The Best Performances of 2024

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Midway through the A24 film “Sing Sing,” Divine G, an incarcerated man played with poise and panache by Colman Domingo, appears before a parole board. Divine G is the leading light of a prison theatre troupe, part of a real-life program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. “It’s something I’m very proud of,” he brags. “So, are you acting at all during this interview?” his skeptical inquisitor asks. Divine G’s face slowly falls. “Actually, that’s not the intention of acting,” he stammers. “Acting is just to, you know, process.” But he knows his cause is lost.

Domingo’s was one of many performances that struck me this year, whether on the stage or screen. In “Sing Sing,” he acts alongside actual veterans of the program, including Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, who participated in more than two dozen shows during a seventeen-year stint at Sing Sing. Watching Maclin seize the screen, you couldn’t possibly equate acting with lying; his performance is the ultimate form of truth-telling, because it shows how he learned the tools to reveal himself to us.

Looking back on a year’s worth of bravura turns, I thought about destiny: how a performer may wait for years to meet a golden moment. Usually, that doesn’t involve a prison term. But it may mean a character actor toiling in bit parts before getting an Oscar nomination in his mid-fifties, as Domingo did in January, for “Rustin.” Or a singer-songwriter whose début single, after thirty-five years, reincarnated into an unlikely country hit. Timing is everything. This year brought us Zoe Ziegler, at age twelve, playing the watchful, wary protagonist of “Janet Planet,” and June Squibb, at ninety-four, as the daredevil heroine of “Thelma.”

Below are ten performances that broke through the noise of this fractious, tumultuous year. They span disciplines and styles, from confessional drama to helium-balloon farce, from movie-star charisma to porcupine-like prickliness. The usual caveats apply: I consumed a lot, but not everything (catch you in 2025, “Industry”), and no list of ten can encompass everything that was worth watching. But these performances cheered me, provoked me, ensorcelled me, and helped me, you know, process.

Tracy Chapman at the Grammys

The country singer Luke Combs had a hit last year with his twangy cover of “Fast Car,” Chapman’s star-making ballad from 1988. In February, both singers duetted on the song at the Grammy Awards, where Combs’s version was nominated for Best Country Solo Performance. All this raised questions. Was the song, as uncategorizable as Chapman herself, really country? Or only when a good ol’ boy from North Carolina sings it? For five and a half blissful minutes, none of that mattered. Chapman was back, her locs speckled with white, her voice as lucid and knowing as ever. Combs gazed at her with fanboy reverence as they traded lyrics that told a poignant story of working-class dreams chased and squandered. (“Maybe together we can get somewhere.”) The duet gave the impression—as fleeting as that joyride in the fast car—that one great song could bridge America’s divisions. Even Taylor Swift was on her feet, singing along.

Honorable mention: When Céline Dion materialized beneath the Eiffel Tower, to close the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics with a rousing rendition of “Hymne à l’Amour,” she looked and sounded resplendent. It was all the more triumphant after a documentary had laid bare her struggle with stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disease.


Mikey Madison in “Anora”

Maybe you hadn’t caught Madison in the FX series “Better Things,” or had only vague memories of her roles in “Scream” or “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood.” But no one who sees Sean Baker’s film is likely to forget her. As a mouthy Brighton Beach stripper who takes up with the spoiled son of a Russian aristocrat—only to marry him, attract the attention of her father-in-law’s hapless thugs, and fight and kick and scratch her way to some kind of freedom—Madison takes this crowd-pleasing caper in her jaws and doesn’t let go. With her Brooklyn drawl and indomitable attitude, her Anora is someone you can’t dismiss, a tough cookie who won’t shut up when commanded. In the film’s stunning finale, she reveals the wounded heart beneath the grit. Like Anora, Madison made herself unignorable. At twenty-five, she’s now a top contender in the Best Actress race.

Honorable mention: In “Anora,” Madison is flanked by two outstanding young Russian actors: Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays her mop-topped paramour (I’m still laughing over his naked back flip), and Yura Borisov, as a henchman with surprising soul.


Richard Gadd in “Baby Reindeer”

The Scottish comedian premièred his autobiographical solo play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in 2019, and later won an Olivier Award for its run at a small theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. This April, a Netflix miniseries adaptation, which Gadd created, wrote, and starred in, became a phenomenon. Come fall, Gadd won three Emmys. The series braids his experiences as the target of a cheerful stalker, Martha, while bartending at a London pub, and as the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a male mentor. (A few months after it premièred, the “real Martha” sued Gadd for defamation.) What made the series so captivating was Gadd’s ruthless self-excavation, which exposed not just the pain he’d endured but the pain he’d inflicted. At times, his performance seemed almost too raw—particularly in one scene, of a standup gig turned public meltdown—but that rawness gave the series its potency.

Honorable mention: As Martha, Gadd’s co-star Jessica Gunning walked a tricky line between merriness and madness. She could be exuberant one minute, intimidating the next—but never so monstrous that we lost sight of her humanity.


Cole Escola in “Oh, Mary!”

Having followed Escola for years on the downtown cabaret scene, I was no stranger to their impish charms. (Sorry, Cole, this is the third time I’ve called you “impish” in The New Yorker.) But what a joy to see this singular comedic talent become the toast of Broadway, thanks to their tour de force as a boozy, stagestruck Mary Todd Lincoln. Part Charles Ludlam, part “I Love Lucy,” the show opened on Christopher Street in February and became the hottest ticket in town—even Spielberg showed up—then moved uptown over the summer, as Escola spread delightful lunacy wherever they roamed (including a spectral appearance at the Met Gala and a ride atop a flamingo at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade). Escola’s brazenly ahistorical Mary Todd is one of those devilish comic creations, such as Jiminy Glick or Pee-wee Herman, that seems less invented than sprung free, never to return.

Honorable mention: Another Broadway powerhouse playing a spotlight-hungry diva: Nicole Scherzinger, the former Pussycat Doll who plays Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Blvd.” When she blasts out Andrew Lloyd Webber’s power anthems, declaring that Norma is back and ready to be worshipped, we have no choice but to stand and obey. Just stay away from her Instagram account.


Jean Smart in “Hacks”

Smart has been on my list before, but what can I say? Each season of “Hacks” has made her character, Deborah Vance, more delicious, more complicated, more real—I have to remind myself that she’s fictional and not an actual standup legend I saw on a VHS tape of “Comic Relief” in 1986. In the Max show’s third season, Deborah is finally on the verge of snatching her lifelong dream—a late-night chair—but first she must confront how the world has changed, and how it hasn’t. “I can’t be woke. I’m exhausted,” she screams in the thrilling penultimate episode, after her problematic early material starts circulating during a campus visit. The exhaustion runs deep, as does her elation a few scenes later, when she finally gets her wish. Smart is a gift in this role. Keep throwing Emmys at her!



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