Waiting for Godot at the always excellent Court Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dunsinane at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Moby Dick at the Lookingglass Theatre were the best of my 2015 theater experiences. In a year that included Shannon Cochran in Little Foxes, the unsettling but superbly acted Never the Sinner, the wildly offbeat Pilgrim’s Progress (one of the hottest tickets in the city), two Q Brothers’ productions, and my second time seeing The Book of Mormon, that is saying volumes. The finest performances of the year were Christopher Donahue as Ahab in Moby Dick, Mike Nussbaum as Gregory Solomon in The Price, and Lance Baker as Mr. Van Daan and O’Neill in Anne Frank and 1984, respectively. Again, singling out these actors when one considers Cochran as the imperious Regina Gidden, Alfred H. Wilson and Allen Gilmore as, respectively, Estragon and Vladimir, and Karen Janes Woditsch as Sister Aloysius in Doubt, is high, high praise.

■ Waiting for Godot (January; Court Theatre)
■ Dunsinane (March; Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
■ The Book of Mormon (March; Broadway in Chicago: Bank of America Theatre)
■ The Good Book (March; Court Theatre)
■ Les Miserables (March; Paramount Theatre)
■ The Little Foxes (May; Goodman Theatre)
■ Sense and Sensibility (May; Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
■ Doubt (June; Writers Theatre)
■ The Diary of Anne Frank (July; Writers Theatre)
■ Moby Dick (July; Lookingglass Theatre)
■ Q Gents (August; Illinois Shakespeare Festival)
■ Grand Concourse (August; Steppenwolf Theatre)
■ The Price (September; TimeLine Theatre)
■ East of Eden (September; Steppenwolf Theatre)
■ The Tempest (October; Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
■ 1984 (October; Steppenwolf Theatre)
■ Agamemnon (November; Court Theatre)
■ Never the Sinner (November; Victory Gardens Theater)
■ Pilgrim’s Progress (December; A Red Orchid Theatre)
■ Fallen Angels (December; Remy Bumppo Theatre Company)
■ Treasure Island (December; Lookingglass Theatre)
■ A Q Brothers’ Christmas Carol (December; Chicago Shakespeare Theater)

I also thoroughly enjoyed the following cinema broadcasts:

■ Aida (July; The Met: Live in HD (Fathom Events))
■ Hamlet (October; National Theatre Live (Cinema Broadcast))
■ The Winter’s Tale (November; Kenneth Branagh Theatre Live (Cinema Broadcast))
■ Coriolanus (December; National Theatre Live (Cinema Broadcast))