AMERICAN THEATRE | The Year’s 10 Most Popular Posts, and 10 That Deserve Another Look

• She Loves Theatre, but Does Theatre Love Her Back? The heavy traffic for Billy McEntee’s excellent profile of obsessive New York City theatregoer Nicki Cochrane, which we published in May, is clearly a case of hate-reading as much as simply reading. It was clear from Billy’s piece that Cochrane is a piece of work, as much dreaded as admired for her constant presence in theatre audiences, with or without a ticket. But the abundant commentary about the piece, both on our site and on social media, brought out troubling claims that Cochrane has bullied, belittled, and generally immiserated many theatremakers and fellow theatregoers. “You cannot ‘love’ an art form and treat the people who make the art this way,” read a typical comment on our Facebook share (from Ann Marie Lonsdale). For what it’s worth, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis stuck to a different view of Cochrane his share of the piece.

• Gavin Creel Let the Sun Shine in Every Room. It was quite a year for memorials, but few deaths stung quite like the passing of Broadway triple threat Gavin Creel at the age of 48, of cancer, in September. The outpouring of love on social media—including a campaign led by Time Out NY’s Adam Feldman to get Broadway theatres to fully dim their lights in Creel’s honor—was joined by this moving tribute from his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, Will Swenson, who wrote of his late comrade that he “radiated light and kindness. He lived in a constant state of searching for joy.”

• The Top 10* Most-Produced Plays of the 2024-25 Season. This annual list, and its counterpart compendium of writers (below), is perennially most-read, for obvious reasons. As a snapshot of the field’s priorities—aesthetic, political, economic—this year’s list showed a field attracted to both relevance (What the Constitution Means to Me and POTUS returned for the second year running) and escapism (Dial M for Murder, The Play That Goes Wrong). It’s a dated snapshot, of course, as most of these season planning decisions were made many months if not years ago. Next fall’s seasons, now in the planning stages, will undoubtedly tell a different story.

• ‘Tommy,’ Can You Hear Me? I’m Not Gonna Take It. Alexandra Pierson penned this searching essay, which combined opinionating with reporting in what I consider a model of the form, about the recent Broadway revival of Des McAnuff’s popular staging of The Who’s iconic rock opera. Pierson was curious about, and ultimately frustrated by, the extent to which the new production did—and didn’t—reckon with the specifics of the lead character’s trauma. The bottom line, for Pierson, is that in 2024 if you call a character “deaf, dumb, and blind” onstage—even metaphorically or allegorically—you’ve named real disabilities that can’t simply be waved away. (Incidentally, Alli’s piece joins a long legacy of AT pieces challenging musical theatre to do better.)

• Life Imitates Art in Hampshire High’s Contested Staging of ‘The Prom.’ In another remarkable musical theatre story, Crystal Paul reported on the saga of an Illinois high school production of the Broadway musical about a prom canceled, then reinstated, over the attendance of a teen lesbian couple. Similarly, the show was first cancelled, then reinstated by Hampshire High administrators, allegedly for “safety” concerns—though, as Paul reported, it still had to overcome some puzzling, opaque restrictions around promotion and publicity. The show went on, against steep odds, in what now feels like a both an inspirational playbook and a cautionary tale for a time of increasing anti-LGBTQ+ backlash.

• How Aaron Tveit Made the Cut for ‘Sweeney Todd.’ We don’t do a ton of Broadway coverage, but I couldn’t resist this pitch from Carey Purcell, given that the casting of this youngish tenor in the role of one of musical theatre’s most psychotic characters felt…counterintuitive, shall we say. Going in as the replacement for Josh Groban in Tommy Kail’s large-scale revival, Tveit confessed trepidation but ultimately reasoned, “The material is so good that it holds up to big choices.”

• All the Lonely People. In some ways the centerpiece or conscience of our Spring edition, “The Audience Issue,” this speculative essay, or “modest proposal,” from playwright Sarah Ruhl laid out the clear health benefits of gathering with friends and strangers at the theatre, at a time when the nation faces a toxic epidemic of isolation. As she put it: “There is no prescription medicine for loneliness. It is instead a community, cultural, and structural problem, which the theatre addresses in its very DNA, without apparently meaning to.

• $10 Million Gift at 59E59 Means Rent-Free Runs for Producing Companies. At a time of contraction and retrenchment, people do love to read some good news. In this case, it was that the Elysabeth Kleinhans Theatrical Foundation, which runs a multi-theatre complex on New York City’s Upper East Side, stepped up its support so that the 30-plus productions that go up there each year could eliminate the space rental line from their budgets. Margarett Perry, artistic director of Twilight Theatre Company, which has produced at 59E59 and whose next production there will be Robert Schenkkan’s Old Cock, gushed about it: “For small theatre companies trying to produce new plays in New York City, it’s the best news we could possibly get.”

So those were 2024’s traffic champs. The following stories, selected by our staff and contributors, include a few from the print magazine (did I mention we have a print magazine?), as well as a number of online-only pieces. All of them deserve another look, not least because in their range and variety we think they help tell the rich, complicated story of 2024.

• Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias: How to Heal the High School Space. This deeply personal yet universal essay by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho, then our associate Chicago editor (now our digital editor), headlined last year’s training issue. In it, she explores the ways that trauma-informed teaching and inclusion is transforming some high school theatre spaces, which have too often been sites of harm and shaming.
• Exploring an Ensemble’s ‘Purpose.’ Chicago editor Jerald Raymond Pierce asked the tough questions about this auspicious Steppenwolf Theatre world premiere, a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that seemed to both consciously evoke the legacy of such Steppenwolf ensemble workouts as August: Osage County and carve out its own path, under director Phylicia Rashad. The result: a fascinating portrait of a play with something to say that was still finding the best way to say it. (It will premiere on Broadway in February 2025.)
• The Right (to) Protest. I confess that this story seemed to make everyone uncomfortable, and no one happy, when we published it in June. Charged with covering a controversy over the New York Theatre Workshop’s position on the Israel/Gaza war, as well as a pro-Palestinian protest by an actor during a Florida performance of The Chinese Lady, reporter Amelia Merrill managed a thoughtful, circumspect piece on a thorny topic that holds up remarkably well in hindsight. In speaking to Victor Cazares, a former NYTW resident playwright who went on an HIV meds strike to contest the theatre’s failure to call for a ceasefire, and Che’Li, the actor who was dismissed for her onstage activism, Merrill emerged with as many questions—about the role and efficacy of protest, about the tradeoffs between artistry and activism—as she did answers.
• Throwing Toys, Facing the Music: My Cathartic 2-Show Day. I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece like this before, but it’s not just novelty that made Lucas Papaelius’s first-person narrative so compelling. In detailing the day he spent watching two Broadway productions in whose developmental workshops he had played a non-trivial role but in which he was not ultimately cast, Lucas turned in a revelatory meditation on chance, collaboration, casting, and the ins and outs of an oxymoron we all take for granted: creative business.
• From Restless to Rooted: Reflecting on the 2024 TCG Conference. Our intrepid correspondent Amanda L. Andrei joined us for the TCG National Conference in Chicago in June, and turned in a strong, ambivalent rumination on what she saw and heard about the state of the theatre and its artists. Citing the Tagalog word for restless searching, “namamahay,” she anatomized both the unsettled feelings and seeds of hope and community in evidence in the conference’s plenaries and sessions.
• How the Wolf Survives. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this Production Notebook by writer-photographer Crystal Paul, which appeared in our Spring print issue, may count as the most overflowingly abundant story we published this year. In telling the tale of how the Mexican troupe La Liga Teatro Elástico built La Bestias Danzon, a puppet-beast ritual performance, with volunteers and artists at the Chicago International Puppet Festival, Paul didn’t just tell us about the piece’s unique materials and challenges—she showed us, in images as vivid as her text.
• When the Arts Become a Partisan Issue, We All Lose. Another piece, like Amelia Merrill’s above, that covered what felt like a hot-button issue at the time (in this case, in August), and which, read now with the heat of campaign season behind us and the future looming, feels as prescient and urgent as ever. Using Florida Gov. DeSantis’s veto of $32 million in arts and culture grants as a jumping-off point, Cristina Pla-Guzman spoke to arts leaders and educators about the Sunshine State’s increasingly chilly funding climate, what it portends for the nation and the field at large, and what can be done to fight back.
• The Legend of Zelda. The career of Arena Stage co-founder Zelda Fichandler was already deeply instructive for those who’d read about her or read her writings in American Theatre and other venues (I consider this one of the best pieces of writing about the theatre by anyone ever). But this year saw the publication of two essential books that print the legend, and are best read in tandem, as I did for my review: The Long Revolution, lovingly edited by Todd London, compiles her speeches and writings over the decades, showcasing her aspirations and frustrations and insights, while Mary B. Robinson’s extraordinary oral history, To Repair the World, tells the story of how her restless visions manifested and landed on others, as well as on her own life. Her wisdom about institution-building and -sustaining would be timely in any age, but seems especially well suited to our current era of embattlement.
• ‘Cabemos todos’: Teatristas Without Borders at L.A.’s Encuentro. Gabriela Furtado Coutinho flew to Los Angeles to cover this international festival of work by and for Latine and Latin American artists in the week immediately after the presidential election, and returned with heartening stories of community, of dialogue, and of forward-looking collaboration across differences of language, aesthetics, economics, and politics. As she put it, “Theatre at its best answers humanity’s distress calls, and Encuentro did just that. To be in a space surrounded by Latine theatre leaders wasn’t just healing or transformative; it was historic.”
• Equal Accessibility for Deaf and Hearing Audiences? It’s Possible! Brian Andrew Cheslik, who runs Deaf Austin Theatre, wrote an illuminating piece about staging, with co-director Michael Baron, an ASL/English production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, with Sandra Mae Frank in the lead. This story, published smack in the middle of the year, tidily sums up many of our pet themes, which we hope to return to as long as we’re publishing: accessibility, innovation, joy, and possibility.

Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.