Theater: Best of '88: Theater

CHESS London's frantic multimedia hit was rewritten for Broadway as a tender, doom-struck musical meditation on how East-West politics crush individuals. Trevor Nunn's trademark cinematic staging gave narrative clout to the best rock score ever produced for the theater.

THE COCKTAIL HOUR Playwright A.R. Gurney is at his peak in this charming Wasp family comedy about a writer's relatives yearning for privacy, transplanted intact from San Diego's Old Globe. Nancy Marchand glows as the slightly sozzled matriarch.

DINNER AT EIGHT The classic dawn-of-the-Depression satire was hauntingly revived by New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. A superb cast of 24 included Elizabeth Wilson as the pathetic social climber and Charles Keating as the broken-down actor immortalized on film by John Barrymore.

EASTERN STANDARD Insider trading, bag ladies, AIDS and nouvelle cuisine -- everything '80s gets skewered, then sentimentalized, in this stylishly acted and wittily observed Broadway satire spawned at the Seattle Repertory.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe adapted Steinbeck's novel of the Dust Bowl into an absorbing three-hour docudrama marked by ruthless unsentimentality about the Joad clan, clinging haplessly and disastrously to folk wisdom and totemic faith in the family.

KING LEAR At the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario, director Robin Phillips and star William Hutt brilliantly reinterpreted the title role as a dotard whose authority has long faded and whose daughters' stern discipline is common sense in the face of senility.

M. BUTTERFLY Politics makes the strangest of bedfellows in this operatically showy and entrancingly acted Broadway drama, based on the real-life romance between a transvestite Chinese opera performer (B.D. Wong) and a French diplomat (originated by John Lithgow) who believes his love is a real woman.

MIRACOLO D'AMORE Clowns and choruses, nudes and birdsong enlivened Martha Clarke's surreal fantasy of love and violence, a montage of painterly and powerful images first seen at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A., in Charleston, S.C.

NOTHING SACRED George F. Walker wryly adapted Turgenev's Fathers and Sons so that student anarchism in 1860s Russia paralleled the polemics of Marxist collegians in 1960s America. Tom Hulce (Amadeus) starred in the first of a raft of U.S. stagings, at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum.

SPOILS OF WAR In Michael Weller's poignant memoir, off-Broadway and briefly on it, Kate Nelligan gave the performance of the year as an Auntie Mame mom, mingling furtive boozing and strutting glamour, dignity and desperation.