MAYBE NOT THE ONES you'd expect, though. Sometimes it's the supporting actor, not the marquee-name star, whose scene knocks your socks off. Or the fifth-billed performer whose moving musical number takes your breath away. That was the case in 2017 with these three women and four men.
PHILLIP BOYKIN as Tonton Julian in 'ONCE ON THIS ISLAND'
Circle in the Square Theater
HAILEY KILGORE, WHO PLAYS the young Caribbean heroine in "Once on This Island," is a rising star. And it was thrilling to have Lea Salonga, in her role as the god of love, wandering through the audience and standing so close to me during much of the performance I attended at Circle in the Square. But I kept noticing this other guy.
Phillip Boykin plays Tonton Julian, who spots an orphaned little girl in a tree and insists to his wife, "But we're too old for children," then changes his mind. His love for his adopted daughter (played by Kilgore) radiates throughout this Romeo-and-Juliet tale, and his voice (in "One Small Girl," "Ti Moune" and "Pray") is a thing of beauty and power.
I thought I'd never seen Boykin (a 1995 University of Hartford graduate) before. But lo and behold, it turns out he was the amazing, operatically trained actor who played Crown, Bess's fierce and dangerous ex-lover, opposite Audra McDonald, in "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" (2012). He won a Theater World Award for that performance. And he's been garnering awe-struck reviews since then (one critic called him "the living subwoofer"). His debut album is called "The Boy Can Entertain."
Hometown: Greenville, S.C.
GAVIN LEE as Squidward G. Tentacles in 'SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE MUSICAL'
YOU HAVE TO GIVE a certain amount of credit to David Zinn, the costume designer, for Squidward's four-legged pants. (Which are much more fabulous than they appear in the photo of Gavin Lee above.) But it was Lee who brought the razzle-dazzle and the unlikely lovability to SpongeBob's grouchy, cynical co-worker and pal. Sometimes you would have sworn that was Sean Hayes onstage, at his manic comic best. At other times, Lee seemed very much like Tommy Tune in top hat and tails. Good combo.
Where has Lee been all our lives? Hanging out with a magical nanny. He first played Bert, the Cockney jack-of-all-trades, in "Mary Poppins" in London in 2004. He made his Broadway debut in the show two years later, winning both Drama Desk and Theater World Awards for his effort. Then he did the national tour for four years (2009-13), dropped by "Les Miz" for a year or so, and now he's playing a depressed turquoise octopus. But that's not bad. How many performers get a spectacular number with a chorus line of sea anemones?
Hometown: Enfield Town, Sussex, England
JOE MANTELLO as Tom Wingfield in 'THE GLASS MENAGERIE'
At the Belasco Theater
DON'T YOU LOVE IT when Joe Mantello acts? It doesn't happen often. Mantello (left, with Sally Field) was Louis in the original Broadway production of "Angels in America" (both parts) two decades ago and Ned Weeks (the Larry Kramer character) in the 2011 revival of "The Normal Heart." He'll be back in the director's chair in the new year, helming two major revivals: "Three Tall Women" and "The Boys in the Band." But very briefly this past year (two months in the spring), we had a chance to see him onstage.
And what a character he tackled! At age 54, Mantello was Tom Wingfield, the pl;aywright's sensitive young alter ego in the latest Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's classic memory play "The Glass Menagerie." In a revival that was criticized strongly for the interpretation of two of its four characters, he was a clear and present ray of light.
Playing his mother, Amanda, in this production was not considered Field's best work. (It wasn't even considered her best Amanda Wingfield. That was years ago at the Kennedy Center.) Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times described her interpretation this time as a "grim, angry kitchen-sink Everymom." And the depiction of Tom's sister, Laura, by Madison Ferris, an actress who has muscular dystrophy and spends most of the play in a wheelchair, seemed like overkill in a story about a young woman with a limp. The Gentleman Caller (Finn Wittrock), as the fourth character has always been known, barely registered. But Mantello showed us delicate layers of Tom's pain, his need to escape, his loyalty to Laura and, in no uncertain terms, his sexuality. (I disagree with my old friend BB on that point.)
Hometown: Rockford, Ill.
ELIZABETH MARVEL as Marc Antony in 'JULIUS CAESAR'
Delacorte Theater, Shakespeare in the Park
ALL THE FUSS ABOUT Shakespeare in the Park's "Julius Caesar" last summer was Donald Trump-related. How dare the people behind the production dress and coif an ancient Roman leader to look like the 45th president of the United States, orangey skin, funny hair and all? Wasn't that just endorsing assassination?
No. For well over 400 years, "Julius Caesar" has been about why assassination is a terrible "solution," how it never solves the problem and usually makes things worse. But if you were able to take your eyes off Gregg Henry's Caesar and Tina Benko's sexy Slovenian Calpurnia (Mrs. Caesar), you may have noticed that New York theatergoers were being blessed by an astounding performance at the Delacorte: Elizabeth Marvel as Marc Antony.
My particular brand of feminism does not require that women play men's roles and vice versa. Or that fictional or historical characters be conceived as gender-neutral. But people, when a switch like that works, it works. Marvel's "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech ("But Brutus is an honorable man") is a tour de force. Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post: "Best of all is Elizabeth Marvel" ... "The no-holds-barred emotionality" she brings to the eulogy is "an entirely fresh approach to a speech an audience might have felt it already knew inside and out."
The 48-year-old Marvel's screen credits include "House of Cards," "Homeland" and "The Meyerowitz Stories." Her Broadway appearances have included "An American Daughter" and "Picnic."
Hometown: Orange County, Calif. (born)
MARY BETH PEIL as the Dowager Empress in 'ANASTASIA'
THE MUSICAL "ANASTASIA" IS about not knowing who you are, but the one character who has no such identity crisis is the Russian Dowager Empress played by Mary Beth Peil, 77. As the title character's royal grandmother, who escapes to Paris before the Soviet revolution, Peil is -- ask a few critics -- "eternally elegant" (WNYC), "ever elegant" (The New York Times), "glorious" (Deadline) and "the very definition of grace and class" (The Hollywood Reporter).
Peil didn't make her Broadway debut until she was in her mid-40s, and that was as Anna in "The King and I" (1985), opposite Yul Brynner, the last time he played the role before his death. A lyric soprano, she's best known to television audiences for grandmother and mother-in-law roles ("Dawson's Creek," "The Good Wife"). She was nominated for a 2017 Tony for this imperial role but lost to Rachel Bay Jones for "Dear Evan Hansen."
Hometown: Davenport, Iowa
DAVID HYDE PIERCE as Horace Vandergelder in 'HELLO, DOLLY!'
At the Shubert Theater
BECOMING FAMOUS ON TV has never hurt David Hyde Pierce's credibility in the New York theater world. But then the show he starred in -- NBC's "Frasier" (1993-2004) -- was the closest thing a network sitcom has ever been to TV-for-theater-people.
Pierce's Broadway debut was in "Beyond Therapy" (1982), and he was in "The Heidi Chronicles" in 1990. Then he went away to play a prissy Seattle psychiatrist with an invisible, rich, anorexic wife and a crush on his father's pretty health care aide.
Back on Broadway in the 2000s, he's done, among other things, "Spamalot"; "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike"; and "Curtains," for which he won the Tony for best actor in a musical. But all of these paled beside the prospect of playing Horace Vandergelder, a successful but modest Yonkers feed merchant in need of a wife, opposite Bette Midler this year. In "Hello, Dolly!," the most spectacular revival of the decade (at least), Pierce, 58, did the almost impossible. He stood out by holding back. His final performance: Jan. 14, 2018.
Hometown: Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
MARY TESTA as Mrs. Dragonetti in 'THE PORTUGUESE KID'
City Center
I SAT AT MARY TESTA'S table at a Tonys after-party one year in the late '90s. She'd been nominated for "On the Town," for best featured actress in a musical, and I kept thinking that she'd played the taxi driver.
She didn't. She was the hilarious alcoholic vocal coach working with Miss Turnstiles. Ben Brantley called her first stab at that role, in Central Park, "an outlandish but perfectly balanced cartoon of a performance." He has also called Testa "a performer of radioactive presence and lungs of steel."
I don't know why the woman isn't an international megastar. She hasn't been on Broadway since "Guys and Dolls" in 2009, but she's still doing remarkable things Off Broadway and elsewhere. This year she starred with Jason Alexander and Sherie Rene Scott in John Patrick Shanley's newest comedy, "The Portuguese Kid," at City Center -- and brought enormous energy and joy to the role of Alexander's impossibly crabby, highly opinionated mother. "Nice girls don't use hot sauce," she tells one character. "Gold-digger." Why stop at one putdown when two flow so smoothly?
No one has ever written a role so over-the-top that Mary Testa can't make it real. Of course this play's casting proved that some things haven't changed much. Alexander (born in September 1959), who played her son, is 58 years old; Testa (born in June 1955) is 62.
Hometown: Philadelphia