Theater: Best of ’86: Theater

BIG DEAL Bob Fosse’s sinuous choreography and inspired staging of classic songs — including a sardonic, syncopated chain-gang rendering of Ain’t We Got Fun — highlighted a witty, rueful and all too short-lived musical about bumbling burglars and reluctant romance in Depression-era Chicago.

BROADWAY BOUND Jokemeister Neil Simon has proved himself an artist in the trilogy that began with Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. He reaches a pinnacle in this comic yet unflinching reflection on his parents’ troubled marriage and the psychic origins of his own career.

EMILY Stephen Metcalfe’s farce at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater slyly sent up contemporary mores and materialism. Madolyn Smith’s beguiling performance gave the self-absorbed yuppie title character an unlikely likability.

FENCES In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson launched a cycle about black life in each decade of the century. His new work, mounted by the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Chicago and Seattle and scheduled for Broadway in March, depicts a baseball player turned sanitation worker in the 1950s. James Earl Jones has his most exciting role since The Great White Hope.

FIGARO GETS A DIVORCE Odon von Horvath’s 1937 satire about an ousted dictator got a dazzling U.S. premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego. Director Robert Woodruff interpolated sly references to the Marcos and Somoza clans, and his expressionistic staging throbbed with energy.

THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES John Guare’s zany yet compassionate portrait of losers who live in awe of celebrities is having an impeccable Broadway . revival. Swoosie Kurtz’s mad housewife was the performance of the year.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Jonathan Miller’s swift, funny rendering of an often lugubrious work was not so much a revival as a rediscovery. It proved that O’Neill’s lyric family tragedy can work as gritty naturalism.

ME AND MY GIRL Effervescent, corny and completely irresistible, this 1937 British musical about a Cockney turned lord has conquered Broadway. Robert Lindsay’s seemingly matchless star turn is gloriously rivaled by his once and future successor, Jim Dale.

RUM AND COKE Keith Reddin, who was four years old during the Bay of Pigs invasion, sensitively evoked its tragicomic excesses and catastrophic outcome for Cuban exiles and American scions of privilege and for the Government they both served.

WILD HONEY Chekhov’s first play, shrewdly revamped by Michael Frayn.