Top stories of 2022: It was a theater year to remember when theaters reminded us what we’ve been missing

This was a rebuilding year for Connecticut theaters, from the small community theaters to the professional regional theaters to the big “presentation houses” where Broadway tours go.

For most of them, this is the first theater season since the COVID pandemic started where (so far, at least) shows are happening more or less as they were announced. Setbacks have ranged from cast replacements due to illness (as befell more than one member of the “Fences” cast at Playhouse on Park) to a whole ensemble performing masked (for a number of performances of “Between Two Knees” at Yale Rep), but unlike last year or the year before, there were few outright cancellations or last-minute reschedulings.

Programming-wise, shows have shifted from tentative small-cast affairs to large-cast, big-budget musicals. The Bushnell finally got caught up on its backlog of touring Broadway shows that went on hiatus in 2020-21 and were finally making good on their old bookings. Building back full audiences is still a problem, but there have been hopeful signs that theatergoing is back in style, with sold-out performances at some recent holiday shows.

This semblance of stability means that the Courant’s annual list of memorable theater moments isn’t shortchanged or compromised. There were more shows to see this year, and they were on real stages rather than virtual. Big sets and special effects returned. New plays got premiered. Classics got revived. Full-balanced seasons were announced. Major tours, from “Hamilton” to Cirque du Soleil, returned to Hartford.

Why a list of “theater moments” rather than a top 10 list of shows? Because “best of the year” lists often make no sense, pitting escapism versus experimentalism or dismissing otherwise excellent shows because they might have had a lousy ending or one underwhelming person in the cast. Concentrating on specific indelible images that you can’t shake, great memories that remain even if the entire show they were part of might not have measured up, seems more honest and fairer to the hardworking theater-makers.

Here are the top 10 memories we’ll cherish from Connecticut theater in 2022.

The opera aria in ‘Pretty Woman’ at The Bushnell

There’s a throwaway moment in the movie “Pretty Woman,” part of a montage where Julia Roberts and Richard Gere are enjoying each others’ company and attend the opera. In the Broadway musical version of “Pretty Woman,” which played The Bushnell early this year, that night at the opera becomes a swirling, shifting, multi-sensory experience that underscores the couple’s growing attraction to each other. It’s an overwhelming mash-up of musical theater, opera, love, drama and swift-moving scenic design. It’s also a reminder not to dismiss film-to-stage adaptations out of hand. Even if you don’t dig a movie, you can often find new ways to appreciate its story if it’s cleverly retold.

The opening tap dance in ‘42nd Street’ at The Goodspeed

The flashy new revival of “42nd Street” at the Goodspeed Opera House didn’t waste any time letting the audience “come and meet those dancing feet,” as its title song goes. As the curtain was rising, the cast was already breaking into a wild, long, frenetic and fantastic tap dance. You could tell from the set that this was a bunch of hungry, talented young people rehearsing a big show like their lives depended on it. Nothing needed to be said, just danced.

The pre-show music of ‘Straight White Men’ at Westport Playhouse

“I’m a little airplane nyowwww!”

Of all the regional theaters in Connecticut that are reemerging from the economic and creative setbacks of COVID, Westport Country Playhouse has been the most daring, the most challenging and often the most fun.

WCP’s production of genius avant-garde playwright Young Jean Lee’s “Straight White Men,” a searing, very funny condemnation of entitled, privileged white men, blasted the sexually outrageous songs of Cupcake at top volume before the show. This led to complaints from theatergoers, who addressed some of those complaints to two people they thought were ushers or house managers but were actually in the show, as the “Persons in Charge,” whose job it was to set the scenes and literally move the actors around.

Once the loud sex-pop died down, the “Persons in Charge” took to the stage and introduced themselves, schooling the crowd about their trans and non-binary identities. Then the play began in earnest, with Nick Westrate as an English professor named Drew endlessly screeching Jonathan Richman’s crazed children’s song “I’m a Little Airplane” at his brother Jake (played by Bill Army), one grating verse after another. The show only got more shocking, insane and psychologically intense from there. A social satire on a stratospheric scale. Most of it was straight from Young Lee Jean’s uncompromising script, but director Mark Lamos ramped it up by unapologetically pushing it on playhouse subscribers, not to mention bringing in white-guy sitcom royalty Richard Kline from “Three’s Company” as the father in the play. A take-no-prisoners triumph and just one part of a tremendous Westport season that also included a bracing, beautifully designed and almost as provocative production of Ins Choi’s “Kim’s Convenience.”

The house in ‘Dream House’ at the Long Wharf

As a play, Eliana Pipes’ “Dream House” had plot holes aplenty and some characters that were hard to get behind. Yet the production directed by Laurie Woolery, with scenic design by Stephanie Osin Cohen and lighting by Jason Lynch, brought its house-themed reality show conceit to an all-encompassing dreamlike, hallucinatory abstract level that was a wonder to behold. The stagecraft was bittersweet, since this was one of the very last shows to be staged in the Long Wharf’s longtime home at 222 Sargent Drive in New Haven. One hopes that the new itinerant Long Wharf company will be able to keep up the high design and technical standards that the current leadership team has set, which this season included not just the bleeding walls of “Dream House” but the projection-screen maelstrom of “Fires in the Mirror” and the simple-yet-stunning circular set of “Queen.”

The heart in ‘Heartless’ at Hole in the Wall Theatre

Casual nudity seldom works at small community-based theaters where self-consciousness, uneven ensembles and other anxieties can get in the way. One of Sam Shepard’s last plays, “Heartless,” a meditation on mortality and the psychic damage we can inflict on others just by existing, isn’t just body-baring but soul-baring. Hole in the Wall Theater, the invaluable 50-year-old community theater collective in downtown New Britain, did a professional job with every angry, agonizing aspect of this harrowing drama. A key moment was when the audience sees the chest scar on one of the characters which kind of gives the play its title. Hole in the Wall has just announced a 2023 season that includes such dark gems as “Spring Awakening” and “August: Osage County.” Long may they rage.

Tabla virtuoso Avidrodh Sharma in ‘Dishwasher Dreams’ at Hartford Stage

Sometimes an unusual element works so well in a show that you’re surprised it isn’t used more often. Alaudin Ullah’s “Dishwasher Dreams” reveled in its low-key, casual nature, with Ullah spinning a long-form stand-up comedy-style yarn about his parents’ journey to America from Bangladesh and his own experiences with racism, prejudice, stereotyping and basic misunderstandings about his background.

Ullah’s monologue was framed by the esteemed director Chay Yew and his design teams with soft lights, a demure slatted wooden backdrop and the wondrous rhythms, sounds and effects of Avidrodh Sharma on the popular South Asian percussion instrument the tabla. You’d think such a sensitive, subtle score would undercut Ullah’s comedy, but instead, it gave it shape and depth and added personality. Sharma had his own little platform onstage, but he wasn’t on his own island. He was in synch with Ullah for the whole show, providing melodic rhythmic riffs, subtle emotional underpinnings for key scenes and even some comic sound effects. It took one man’s story and thrust it into a new cosmic dimension.

The ‘unwrap your candies’ pre-show announcement for ‘Between Two Knees’ at Yale Rep

Just as the “Reservation Dogs” TV show was gaining popularity and acclaim in its first season on the FX network, the Yale Rep was staging a brilliant mash-up of Native American history, political theory and outrageous comedy by some of the same members of the comedy troupe The 1491s. The show was an audacious, provocative, seldom-appreciated perspective on the settling of the U.S. by those who were the most unsettled by it. “Between Two Knees” never gave you a chance to catch your breath, raising your consciousness with caustic comedy even before the show started. The pre-show announcement challenged the new section of every regional theater’s welcome speech, where they acknowledge that the land the theater is on was stewarded by generations of indigenous peoples, by openly wondering if anyone even listened to it, literally adding “blah blah blah” to it, and directing the audience to a detailed, colorful map and expanded explanation in the show’s playbill, with directions on how to get even more information. All of the other standard bits of an intro speech were mocked as well, a perfect mood-setter for a show that went on to challenge preconceptions unpredictably, and hilariously, for two hours.

The orgy in ‘Pippin’ at Playhouse on Park

“Pippin” is a tough show to get right. If you don’t find the right tone, it’s just a self-important slough through dated 1970s tropes about peace, love and domination. Director/choreographer and Playhouse on Park co-founder Darlene Zoller brought a fluid, fun-loving and hope-filled style that made “Pippin” make fresh sense as a parable of how hard it is to be a good leader. The proving ground is not the battle scene, though Zoller made that fine and flashy, but the coming-of-age sex orgy the title character undergoes. This was achieved with a swinging lounge-rock soundtrack, the wild style Zoller had refined for the series of Playhouse burlesque shows she oversees as “Mama D,” and a cast that was truly up for anything. It was all sinuous and suggestive, not explicit, but push-ups will never seem the same.

Jen Cody climbing the walls in ‘Christmas on the Rocks’

TheaterWorks Hartford is good at keeping its audiences happy. Their homegrown holiday hit “Christmas on the Rocks” has lasted a decade for good reason. Director Rob Ruggiero has kept the show fresh, not just by accommodating necessary cast changes when actors need to move on but by changing the show itself with brand new scenes.

This year, “Christmas on the Rocks” added two holiday playlets to its bar full of grown-up and downtrodden Christmas icons. Whatever you think about Elf on the Shelf (and many people think things that are unprintable in this newspaper), Jen Cody’s portrayal of that smug sedentary sprite (as scripted by Jenn Harris) is hysterical in several dimensions. One of them is physical: There’s a series of brief blackouts which find Cody’s elf suddenly repositioned in a corner, up a wall, on the bar, not on a shelf. Way to keep “Christmas on the Rocks” rockin’.

The upside-down clown in Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Corteo’ at the XL Center

This one just happened recently, when the ever-amazing Cirque du Soleil made its grand return to the XL Center. In a four-day visit, the company transformed the arena into an intimate old-world proscenium stage, albeit one with floating angels and acrobats swinging on chandeliers. The centerpiece of “Corteo” is a person who floats out into the audience suspended by helium balloons, but there were other equally transfixing images that seemed subtler though they were probably just as hard to pull off. It’ll be hard to forget that clown with the white pointy hat blithely strolling along the top of the dozens-feet-high performance area, upside down. Theater creates dream worlds, and sometimes dreams are impossible to believe. The whole gorgeous dark Baroque art masterpiece that was “Corteo” had you pinching yourself.

Reach reporter Christopher Arnott at carnott@courant.com.