Best Chicago theater of 2023: From ‘Tommy’ to a soul opera, our top 10 shows chosen from many

Artistic excellence abounded in Chicago theater even as 2023 proved fiscally and structurally challenging for many companies and artists. Here’s my annual top-10 list of the year, along with 10 more titles that also deserved a spot. I’ve only considered productions first created in 2023, otherwise the extraordinarily well-sung touring production of “Les Miserables” would be here too, to name just one.

But there are some remarkable shows on this list. Some are still playing locally; some have plans to move to Broadway. This was an especially fine year for musicals but over the last 12 months, I’ve also admired everything from revivals to daring new works.

1. “The Who’s Tommy” at the Goodman Theatre: Director Des McAnuff long has been a Broadway wizard but Chicago learned last summer that his heart resides in “Tommy,” The Who’s existential howl of boomer anger from 1969 at the psychological fallout from their emotionally repressed parents. The Goodman’s revival was a pinball thriller, a dynamic new staging that took full advantage of video technology not available for the original. David Korins’ expressionistic set design, Peter Nigrini’s explosive projections and Lorin Latarro’s astonishing choreography combined with Pete Townshend’s music to reinvent “Tommy” for a new generation. Broadway is next for spring 2024.

2. “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire: For decades, Marriott Theatre has staged its own in-the-round productions of relatively recent Broadway hits, but director Jessica Fisch’s beautiful “Beautiful” went far beyond the everyday. There was a star, the superb Kaitlyn Davis, who really played piano throughout the show, just like Carole King, and a supporting cast filled with formidable performers who were determined to bring a level of emotional intensity and truth that went beyond the original production. Most important of all, the swirling, fresh staging caught the intensity and the stress of America’s music and lyric-writing factories where young people competed to write the next hit that would form the soundtrack of American lives. Marriott never has produced a better show.

3. “The Cherry Orchard” at the Goodman Theatre: Unsurprisingly, Robert Falls’ choice for his final show at the Goodman Theatre, following a whopping 35-year run as artistic director, was the greatest play ever written about the pain of leaving something you deeply love — maybe also the opportunity, but mostly the searing pain. The meta aptness of the Chekhov title was not the whole appeal of a witty and deeply resonant production that felt like a meditation on one of Chicago’s most formidable artistic legacies, filled to the brim with joy, sadness and the palpable intensity of Chicago actors. Anyone who knows and feels what Falls’ Goodman career had meant to this city won’t quickly forget his exit.

4. “Once” at Writers Theatre: This 2012 Broadway musical, featuring music by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová and written for the stage by Enda Walsh, is the gold standard for how to adapt movies into musicals. It distilled the cinematic plot down to its humanistic essence and focused on what really matters in the theater: love, family and feelings, our shared awareness of mortality and our collective fear of change. At Writers Theatre, director Katie Spelman and her lead actors Dana Saleh Omar and Matt Mueller seemed to know every inch of its emotional landscape and together lovingly forged an innovative and intensely beautiful staging, taking full example of the intimacy at their disposal. “How’s your heart?” asks Da. Beating fast in Glencoe.

5. “Birthday Candles” at Northlight Theatre: Rescued from a poor (and poorly received) New York production, writer Noah Haidle’s quirky but beautifully personal drama about our lifelong search for patterns in the universe and our resilience in the face of the compounding losses of life was given a beautiful new local staging by Northlight Theatre. Director Jessica Thebus’s tear-jerking production, which starred the real-life couple of Kate Fry and Tim Kane, was beautifully cast, acted with great generosity and honesty, and offered palpable balm to Northlight’s loyal audience. Here was a lovely tribute to the playwright’s mom and, more broadly, to the good and hearty people of the Midwest, survivors every one. Audiences loved every minute.

6. “Swing State” at the Goodman Theatre: Playwright Rebecca Gilman’s modestly scaled play, the latest work of the leading, living bard of the Upper Midwest, was set in Wisconsin and explored themes of environmentalism, mental health, opioid abuse, trucking, policing and even the consequences of hollowing out small, mutual supportive communities and turning them into repositories for Dollar Generals and Kwik Trips. “Swing State,” which later moved off-Broadway, struck me as the first American drama to really grasp with how much broad swathes of America changed during the pandemic, along with noting the despair, even panic, that so many mostly silent Americans have about the divisiveness in an atrophying country, where once-shared values have swung far to the extremes.

7. “The Gospel at Colonus” at Court Theatre: Co-directors Mark J.P. Hood and Charles Newell contributed a gorgeously produced, deeply inclusive and richly sung new staging of a long-beloved, choral-infused work (by Bob Telson and Lee Breuer) drawing rich connections between the spiritual longing felt by the ancient Greeks and the gospel-infused Pentecostal tradition so influentially nurtured just a mile or two from this very theater. The stars, Kelvin Roston Jr., Ariana Burks and Aeriel Williams, were as spectacular as the intensity was palpable. The show’s Chicago premiere was followed by a hugely successful run at the Getty Villa Museum in California.

8. “Twelfth Night” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater: The fine young Chicago director Tyrone Phillips made his debut at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and impressed greatly with a relentlessly optimistic, Caribbean-themed “Twelfth Night” rich in musicality and clarity and focused on the show’s exploration of the fragility of love. Phillips did a very shrewd cut of the famed comedy, bringing it home at just under two hours while also adding a soundtrack of tunes by Bob Marley and others while promoting rich audience interaction. Add in a willing and skilled cast and you had a show everyone left smiling. “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” indeed.

9. “Run, Bambi, Run” at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre: An honorary member of the Chicago theater community — it’s only 90 minutes away — Wisconsin’s leading theater staged a populist, true-crime musical about a woman seemingly framed for a murder she did not commit and forced to dodge TV cameras as she ran for her life. Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Eric Simonson, composer Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes and director Mark Clements reminded their audience of the huge power of the local story: many in the audience remembered the real “Bambi” Bembenek, former cop, sometime bunny at the Playboy resort in Lake Geneva, and escapee from Wisconsin’s Taycheedah Correctional Institution. May this “Bambi” run again.

10. “The Factotum” by Lyric Opera of Chicago: This new opera from Will Liverman and DJ King Rico, played to a rapturous response at the sold-out Harris Theatre, by reimagining the definition of opera not in some elite, formalist fashion but by setting the experience on so-called operatic voices while encompassing R&B, soul, funk, hip-hop and gospel and moving the action of Gioachino Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” to Chicago’s South Side. In so doing, it created a rare local resonance for a company better known for its role in the international operatic waters. Sure, more work was still to be done, but this was still a singular cultural event that came with the kind of lush, Chicago-style soundscape that declared Liverman the real world-class deal, rooted right here in town.

Ten more fine shows, in alphabetical order: “Blues for an Alabama Sky” by Remy Bumppo; “Cabaret” by Porchlight Music Theatre, “Boop! The Musical” CIBC Theatre; “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” at the Studebaker Theater; “Eurydice” at Writers Theatre in Glencoe; ”Oh, the Places You’ll Glow!” by Second City e.t.c.; “Port of Entry” by Albany Park Theater Project, “Rock of Ages” at Mercury Theater; “Toni Stone” at the Goodman Theatre; “A View From the Bridge” by Shattered Globe Theatre.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com