The Theater: The Year’s Best

SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR. A disarming, conjugal comedy of adultery on a 25-year plan. A first play by Bernard Slade, who belongs to la scuola Neil Simon.

THE TAKING OF MISS JANIE. Playwright

Ed Bullins, black by birth and bold in theme, constructs a hot, sly, funny, sexy, drunken montage of black-white confrontation.

CHICAGO. A corrosive dance of decadence that Bob Fosse has choreographed into an electrifying musical, helped no end by Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach.

TRAVESTIES. Playwright Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers) spews wit, wordplay, paradox and thought like tracer bullets, and, in a performance of indelible virtuosity, John Wood sees that every bullet is dead on target.

KENNEDY’S CHILDREN. A perceptive replay of the ’60s and how one generation of U.S. youngsters hoped, doped, marched, raged and finally despaired. John Kennedy is never the subject of the play but a metaphor for the decade.

A CHORUS LINE. Michael Bennett, a brilliantly disciplined choreographer, gives the anonymous members of the chorus a brief sunburst of glory and a long bear hug of love.

HABEAS CORPUS. The middle-aged hero of this achingly funny farce studies lechery like a college course, but he gets nary an A for carnal knowledge. In key roles, Donald Sinden and Rachel Roberts convey randy frustration and purvey music hall bawdry.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN. George C.

Scott’s monumental performance added a new and powerful dimension to this classic and revealed aspects of Willy Loman never seen before.

LAMPPOST REUNION. A visceral bar-buddy reunion on the order of That Championship Season. The hero, possibly patterned on Frank Sinatra, is given tigerish animal magnetism by Gabriel Dell.

THE NORMAN CONQUESTS. Love is never saying no, according to Alan Ayckbourn’s comic monster Norman, whose ravenous libido reduces not one but three evenings to a riotous shambles of reluctant yes-women.