"Topdog/Underdog" and "The Piano Lesson" make the 2022 Best in Theater List

A Year That Kept on Singing, With or Without the Music

‘Topdog/Underdog’ by Suzan-Lori Parks

That Parks is a musician (vocals, guitar, harmonica) comes as no surprise if you’ve seen any of her plays. Some feel like jazz, some like symphonies. From its opening beats, “Topdog/Underdog” is a relentless rap: percussive, playful, braggadocious, baleful. That’s not decoration; it’s built into the story of Booth, a would-be three-card-monte hustler practicing his spiel, and his brother, Lincoln, who gets paid to impersonate his presidential namesake. In Kenny Leon’s Broadway revival, starring the brilliantly paired Corey Hawkins as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth, the tragedy felt as inevitable as the final cadence of a song. (Read our review of “Topdog/Underdog” and our interview with the cast.)

‘The Piano Lesson’ by August Wilson

No American playwright storms the line between speech and music as insistently as Wilson, whose 10-play cycle about 20th-century Black life sometimes seems like a single great oratorio in disguise. In “The Piano Lesson,” the disguise is off, as the drama turns on the heirloom instrument of the title, blessed but also haunted by its carvings of a family’s enslaved ancestors. Among the highlights of LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s Broadway revival, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and the spellbinding John David Washington, were the sequences in which joy and pain boiled over into rhythmic dialogue and flat-out song. They reminded us why music is so effective as theater: It’s literally enchanting. (Read our review of “The Piano Lesson” and our article about LaTanya Richardson Jackson.)

Click HERE to read the entire article.