The New Year's Eve Nutcracker

I was feeling a little Nutcracker'ed out this Christmas (I'd seen it twice so far), but I nevertheless settled into my seat at Boston Ballet on New Year's Eve for a third go round with this seasonal favorite (largely for the sake of the partner unit, who somehow had missed the other trips).

And believe it or not, I was glad I went.  The Ballet had advertised their New Year's Eve version - the first ever - would have a few twists, and these all proved good fun.  The basic idea was to goof around a little with the holiday chestnut (Luciana Voltolini as a snowflake, at left), to make it more of a party; Santa Claus (Robert Kretz) and Drosselmeier's dancing bear (Paul Craig), for instance, kept intruding on various scenes for a quick, scenery-chewing pirouette (which actually proved quite a bit funnier than it sounds).  And in general the company members - many of whom are superb physical comedians - were quick with little pratfalls and bits of comic business; the whole thing felt delightfully fizzy (without tipping too far into parody).

Plus Clara and Fritz were played by adults - Joseph Gatti got to ham it up as the bratty Fritz, while Misa Kuranaga took over as Clara.  Kuranaga's presence allowed the Ballet to experiment with an idea I've suggested before - that The Nutcracker should climax with Clara "growing up" a bit, and participating in the famous "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" (other ballet companies have toyed with this idea for some time).  Here, Kuranaga simply took over the solo, and danced it as beautifully as she has done before.  To my mind, this is an opportunity for a more original pas de deux between Clara and her Cavalier (or perhaps even a threesome with Ms. Plum!), but it was still intriguing to see the Ballet at least dip its toe in these more sophisticated emotional waters.

The company made other, fitting gestures toward the New Year - the whole evening ended with blasts of glitter into the audience, for instance, while the orchestra played "Auld Lang Syne" (and the crowd basically went wild).  These First Nighters weren't the usual ballet audience, btw - which led to loud gasps and various sounds of awe at the level of the Ballet's dancing.  Clearly many of these folks hadn't expected the show to be quite this good. In the lobby at intermission, in fact, the operative word seemed to be "amazing" - I must have heard it half a dozen times.  Which kind of made the Ballet's achievement fresh for me, too.  I had the feeling I was witnessing the start of a new Boston tradition - which was a great way to kick off the New Year.

Elevator Repair Service rips off Andy Kaufman!

If you doubt me, watch this. (Sorry, embedding disabled!) Gosh, I wonder if Andy also did The Sun Also Rises?

The Duke and the Dude duke it out in their respective Grits.

I remember quite clearly seeing the original True Grit as a boy; one rainy day my mother took the whole family to Radio City Music Hall to take it in as a treat. This was back at the fading end of that movie palace's heyday - although the Rockettes still danced after every picture, and the organ came up from the floor like something out of Close Encounters; to me, the movie was almost a sideshow to the theatre itself. (I remember demanding we take a seat at the top of the third balcony, just because we could, but as this was some seven flights up, everyone else insisted on at most the second balcony.)

I recall the movie pretty well, too; I wasn't really that into Bonanza or any of the TV westerns, and I didn't have much connection to John Wayne, because I'd never seen any of his early, enjoyable films. Nor, as I was only about ten, did I key into the movie's streak of reactionary nostalgia. Instead it struck me that, like most Westerns, True Grit had a good, violent beginning and a dull middle and then a really good, violent end that featured a great scene in which Justin Bieber look-alike Kim Darby was trapped in a rattlesnake pit. Indeed, I still recall the startling shot in which Justin (I mean Kim!) tumbled back from the recoil of her pistol and disappeared into the yawning hole behind her - which I immediately remembered was a literal snake pit.

I also think that somewhere, the thematic import of this event - that achieving vengeance had thrown Darby into a kind of moral stinkhole from which she would have to be rescued - registered with me, too. So I was surprised when I didn't feel the same shock of thematic recognition in the Coen Brothers' highly praised remake of this hoary old potboiler.

I was doubly shocked, in fact, because after years of ironic, nihilistic wittiness, the Coens got religion a few years back (at left), and have developed a specialty in dark Old Testament dramas set in dying landscapes. Thus, with its themes of judgment and retribution, I expected True Grit to be a true sib to No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man (a movie that literally imported the Book of Job into the American suburbs). Together these films resuscitated the brothers' artistic bona-fides, and gave one hope that real ideas could still prove commercially viable on the American movie screen.

But I'm afraid True Grit can't really stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those fascinating flicks. In the end, it's just a remake, with a few comically-grotesque Coen touches and a lot of mannered dialogue (lifted straight from the source book, by Charles Portis, where I think it's meant more ironically than it's rendered here), but little of the thematic spine that held together No Country and Serious Man. I'm afraid instead we'll have to store Grit on the same shelf as Coen misfires like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty. It's at the top of that shelf, I'd say, but it's still on the same shelf.

And just as an side, the existence of those obvious tiers in the Coens' output has always suggested to me a fascinating critical question. I know the Brothers C insist they operate as an artistic unit, but let's talk turkey for a moment, and finally ask the question - who has been responsible for what over the course of their joint career? I mean their output has been so variable, the question all but asks itself. It's hard for me to believe that even between brothers (especially between brothers!) every decision can be 50/50, so - who came up with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and A Serious Man? And on the other hand, who suggested The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers?

In general, I think a rough division suggests itself between the Coens' more original works and their homages.  The "originals" are generally better - it's when they're doodling on an existing template that the Coens sometimes get into trouble.  In True Grit, you can almost feel their interest in the material rising and falling with their own contributions - but the overall design of the picture isn't re-fashioned accordingly; indeed, while the Coens claim they never consulted the first movie, the large action sequences - never a Coen specialty - sometimes ape, or even imitate shot-by-shot (at top), the look and feel of the original.

I suppose the Coens thought they could have their postmodern cake and eat it, too - they felt they could insinuate a critique into the structure of the original Grit without disturbing its audience-pleasing aspects. They'd just replace the Duke with the Dude, and coast on a new generation's hammy self-awareness.  This would have been a neat commercial trick, but for subtle reasons it doesn't quite come off.  Not that the cast is really to blame.  To his credit, Jeff Bridges contributes a genuine performance as Rooster Cogburn - the role that got John Wayne his long-delayed Oscar.   It's not really a surprising or original take on the character - it's low-key, in a manner that slightly, but not insistently, suggests the Dude gone to seed.  Beyond that it's pretty much what Wayne served up, too, if at a smaller scale; but Bridges commits to the role completely, and his querulous timing is as sharp as ever; he holds the picture together, just as Wayne did.  As his slightly-clownish, slightly-sexy sidekick/rival, Matt Damon does what he does best - that is, disguise his deficits in personality and presence with crafty cinematic smarts; this guy plays cinematic dodgeball better than any Hollywood star I can think of (with the possible exception of Brad Pitt).

Filming Grit on the streets of Austin, Texas.

Still, you could argue that without really outsized central performances, the book's implied parody of the Wild West can't really take hold.  And while Damon is serviceable, he doesn't really get much of a rhythm going with his pint-sized co-star, fourteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld.  But then Bridges doesn't get much further with her either.  In the central role of Mattie Ross, who hires Cogburn to track the killer of her father, young Steinfeld has been widely praised - probably because nobody wants to hurt the feelings of a teen-aged girl thrust into such a spotlight. But I'm afraid she's the central gap in the picture; Steinfeld is poised and appealing, and handles the dialogue's circumlocutions quite well - I'm sure she has a career in Hollywood ahead of her.   But she's both too young to connect romantically with Damon (as the older Darby sometimes did with Glen Campbell in the original), and yet she also projects little of the grim sense of childish determination the Coens seem to think they're conjuring; indeed, her performance makes you long for bitter little Tatum O'Neal to be teleported in from Paper Moon (and once Elizabeth Marvel takes over as the grown-up Mattie, in a deadpan epilogue, we suddenly sense everything we've been missing till now).

Oh, well. Steinfeld was probably just a shade too young to really carry off the demands of this difficult part. But the gap in her performance means that the theme of the movie goes slightly haywire. The Coens clearly meant to align True Grit with their recent thematic concerns - they want their new Grit to demonstrate that vengeance is the Lord's, not Mattie's. In their version, as in the book, the rattlesnakes take the heroine's arm with their venom; she doesn't actually have a right to her vengeance - she has to pay for it. And only Cogburn's intervention, and the death of her beloved horse, prevent the price from being even higher - the old one, in fact, of an eye for an eye. And yet somehow as we ponder these buried themes, we sense we're doing all the work the Coens should have done for us up on screen. Yes, they lay on with a trowel the moral squalor of the West - men come and go dressed in animal skins, trading corpses; but without closer connections between the protagonists, and a clearer ironic snap to the finale, the point of the picture is all but lost.  We've now had two Grits; but I don't think we've seen the true one yet.

I still owe the general cultural scene at least one more glance in the rearview mirror - but that will have to wait a day or two, I'm afraid.

For today is New Year's Day, a day for resolutions.  And so I'd like to propose one for the whole city:

2011 will be the year Boston resolves to build itself a new opera house.

Why?  Well, there have been rumblings around this particular ambition for some time, but we're closing in on the cultural conditions that make it a requirement. Boston Lyric Opera has positioned itself to become the city's next big cultural success story; its productions have skyrocketed in quality over the past few seasons, and it has a smart, ambitious artistic director in Esther Nelson - someone who I think can keep the company's quality high while wooing Boston's big donors toward their next "philanthropic opportunity," as they say.  And unlike most cities our size, we can boast another ambitious opera company, Opera Boston, which has successfully carved out a secure niche for itself in the more adventurous and obscure repertoire.  Meanwhile a sense of ferment, and foment, has begun to bubble around these two major players; we now have smaller opera companies putting up productions in the summer, and there's even an opera fringe these days.  James Levine consistently programs opera at the BSO, and of course many weekends the local malls fill up with opera lovers watching the latest from the Met and elsewhere.  And at the same time, Boston Ballet is finally getting the love from its hometown it has long deserved (the company is about to pay off its long-term debt and renovate its South End digs thanks to a remarkably fast fund-raising drive) - and the current "Opera House," gorgeous as it is, cramps their style slightly when it comes to extravaganzas like The Nutcracker.

All this was unheard-of ten or fifteen years ago.  But then let's just ponder the remarkable journey Boston has taken in the past few years - or rather, let's give credit where credit is due.  This provincial capital has all but transformed itself culturally in the past decade; I really wish the town could begin to understand how far it has come, thanks to the vision of several determined leaders and the deep pockets of the philanthropic community.  We're not the dead-end locale of some trashy Ben Affleck thriller anymore.  Indeed, almost year by year, we've seen major cultural projects come to fruition: first the Calderwood Pavilion in the South End; then the renovation of the Opera House and Cutler Majestic; then the new ICA on the waterfront.  And this year brought a double whammy - the renovations of the Paramount (and Modern) theatre complex downtown, and the stunning new American Wing at the MFA.  Not so long ago the Globe was worrying that Boston couldn't support the Calderwood Pavilion, and now we're awash in gleaming new cultural spaces!  It's not an overstatement to say that in the past decade, in cultural terms Boston has become a different city.

Except when it comes to perhaps the grandest of the arts - opera.  And yet, as I said before, the opera scene has never been stronger - there's just no space for it to grow into.  The Schubert and the Opera House can't handle Wagner, or Verdi, or actually half the operatic repertoire, so Boston Lyric and Opera Boston can't really bring our city the full range of their art form.  Likewise Boston Ballet can't bring us the full sweep of the greatest ballets without a stage bigger than their current one.  But don't think the list of tenants for the New Boston Opera House would end there.  The Boston Early Music Festival and Boston Baroque are now producing opera productions that garner global attention, and not so long ago Handel and Haydn was doing the same thing.  And local orchestras like the Boston Philharmonic are constantly programming huge modern works that are crammed, both physically and sonically, in spaces like Jordan Hall and Sanders Theatre.  I'm quite sure that in short order, a new opera house would be over-, rather than under-, booked.

Especially since even if we got off the dime right now, it probably wouldn't be built till 2015, or maybe 2020 - particularly given all the open questions about it (beginning with "Where should it go?").  The road ahead looks like a long and hard one, I know - and there will always be other worthy questions to distract us (like "What to do about the Greenway?").  But every journey begins with a single step.  Let's make the next decade the one in which Boston makes good on its claim to being a world-class city with an opera house worthy of one.

Natalie Portman goes down in Darren Aronofsky's misogynist fever dream.

I knew Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan was going to be bad. It's about an art form that basically operates over his head (in effect ballet is his antithesis) - and I didn't expect much in the way of insight into the aesthetics of elevation from a director who's the cinematic equivalent of Debbie Downer.  And let's be honest, in technical terms I think we've already seen everything Darren Downer's got to show us several times already.  Plus, Manohla Dargis liked it, which is almost never a good sign.  And then Darren went to - wait for it - Harvard. So I knew the flick would be bad; the only question was, how bad would it be?  And could it possibly be so bad (I half-hoped) that it actually turned out to be good?

Well, how to put this. It's bad, sure enough; REALLY bad.  And yet that magic moment when its clumsy adolescent "tragedy" turns to glorious, fabulous camp never materializes; this grimly turgid turkey never takes flight. And that's because the film's not just bad, but vile in the same way that schlockfests like Sin City are; watching it is like coming upon your kid brother masturbating to some creepy piece of manga he downloaded while the babysitter wasn't looking.  Sure, you can feel Aronofsky aping the approach to some sort of arty apotheosis, like a sumo wrestler lumbering after a butterfly; yet you know no genuine artistic climax can be in the offing, because everything in the film has been so crudely pre-determined.  The movie can neither succeed nor fail, because nothing is ever at stake in it; it's the kind of "wild ride" in which we can see the tracks ahead of us from the very start, leading right into the ground.  (This is why roller coasters, and the movies that imitate them, aren't art: you always know what's going to happen next - another "shock!"). And so despite its prevalent mood of forced hysteria, in artistic terms Black Swan can only lie there, quivering, like poor Natalie Portman does after somehow dancing the final act of Swan Lake with a six-inch shard of glass wedged in her stomach.

I know I'm supposed to critically "support" this kind of ridicule - but do I really have to?  This thing was painful enough sitting through the first time; pondering it again is almost too much to contemplate.  And where to begin, anyway?  Black Swan is sheer idiocy from start to finish, a crudely calculated pastiche of tricks and tics from other, far better movies.  (Indeed, as you watch it, and pick up quotes from movies as disparate as The Red Shoes, The Tenant and Repulsion, you wonder if something still counts as a "quote" if it has been translated into cinematic Klingon.)

The movie is, as I'm sure you've heard, about Natalie Portman falling apart as she prepares to dance both the "white" and "black" swans - Odette and Odile, not that those names are ever mentioned in the movie - in a new, "visceral" version of Swan Lake choreographed by the hilariously sleazy Vincent Cassel.  The emaciated Portman (she went through a punishing regimen to simulate the physique of a prima ballerina in a matter of months) does look ravishing, and it's wonderful, after watching her drone on in Kurosawa drag in all those dreadful Star Wars duds, to see her acting again - she contributes a glowingly febrile kind of performance (indeed, at times she and the slimily intelligent Cassel - not to mention the glamorously ravaged Winona Ryder - almost make the movie worth watching).  But in the end, her performance is all actressy nerves and hot air, because Portman has nothing to play but one pop cliché after another.  "Nina," her character, isn't a character so much as a collection of dated tropes from anime (we half-expect her eyes to be twice normal size).  She dresses in white and pink and still lives with her Carrie-wannabe Mom (a scary Barbara Hershey - that botox has not worn well!) because emotionally she's a control freak who's still a little girl - get it? (If not, I'm sure one of the stuffed animals she sleeps with will explain it to you.) And slowly, Little Miss Perfect begins to crack up under the pressure of her "perfection" in ways that only digital imagery has made possible.  Indeed, when she finally gets in touch with her "black swan" side, Nina begins sprouting black feathers.

Just what the dudes - I mean the doctor - ordered!

Uh-huh.  Yes, the movie really is that stupidly literal.  Or rather that stupidly hallucinogenic.  Because just about every shock cut and blood-drenched special effect in it turns out to be a dream, you see.   Which only makes you wonder - whatever happened to Darren Aronofsky?  He seemed so smart when he made π - how'd he get so dumb?  And so repetitive?  We can quickly tell he's merely going to pound Portman into the dirt, just as he did Mickey Rourke and Ellen Burstyn before her.  Because everyone's doomed in this director's movies - and the bigger they dream, the harder they fall.  Not that said dreams have any interest for him - to Aronofsky, ballet (Black Swan) = wrestling (The Wrestler) = drug abuse (Requiem for a Dream).  There is no meaning to these specific contexts - they're just serviceable frames in which Darren Downer can recycle his fetish for destruction.  Indeed, in one particularly creepy scene, when Portman tells her mom over her cell that she's won her coveted role, you can see Portman all but lit from within by overwhelming emotion - but Darren lights her cruelly, and shoots her in punishing close-up: to him, her vulnerability makes her a gargoyle, a harpy he's happy to slowly pull apart, limb from limb.  Somehow, you get the impression, in his mind she's got it coming.

And if you think I'm kidding about that "fetish" part, think again.  None of the dim bulbs who've raved about this piece of trash ever mentions that Aronofsky concocted this supposed "psychological" thriller with the help of three other guys - together they seem to have operated like a team of fratboys diagnosing the damaged house bunny.  And what do they think poor Nina needs to help her dance that challenging "black swan" role?  Why, she needs to get felt up by an older man, masturbate, and then indulge in a lesbian sex scene (with the overripe Mila Kunis, above) - what else?  At such moments the movie seems so stunningly retro in its sexual politics you're not sure if you want to laugh or cry - but you do know you want to kick Darren Aronofsky in the nuts, and hard.

Sometimes, I admit, I wondered if it wasn't the pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness of the movie that bugged me more than its misogyny.  I mean, when Dario Argento starts torturing the ballerinas to death in his nutty Suspiria (at left), you're not as irritated, because his infantile sadism is so undisguised (and so pathetic somehow) - and, well, also because Dario's powers of stylization are so much stronger than Darren's.  Although I did like the production design of Black Swan (even though there's nothing in it to match half of The Red Shoes, below). Portman looks particularly great as Odile, with crazy batwings taped to her eyes (at top), and a crown of thorns growing right out of her head.  The gulag-chic look of the rehearsal halls and dressing rooms is likewise sick fun - although it's never really spooky.

Because face it, Darren Aronofsky's no Roman Polanski (as some have claimed) - please, the very comparison makes me gag.  Polanski is a highly cultured man; whatever you may think of his sexual misdeeds, his films aren't sourced in Korean horror movies, they're sourced in a poetic, and tormented, vision of the horror of the real world (he spent his childhood literally fleeing from Nazis, not traipsing through Harvard Yard!).  In Repulsion, for instance, the doomed heroine's paranoia seeps out of a thoroughly-imagined, utterly realistic mise-en-scène - and what's more, in the final haunting shot, we realize her traumatized psyche may have been caused by her sexually abusive father.  She doesn't self-destruct - she has been destroyed, a plight that seems simply beyond the artistic reach of Aronofsky's terminal narcissism.

And let's just talk a moment about Swan Lake, and the world of ballet, shall we?  Yes, ballet is a harsh physical mistress - and there's certainly a good movie to be made about that, one that questions whether any artistic achievement could be worth such a steep physical and psychological price.  But Darren Downer couldn't care less about that, frankly - the issue of the satisfaction artistic achievement can bring never enters into his calculus; indeed, to him I'm not sure such satisfaction exists.

As for Odette and Odile - it is, in fact, the black swan who is the psychological mystery in Swan Lake, and the great challenge of the role is not sexual abandon, as Aronofsky would have it, but rather insight into the calculations of Odile's perversity - not to mention her charged relationship with her evil father.  But in the girls-only psychosexual snake pit of Black Swan, none of this material can be allowed onstage or onscreen - things would get so complicated! - and thus the very essence of Swan Lake is hopelessly distorted.  Likewise you'd never guess that the ending of the ballet is famously up for grabs - there are at least four variations that are commonly danced, although I think Black Swan marks the first time it has ended with hara-kiri.

The Red Shoes sums up Black Swan in a single shot.

Sigh - so okay, Black Swan's a bum's rush - but oddly enough, it might still prove a boon to ballet.  Clueless millennials may well be drawn to Swan Lake, hoping to find in its tropes an orgy of feminine self-abuse.  They'll be disappointed, of course; but maybe a few of them will nevertheless leave the theatre hooked by ballet's overwhelming beauty - and soon enough, they'll be back.  No, it's not the state of ballet that I'm worried about when I ponder Black Swan - it's the state of the cinema.  Once, many years ago, I cared passionately for the movies - but now I wonder how.  Or rather I wonder how this great art form could have slowly transformed itself into such a virulent cultural cancer.  Gazing at Black Swan, as memories of ballet movies like The Red Shoes flitted through my head, my heart grew heavier and heavier; it was almost like watching the requiem for a dream.

2010 was an extraordinary year, probably the best for Boston theatre in my memory, and as I looked back over its most remarkable shows, I realized I couldn't limit myself to a "Top 10" list this time around (sorry, Art!). I tried to, believe me I did; but first I had to go to a dozen ("The Top 12!") then a baker's dozen, and then (speaking of bakers), I realized I just couldn't ignore the superbly-produced Annie Baker festival, even if I had some doubts about its playwright; that brought me to a "Top 15!" and even then I found I was slighting some exemplary shows.

So this year there are twenty, count' em, twenty Best-of-Boston picks from the Hub Review. And as you survey the list, I think a few trends will be apparent. First, this was the year the Huntington re-asserted itself as the greatest theatre in the region (four of my top picks are Huntington shows), and the ART continued its decline into irrelevance. (I know they sell lots of tickets, but so does Blue Man Group.) And in the meantime, ArtsEmerson has snatched away their highbrow artistic mantle and demonstrated that challenging theatre can be popularly engaging, too (a trick that even in its heyday the ART never really pulled off).

2010 was also the year that Boston demonstrated once again, (but this time conclusively), that the scene had matured to such an extent that it's no longer dominated by these two (or perhaps now three) behemoths. There was great work everywhere this year - indeed, I think there were more high-quality productions in 2010 than in any single year of the past quarter century. Yet a surprising number of productions on this list depended on a single playwright and a single performer - the playwright was Alan Ayckbourn (not Annie Baker), with sterling productions of his best plays up at Gloucester and down at Trinity; and the performer was the great Karen MacDonald, who appeared in three of my Top 20, totally dominated one, and was the sole actress in another. I think that's a Boston first.

Well, enough preamble! Without further ado, here are Boston's Theatrical Top 20 for 2010:

1. All My Sons - Huntington Theatre. Probably the most emotionally charged evening of theatre I've seen in years. A powerhouse cast, led by the riveting Karen MacDonald in the performance of a lifetime, brought Arthur Miller's American tragedy to hair-raising life.

2. Stick Fly - Huntington Theatre. Once Lydia Diamond stopped pretending she was a slave girl and began writing what she actually knew, she penned one of the most accomplished plays of the past several years. Big and smart and audience-friendly, Stick Fly turned a magnifying glass on the intersection of race and class in this country, and with the help of a sterling cast led by Nikkole Salter, demonstrated that the "traditional" well-made play is probably still the best way to probe the way we live now.

3. Bus Stop - Huntington Theatre. Nicky Martin back in form, conducting William Inge's brilliant set of variations on loneliness in a snowbound diner. Simply a classic version of a classic play. Plus, of course, Karen MacDonald.

4. Adding Machine - SpeakEasy Stage offered a striking version of this flawed musical - so striking that much of its imagery (and many of its performances) linger in my mind months after the curtain fell. This production marked a significantly darker turn than usual for this company. More, please.

5. The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead - Merrimack Rep. This is the third Best-of-Boston production that featured Ms. MacDonald - although this time, under the sensitive direction of Melia Bensussen, she was the whole show - so how could it go wrong?

6. Into the Woods - Reagle Music Theatre. This production marked a leap in sophistication for the former Reagle Players, and showcased an astonishing turn by Broadway vet Rachel York. But bizarrely, amid its triumph, Reagle fired its director, Stacey Stephens! The organization then endured another blow with the sudden death of its longtime PR maven, Frank Roberts. The company has soldiered on, although 2011 may prove a pivotal year for it.

7. 4:48 Psychosis - Gamm Theatre. Casey Seymour (at right) proved a revelation in this haunting, harrowing production of Sarah Kane's last play, a frighteningly honest look at one woman's losing battle with suicidal depression. 

8. Table Manners - Gloucester Stage. Practically perfect in every way. A superb cast, under the nuanced direction of Eric Engel, made an eloquent case for Alan Ayckbourn as a major playwright.

9. Absurd Person Singular - Trinity Rep. More Ayckbourn; this time broader and bordering on caricature - but caricature cut with a scalpel. Featuring the best work in years from Trinity stalwart Anne Scurria.

10. Tales from Ovid - Whistler in the Dark. The Whistlers took to the air - literally dangling from the rafters of the Factory Theater in aerial silks - in what may be the most poetically thrilling production I've ever seen on the fringe. Director Meg Taintor and a fearless cast conjured one memorable image after another. There are rumors this production may have a second life at a larger local venue; let's hope so.

11. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune - New Rep. Anne Gottlieb and Robert Pemberton found every rueful emotional note in Terrence McNally's famous two-hander. It's been a particularly strong year for Gottlieb, who also delivered eloquent performances in Not Enough Air and In the Next Room.

12. Nicholas Nickleby - Lyric Stage. Spiro Veloudos pulled off his biggest logistical challenge yet in this two-part, six-hour-plus version of David Edgar's translation of the Dickens classic. Perhaps somewhat uneven, it nevertheless caught the spirit of the sprawling novel, and in these days of shorter and shorter new scripts, basically delivered four shows for the price of two.

13. Aftermath - ArtsEmerson. This visiting production was not for those Americans who can't stand a good long look in the mirror. A quietly devastating depiction of the wreckage we have made of Iraq, this script never raised its voice, because it didn't have to. A reminder of what theatre is supposed to do - that is, bring us the news about ourselves, however troubling it may be.

The Annie Baker Festival -

14. Circle Mirror Transformation - Huntington Theatre.

15. Body Awareness - SpeakEasy Stage.

16. The Aliens - Company One (at left). 

Even the New York Times, bless its provincial little heart, was impressed by the high quality of these three productions. Alas, together they kind of disproved their own thesis, I'm afraid - they demonstrated that Annie Baker is a very promising young playwright who has yet to pen a major play. But doesn't that kind of accuracy constitute its own form of success? I think it does, and I look forward to hearing more from Ms. Baker.

17. The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later - Arts Emerson. A thought-provoking and beautifully-acted follow-up to the most important piece of political theatre of the last generation.

18. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - North Shore Music Theatre. Not one of my favorite musicals, but if you're going to be cleverly crass, you'd better kick some serious ass, and this amazing cast certainly did, in a surprise hit for the reborn North Shore.

19. 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee - Lyric Stage. Did we need another version of this quirky perennial? Probably not. But the Lyric production's top-notch cast and slick direction made you forget all about that.

20. Timon of Athens - Bill Barclay's broad but clever take on Shakespeare's most fragmentary tragedy delivered the best production the Actors' Shakespeare Project has done in some time. Featuring a remarkable turn from Allyn Burrows as the Bard's bitter anti-hero.

The Fall Hubbies, Round II

Yes, there's still time for another round of Hubbies, and there's always time for another dirty picture here at the Hub Review (that's Todd Sanfield rockin' his "First Night" button; I think Todd would make an excellent model for the plexiglass Hubbie award, should it ever be fabricated - don't you?).

Of course it's only been a few weeks since the last Hubbies were awarded, so today's list is short, but sweet.  We didn't want to forget any of these fine performances, productions or designs, however, before we rang the year to a close with our definitive "Best of Boston" column for 2010 (coming later this week).

So without further ado -

Best Ensemble

Stephen Berenson, Angela Brazil, Phyllis Kay, Fred Sullivan, Jr., Timothy Crowe and Anne Scurria, directed by Brian McEleney - Absurd Person Singular, Trinity Rep

Tony Ward, Joey Collins, and Crystal Finn, directed by Carl Forsman - Beasley's Christmas Party, Merrimack Rep

Anne Gottlieb and Robert Pemberton, directed by Antonio Ocampo-Guzman - Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, New Rep

Best Individual Performances

Johnny Lee Davenport - Vengeance is the Lord's, Huntington Theatre

Alex Pollock, Nael Nacer - The Aliens, Company One

Leslie Flesner, Julie Kotarides, Rebecca Riker - A Chorus Line, North Shore Music Theatre

Peter A. Carey, Sasha Castroverde, Daniel Berger-Jones, Michael Costello - Nicholas Nickleby, Part II, Lyric Stage

Steven Barkhimer, Allyn Burrows - Henry IV, Part I, Actors' Shakespeare Project

Heather Peterson, Julie Jarvis, Sheryl Johns, Mack Carroll - Durang Durang, Bad Habit Productions

Harry Hobbs, Ken Baltin, Maria Silverman, Najla Said - The Fever Chart, Underground Railway Theater

Zachary Hardy - Striking Twelve, SpeakEasy Stage

Best Design

Cristina Tedesco, set, for the entire Annie Baker Festival - Circle Mirror Transformation, Huntington Theatre, Body Awareness, SpeakEasy Stage, and The Aliens, Company One

Eugene Lee, set - Vengeance is the Lord's, Huntington Theatre

Susan Zeeman Rogers, set - The Fever Chart, Underground Railway Theater