IN a year dominated by microwaved revivals and malfunctioning jukeboxes, the play really wasn't the thing in New York, despite the hopeful materializing on Broadway of Martin McDonagh's "Pillowman" and John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," mighty pillars embodying the dramas electric and orthodox, respectively. The players, on the other hand, offered an encouraging multitude of reasons to keep going to the theater, with an unusual strength in tight and bracing ensemble work. Here, five impeccably synchronized casts and five heroic standout performances.

Dream Teams

'GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS' Joe Mantello's caffeinated revival of David Mamet's 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner, a swift and merciless dissection of the art of office backstabbing, was the best boy's night out in ages. A glisteningly oily Liev Schreiber and a defensively hunched Alan Alda led an expert all-male corps in a bravura display of dog-eat-dog verbal acrobatics.

'HURLY BURLY' It's not easy finding the life force in being glazed, dazed and perpetually drugged. But Scott Elliott's revival of David Rabe's 1984 play about also-rans on the rim of the movie industry unleashed a revitalizing current in a glamorous group of stars that relished the opportunity to deglamorize themselves. Josh Hamilton provided the year's coolest, nastiest study in passive aggression, while Parker Posey and Ethan Hawke set a new standard for hyperkinetic foreplay.

'SPIRIT' A British import, seen all too briefly at the New York Theater Workshop, in which three ordinary-looking blokes (Guy Dartnell, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson) found a complex poetry in seemingly simple story telling, as they slid down and popped in and out of a precipitously sloped stage. A sly, sobering indictment of war and the boyish machismo that breeds it, all the more potent for its indirection, from the unstintingly imaginative Improbable Theater.

'SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET' They sing, they act, they shock you out of your senses - and they all play musical instruments! The cast of John Doyle's feverishly inventive reconception of Stephen Sondheim's and Hugh Wheeler's macabre 1977 musical might be subtitled "I Am My Own Orchestra." But having a gloriously fine-tuned cast - including Michael Cerveris as the title razor wielder and Patti LuPone as his partner in cannibalism - make its own music turned out to be much more than a clever gimmick. The device concentrates narrative control in ways that only enhanced the show's hypnotic hold on its audience.

'WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?' Edward Albee's masterpiece of marital warfare (from 1962) requires Olympic-level proficiency in thrusting and parrying. Anthony Page's funny, heartbreaking production delivered a gold-medal fencing team in Kathleen Turner, Bill Irwin, David Harbour and Mireille Enos, while making it clear that their characters are forever falling on their own foils. Emotional blood sport of the highest order.

Celestial Star Turns

VICTORIA CLARK IN 'LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA' As a North Carolina matron in 1950's Rome, this little-known actress injects a Jamesian complexity into the Lincoln Center Theater production of Adam Guettel's and Craig Lucas's lushly romantic musical about American guilt and innocence abroad, based on Elizabeth Spencer's novel. Singing of the varied shades of love newborn and dying, Ms. Clark uncovers a piercing emotional precision in Mr. Guettel's intricate melodies.

REBECCA HALL IN 'AS YOU LIKE IT' The fresh-faced, gracefully gawky daughter of the leonine director Sir Peter Hall more than justified her father's casting her as Shakespeare's Rosalind, a role that demands more than the glow of youth to captivate. In a visiting British production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ms. Hall infused the usual pluck of this cross-dressing heroine with a touchingly fearful awareness of the dangers of love in a world of betrayals. She became the perfect prismatic center for a production that sought out the shadows in the Forest of Arden.

ANTONY SHER IN 'PRIMO' In this taut adaptation of "If This Is a Man," Primo Levi's memoir of life in German extermination camps during World War II, Sir Antony delivered a master class in compelling understatement. Directed by Richard Wilson, this actor turned memory into a physical process that shaped every syllable and every gesture in his one-man portrait of the moral and emotional toll of survival, a production of the National Theater of Britain.

LOIS SMITH IN 'A TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL' Making full and canny use of the bluest pair of eyes on a New York stage, Ms. Smith opens windows onto the radiant interior life of an elderly Texas country woman claustrophobically trapped in the city. Horton Foote's tale of the old woman's escape, from 1953, assumes new urgency and pathos thanks to Ms. Smith's in-the-moment performance in Harris Yulin's loving production for the Signature Theater Company.

JOHN LLOYD YOUNG IN 'JERSEY BOYS' Who'd a thunk that the theatrical find in the year would surface in a crowd-pleaser about the career of the pop group the Four Seasons? But playing Frankie Valli, the Seasons' lead singer, Mr. Young crosses the line from spot-on surface impersonation into genuine depths of character. Even wailing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," he generates a soul-plumbing intensity that makes "Jersey Boys" a Broadway rarity: a jukebox to remember.