Domesticated dino
The baby dinosaur in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Skin of Our Teeth” is a sweetheart, domesticated as a dog. And in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s visually extravagant Broadway production at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, he was a puppet so enormous that he counted as one of the show’s several spectacles. When he and his mammoth pal — also a puppet, also designed by James Ortiz — came in from a ferocious cold snap to warm up in their human family’s living room, they were an endearing sight, wreaking benevolent havoc on the houseplants. Then the animals were ordered back outside, into the Ice Age, and the dinosaur gave a backward glance touched with innocence and doom — a more emotionally immediate argument about climate change than a thousand position papers.
LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Best Theater of 2022
In a time of renewed awakening, a surprising number of shows smartly reflected those changes in song.