. Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher are certainly and without a doubt very, very loud (except, oddly enough, at the exact moment you want volume — Tveit gets all but drowned out by the orchestra during the big, indecipherable “One Night In Bangkok.”). Mostly this revival of the 1980s flop from Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice, with Danny Strong’s new book crammed with inelegant topical references, seems to exist mostly to give reviewers the chance to offer some variation of “close, but no checkmate.”