The Short List

Best Scene
Cherry Jones and Brían F. O’Byrne, ‘Doubt.’ Did he molest the boy or didn’t he? This clash of acting titans gave John Patrick Shanley’s play its impossibly intense shouting match at the climax:
Father Flynn: You have not the slightest proof of anything.
Sister Aloysius: But I have my certainty . . .
Father Flynn: You have no right to step outside the Church!
Sister Aloysius: I will step outside the Church if that’s what needs to be done, though the door should shut behind me! I will do what needs to be done, Father, if it means I’m damned to hell!

Goldsberry performs Shakespeare.   (Photo: Michal Daniel/Courtesy of the Public Theater)

Best Performer Crying Out for Roles Worthy of Her Talent
Renee Elise Goldsberry, whose acting and singing in supporting roles in Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Color Purple nearly redeemed both shows.

Best Song
“Let’s Walk,” a lovely little duet by Victoria Clark and Mark Harelik from The Light in the Piazza.

Best Great Performance New York Missed
Alvin Epstein’s King Lear at Actors’ Shakespeare Project in Boston. The mad scenes by the cliff, when Lear has lost his mind and kingdom, were a triumph of classical acting: How did the city’s artistic directors let this happen in Boston and not here? (Runner-up: Jane Krakowski’s delightfully flighty Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls on the West End.)

Best Feud
Michael John LaChiusa’s essay in Opera News about the death of the musical, Marc Shaiman’s outraged response in a Broadway chat room, and the impassioned discussion that followed. If only the critics would write so provocatively.

Best Opening Line
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I am the greatest actor that has ever existed.” —Julian Bleach, ‘Shockheaded Peter’

Best three-Liner
“There is a cure for homosexuality.”
“What is it?”
“Fame.”
From ‘Manic Flight Reaction,’ by Sarah Schulman.

Best Triple Threat (Old Definition)
Sherie Rene Scott, who showed in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that she’s a sparkling actor, singer, and dancer.

Best Triple Threat (New Definition)
Manoel Felciano, who as Tobias in Sweeney Todd showed he can act, sing, and play an array of musical instruments—sometimes simultaneously.

Best Theater Outside a Theater
Jack White’s whirling, howling, utterly mesmerizing stage persona, on full display at the White Stripes shows at Brooklyn’s KeySpan Park.

Best Long-Overdue Premiere
‘Walking Down Broadway,’ by Dawn Powell, a sharp 1931 comedy about young people freshly arrived in New York, dusted off for a world premiere by the Mint Theater Company.

James Thiérrée in BAM's Bright Abyss.   (Photo: Jack Vartoogian/Courtesy of BAM)

Best Physical Performer
James Thiérrée, the writer, director, and star of Bright Abyss, whose clowning and mime routines at BAM showed he would be a worthy heir to Charlie Chaplin even if the young Frenchman were not, in fact, his grandson.

Seascape's lizards.   (Photo: Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Philip Rinaldi Publicity)

Best Costume Designer
Catherine Zuber, whose classic clothing brightened the wonderful A Light in the Piazza, whose dazzling lizard suits stole the show in the so-so Seascape, and whose intricate work was the only good thing about In My Life.

Best Workaholic
Doug Hughes, who directed five shows in New York in 2005, including Doubt and A Touch of the Poet. It would’ve been a better year if he’d directed ten.

Best Voice
T. Ryder Smith. Without singing a note, this downtown star showed once again he’s got the most distinctive pipes in town. His delivery—low but a little creaky, piercing but resonant—sounds as if it’s been beamed forward in time from a Gothic novel, which made him equally suited to Richard Foreman’s loopy The Gods Are Pounding My Head! and Anne Washburn’s gnomic fright show Apparition. (And his acting’s just as astonishing.)

Best “I’m Still Here” Display
Chita Rivera, 72, dancing on tables and singing lightning-fast medleys in her new biographical spectacle, The Dancer’s Life.

Best First-Act Curtain
The twisty, shocking “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” story-within-a-story in ‘The Pillowman.’ The writer Katurian (Billy Crudup) narrates as backstage tableaux illustrate the horrors. When was the last time a Broadway audience screamed?