10 The Normal Heart (Off Broadway) Twenty years later, many imagined that Larry Kramer's scorching screed about the early days of the AIDS crisis would play like a period piece. Instead, director David Esbjornson's revival revealed the play as a work of wrenching political theater that has lost none of its power to move an audience to tears and outrage. As Kramer's brilliant, vain, maddening alter ego Ned Weeks, Raúl Esparza added another knockout performance to what's fast becoming the most impressive résumé of any young stage actor in New York.
THE WORST
1 Dracula (Broadway) All the ''suck'' puns in the world are not sufficient to condemn this desiccated corpse of a Frank Wildhorn show, which will mercifully fold up its cape Jan. 2. From the sound of it, the Jekyll & Hyde composer simply left the synthesizer idling while he went out for coffee. In its defense, leads Tom Hewitt and Melissa Errico do play dead rather convincingly.
2 The Ten Commandments (Los Angeles) Locusts, boils, frogs, hail, and death of the firstborn are easy. This show was hard. The limitations of stunt casting were evident in a sung-through show featuring a pitch-plagued star (Val Kilmer) under so much facial hair that only the first few rows could be sure it was him. But Moses himself couldn't have saved this flop.
3 Embedded (Off Broadway) Actor-turned-writer (actually, ''writer'' may be putting it too strongly) Tim Robbins' take on the war in Iraq was so smug, smirky, ham-handed, and banal that if we didn't know better, we'd swear he was part of a right-wing conspiracy to make left-wing political art look bad.
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