John Freedman looks back at singing doctors, power-crazed kings, oafish bureaucrats and other highlights of the 2005-06 theater season

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ALIEN OBJECT: Film or television screens on stage. One even began to wonder if theater artists had given up and admitted that theater can't express what cinema can. (See Trend of the Year.) Everybody was using film projections in their shows. Roman Kozak did it in Oleg Bogayev's The Maiden Spring, or Marya's Field at the Pushkin; Veniamin Smekhov did it in Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide at the National Youth Theater; Kirill Serebrennikov did it in The Golovlyovs at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater; Nina Chusova did it in Amerika, Part II at the Sovremennik; Andrii Zholdak did it in his production of Phaedra: The Golden Colossus at the Theater of Nations and almost every single director did it in almost every single show at the Praktika Theater. For goodness' sake, even Kama Ginkas, a true believer in theater's antipathy to modern technology, did it in A Ridiculous Poem at the Theater Yunogo Zritelya. If you made theater this year, there is a very good chance you enlisted the powers of film to help you. ...

CLASSIC CLASSIC: Kirill Serebrennikov's adaptation of Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin's bitter 19th-century satiric novel The Golovyovs at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. This tale about a family degrading into irrelevance and senility was epic drama in the grand Russian tradition. And it was every minute a dynamic, vigorous contemporary work. It had great acting, a great set (thanks to Nikolai Simonov), and it was directed with power and vision. ...

BEST ACTRESS: There are three finalists this year, and there is no way I am going to try to distinguish one's excellence from another's brilliance. So let's congratulate three winners: Maria Mironova as Vera Pavlova in Phaedra: The Golden Collosus at the Theater of Nations; Alla Pokrovskaya as Anna Petrovna Golovlyova in The Golovlyovs at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater; and Yelena Lyadova as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Theater Yunogo Zritelya. Mironova was heartbreakingly disquieting as a woman wracked by the torture of passion lost. Pokrovskaya was magisterial as the matriarch of a family descending into chaos and senility. Lyadova was tough, earthy, wise and forgiving as the young woman who induces Stanley to howl like a wolf at the moon.

NO SECOND FIDDLE: Aleksei Kravchenko as Pavel Golovlyov in The Golovyovs; Nikolai Ivanov as Ivan Karamazov in A Ridiculous Poem at the Theater Yunogo Zritelya; and Mikhail Porechenkov as Polonius in Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theater. There are times when supporting or"secondary" roles are anything but secondary in importance. Kravchenko, Ivanov and Porechenkov did not play leads, but each turned in stunning work that at times made their characters seem like the focus of the shows they played in. ...