Killers, Queens & Teens Top Broadway.com's Five Best London Performances in 2014

London offered a veritable feast of fine acting on stages large and small in 2014, whether in time-honored theatrical chestnuts (Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit) or bracing new plays (Russell Tovey at the Royal Court in The Pass). Fine as all these men and women were and are, below are the five performances from the year that linger most in our minds.


HELEN MCCRORY IN MEDEA
This wonderful actress has shone before in plays as different as Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive and Harold Pinter’s Old Times, but her modern-dress Medea at the National Theatre was something else: a rampaging figure of vengeance whose fury simply would not be quenched. McCrory’s scorned wife suggested an ordinary woman overtaken by an extraordinary need to right the wrongs done to her by her adulterous husband Jason. We’ve seen numerous Medeas over time, including Zoe Caldwell, Diana Rigg, Fiona Shaw and more; McCrory was the best.


MARK STRONG IN A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
There was a distinct element of Greek tragedy to director Ivo van Hove’s scorching take on Arthur Miller’s eternally powerful play at the Young Vic, with Strong back on the London stage for the first time in a dozen years following an extended sojourn into film. Playing the Brooklyn longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, who is taken over by desires he can’t begin to comprehend, the actor was both mesmeric and terrifying in his torment. The production transfers to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End in February, with Strong along for a highly visceral ride.


AARON TVEIT IN ASSASSINS
Tveit's performance as the show's central killer, Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth, puts the Broadway veteran at the chillingly magnetic center of the Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's haunting musical. With elan, style and gravitas, Tveit offers a London stage debut to remember in a show we are unlikely soon to forget.


EVA NOBLEZADA IN MISS SAIGON
We were at the 1989 premiere of the Boublil/Schonberg musical, so we can attest first-hand to the fact that the American teenager in her professional stage debut finds even more in the role of the doomed Kim—greater sexual yearning, for one thing—than did the part’s originator, Tony winner Lea Salonga, a quarter-century ago. Noblezada, who was plucked from North Carolina to make her professional stage debut in the musical blockbuster, is taking her first flush of stardom in stride and giving a memorable and heartrending performance.


EVE BEST IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
We hear in Shakespeare’s grand and sprawling play of Cleopatra’s “infinite variety,” which is just one way of summing up two-time Tony nominee Best’s achievement in the role, which capped an impressive summer of work at Shakespeare’s Globe. Funny and sexy, accessible but also every inch a queen, Best looked as if she was having the time of her life on the Globe stage and, as a result, the audience did, too.