This year’s Ten Best List might be called “Lahr’s Last Huzzah.” When I began as Senior Critic, in 1992, the second show I reviewed was Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing,” in Chicago. Odets seemed to me a woefully overlooked major writer. Over the decades, I’ve also reviewed Odets’s “Flowering Peach,” “The Country Girl,” and written a Critic at Large about him. The last show of my twenty-year New Yorker joyride was Odets’s “Golden Boy”—Lincoln Center’s masterly production which indisputably puts Odets in the pantheon of great twentieth-century playwrights. In a good theatregoing year, you’re lucky to get one production of such exhilarating high quality; this year, I got two—the second being Mike Nichols’s inspired revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” They share first place…

Click-through for John Lahr on the top 10 plays of 2012: http://nyr.kr/SiLv9F

I Hate Top Ten Lists

At base, I object to any system that makes me feel like a store clerk in “High Fidelity.” Those guys are not my guys. I mean, I don’t follow basketball statistics. I watch the Oscars for the starlet meltdowns and I don’t expect the “best movie” to be the best movie. I black out when I try to calculate the tip. Please don’t make me tell you the best television show of the year.

Although the answer is obviously _______

- Click through to read TV Critic Emily Nussbaum’s answer, and more on why she hates top ten lists: http://nyr.kr/uXo7bC