2010 in review: Charles McNulty on theater

Daniel Sullivan’s Central Park production (now on Broadway) was memorable for Al Pacino‘s Shylock, an unsentimental look at a man roiling with grievances and overloaded with grudges. The usurer’s anger was indeed so well inhabited it was painful in its psychological clarity.  (Joan Marcus / Associated Press)

Martin Benson’s elegant garden party staging of this farcical romance masquerading as a debate (or is it the other way around?) offered definitive proof that compelling talk can seduce an audience when the words and wit are from a mind as devilishly clever as George Bernard Shaw’s.  (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The great accomplishment of Achim Freyer’s titanic act of sorcery was the respect shown for Wagner’s opera as music drama. By far the most engulfing theatrical experience of 2010.  (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winner about women who find sanctuary from the horrors of war in a Congolese brothel, put a human face on a contemporary crisis that isn’t easy to confront. Topical, urgent and, under Kate Whoriskey’s invigorating direction, dramatically gripping.  (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center Theater production retained much of its elegance if not all of its surefootedness. But Carmen Cusack’s Nellie Forbush turned Ahmanson patrons into swooning cockeyed optimists.  (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)