‘RICHARD III’ Shakespeare’s anatomy of a head of state as a psychopathic narcissist has never seemed as immediate or as terrifying as it did in Thomas Ostermeier’s Berlin-born production, starring Lars Eidinger as a seductively jokey madman next door. Imported by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this was a spook house for grown-ups that transformed medieval England into a Land of Id that feels all too close to the here and now.

‘SPRINGSTEEN ON BROADWAY’ A man who packs stadiums with his high-voltage rock performances turns down the volume — but not the intensity — to reflect on American life as he’s known it through seven decades. Drawing from his own songbook (and published memoir), Mr. Springsteen exudes a dark but cozy Everyman omniscience that suggests a latter-day equivalent to the paternal Stage Manager of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

‘SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE’ Sarna Lapine’s revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1980s classic about the painter Georges Seurat and his 20th-century descendant, starring a magnificent Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, registered as the ultimate affirmation of the power of art to distill, shape and transcend life’s daily anarchy. Seurat’s invocation of “design, composition, balance, light and harmony” felt like the perfect summing up of why art matters more than ever in times of tumult.

Jesse Green

The 7.5 plays and 2.5 musicals on my Top 10 list (presented in chronological order) were not all perfect or even enjoyable in the conventional sense, but helped re-establish equilibrium between the outer world in which bad things happen and the inner world where we worry alone. They felt rudely intrusive: not like escapes or pandering exhortations but, even at their most playful, urgent invitations to act.

‘ESCAPED ALONE’ Four late-middle-aged English women sit yakking away a summer afternoon in a fenced-in backyard. In the hands of Caryl Churchill, banality like this is more than enough to gut you, as their palaver is interrupted by bulletins from a dystopian (and oddly Dada) future. Calamity, Ms. Churchill demonstrates, is not what happens later but what has always been happening, just subliminally enough to make it commonplace.