If we had six fingers on each hand, I suppose it would be Top 12 lists that would have developed into end-of-year-traditions. As round as it sounds, 10 is pretty much an arbitrary number that evolution has established for human counting. But since it has been a journalistic tradition for tens and tens of years �" did a 12-fingered species develop the notion of a dozen? �" the tradition will be maintained here. There is no particular order in this theatrical Top 10 list, with each entry providing its own distinctive memories as 2014 begins its disappearing act.
1. The Totalitarians SF playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's new political satire was a little bit scary and a whole lot funny as it chronicled the rise of a fear-mongering candidate with fascistic tendencies. Nachtrieb's wonderful sense of the absurd found a fine forum in the Z Space-Encore Theatre production sharply directed by Ken Prestininzi and featuring an in-sync cast comprised of Jamie Jones, Liam Vincent, Andrew Humann, and Alexis Lezin.
2. The Whale As the title character in Samuel D. Hunter's funny/sad play, Nicolas Pelczar delivered an agonizingly detailed and ultimately triumphant performance as a grief-stricken gay man eating himself to death following his lover's death. Director Jasson Minadakis' production at Marin Theatre Company was all the more powerful for its patient approach to the accumulation of short scenes, with vivid performances also coming from Cristina Oeschger, Adam Magill, Liz Sklar, and Michelle Maxson.
3. Painting the Clouds with Sunshine Instead of reviving an old musical, which is its forte, 42nd Street Moon created its own "old" musical and provided it with a sunny new production. Co-written by Greg MacKellan and Mark D. Kaufman, and directed by Kaufman, the show was a playful amalgam of old musical tropes made even more fun through the use of lesser-known songs by the giants of the era. It can't be easy working a song titled "Gather Lip Rouge While You May" into a story, but the Moon team did it with panache.
4. Ideation Written before the Ebola crisis had emerged, but staged by San Francisco Playhouse just as panicky headlines were appearing, Aaron Loeb's mordant comedy felt eerily prescient. Even without that specific immediacy, the play offered a caustic look at how corporate paranoia can spin out of control, as a think-tank team is charged with concocting a plan to liquidate carriers of a hypothetical virus for the common good. Loeb's script had a lot more laughs than that summary might suggest, rooted largely in the increasingly complicated relationships among the corporate players. Jason Kapoor, Mark Anderson Phillips, Michael Ray Wisely, Carrie Paff, and Ben Euphrat brought edgy comedy to these characters under Josh Costello's taut direction.
5. The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures Tony Kushner's newest play clocked in at nearly four hours, but given the number of ideas and subplots being juggled, it could almost be called a streamlined affair. At the play's center, the quietly charismatic Mark Margolis played an old union organizer whose family �" a group with many, many issues �" has gathered to dissuade him from the assisted suicide he has planned for himself. The multiple verbal collisions could be frustrating at times to sort out, but the emotionally wrenching, intellectually stimulating, and thematically unwieldy play found fulfilling life under Tony Taccone's direction at Berkley Rep.
6. The Habit of Art In one of Theatre Rhino's classiest productions in memory, Alan Bennett's ingenious play-within-a-play gave us big-laugh backstage humor as well as the emotionally charged scenes that a somewhat disorganized troupe is trying to rehearse. An imagined late-life meeting between the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten circled around conflicting views on the proper approach to acting on their homosexuality in 1973 England. Director John Fisher played Britten and had an equal sparring partner in Donald Currie's Auden in this stylish gift to local audiences.
7. Into the Woods Well, the movie is now out, and word-of-mouth reports it's a pretty good rendering of the musical. San Francisco Playhouse offered a very good rendering of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's fairytale mash-up. Director Susi Damilano's production highlighted the humor in the material without undercutting its darker sides, and the cast brought airy individuality to the characters, even if the impact of some songs was lost in an awkwardly utilized set. But the production reemphasized Into the Woods as a musical that seems only to improve with time �" at least in as good a production as provided here.
8. Hir Liberation from labels pushes a happy homemaker to the edge of insanity in Taylor Mac's absurdist comedy that had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre. Nancy Opel was terrific and frightening as Paige, who has turned her home into a trashed circus as she tortures her now-disabled husband, mockingly embraces her daughter's sexual transitioning into a gay man, and further rattles her war-rattled son returning from Afghanistan. Director Niegel Smith found control and balance in a play of hairpin turns that swerved among the tragic, the comic, and the absurd.
9. Die Mommie Die! New Conservatory Theatre Center provided Charles Busch's comedy with a high-tone production featuring a commanding performance by J. Conrad Frank in the star-turn role that Busch wrote for himself. Frank played Angela Arden, an aging celebrity dealing with a family of disturbing neuroses in a send-up of the kind of movies Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were making late in their careers. Director F. Allen Sawyer knew where to find the laughs, and he was abetted by Kuo-Hao Lo's luxurious bad-taste set and Mr. David's splendiferous gowns that Frank worked to the max.
10. An Audience with Meow Meow The Australian-born performer known as Meow Meow has a considerable following both Down Under and in London, but she arrived at Berkeley Rep pretty much an unknown quantity. Offering herself up as a chanteuse worthy of adoration, even as her cabaret show grows increasingly shambolic, the tottering Meow Meow demanded increasing affirmation from an audience that needed a sense of irony to get on board. But directed by the magical Emma Rice of Kneehigh Theatre, the performance ended with Meow Meow crowd-surfing through the audience that seemed delighted to give her the support she needed.