Bigger and better and a bit majestic

Well, some things do change. Even in Boston. The Red Sox are world champions, the first time since 1918. And Boston has two new buildings constructed for theater, the first since 1929 -- both housed under the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion roof at the Boston Center for the Arts.

It only took the combined efforts of the Huntington Theatre Company, the BCA, the City of Boston, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and developer Ron Druker to bring the Virginia Wimberly Theatre and the Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre into existence. The 360-seat Wimberly is home to the Huntington's second stage, and it's a handsome, comfortable room that gives Nicholas Martin and his charges a chance to expand the Huntington's horizons. Its first outing, ''Sonia Flew," was a critical and commercial success.

The jury is still out on the Roberts. SpeakEasy Stage Company has produced two plays in the more flexible 200-seat theater. Even if the singing wasn't universally first-rate, ''Company" showed that SpeakEasy is ready to take its act to a higher level in terms of stagecraft. But ''Johnny Guitar" would probably have been more at home at the older, more intimate space at the BCA.

Boston also welcomed the Opera House back into the theater family with a fine touring production of ''The Lion King." There's too much Disney sentimentality in the show, but the Julie Taymor touches were almost as majestic here as in New York, and Broadway in Boston did a wonderful job in bringing the glorious old building back to life.

With new stages coming to Cambridge and Watertown in 2005, the area continues to become more of a theater city. The past year didn't see much in the way of innovation in theater but did see theaters doing what they've done well a bit better.

Both the New Repertory Theatre (which is moving to a new arts center in Watertown) and the Lyric Stage Company have had major successes with chamber musicals the last few years, but none more stunning than ''The Threepenny Opera" at the New Rep and ''A Little Night Music" at the Lyric, both of which broke box office records at the theaters.

I've seen a number of productions of ''The Threepenny Opera" and had all but despaired that anyone could recapture the excitement that must have been percolating when the Brecht-Weill musical premiered in 1928, but artistic director Rick Lombardo's updated production featuring a cast of great singers found the razor's edge.

Spiro Veloudos, artistic director at the Lyric, has made a specialty out of getting to the emotional core of Stephen Sondheim's music, which he did again here with another fine cast featuring Maryann Zschau, Christopher Chew, Drew Poling and Leigh Barrett, who was also an amazing Pirate Jenny in ''Threepenny."

The American Repertory Theatre continues to thrive artistically under the troika that replaced Robert Brustein. The ART has never been everyone's cup of tea, particularly those who don't like to see the classics radically reenvisioned. But if you do feel there's validity in making the director as much the author as the playwright, then you have to give credit to the ART for finding such a glittering array of auteur directors. There were sterling adaptations of John Vanbrugh's ''The Provok'd Wife" (Mark Wing-Davey), Moliere's ''The Miser" (Dominique Serrand) and Shakespeare's ''A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Martha Clarke), but none was better than artistic director Robert Woodruff's political take on Sophocles's ''Oedipus."

The Huntington, meanwhile, under Martin put its money where its mouth was in terms of supporting local playwrights. The opening production at the Wimberly, ''Sonia Flew," showcased Melinda Lopez in spectacular fashion, making her take on the Cuban diaspora both cogent and compelling. And if the Huntington is now furthering the careers of local writers like Lopez, most of them can thank Kate Snodgrass and the Boston Playwrights' Theatre (like the Huntington, affiliated with Boston University) for giving them the tools to be worthy of the spotlight.

Lopez and other Snodgrass alumni had their plays produced here and in other cities this past year, notably Ronan Noone, whose first part of the Baile Breag trilogy, ''The Lepers of Baile Breag," got good notices in New York while the Sugan Theatre Company's ''The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Breag" showed Noone's ability to develop his voice while drawing on a vocabulary rich in theatrical tradition.

Does Ryan Landry,whose all-male twists on the classics with the Gold Dust Orphans, such as his take on ''Cat on a Hot Roof" -- ''Pussy on the House" -- belong in this company? I couldn't tell; I was laughing too hard to take notes.

Many of the premieres that came from out of town were less than we'd hoped for, like Michael Weller's ''Approaching Moomtaj" at the New Rep. But one that didn't disappoint was ''The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," which had its world premiere at the Barrington Stage Company in Sheffield. This is the latest musical written by William Finn. But it is Rachel Sheinkin's book, which allowed audience members to play along with the cast -- adults dressed as children -- that was particularly affecting, and hilarious. It's hard to see how the upcoming New York production could be any better.

And it was another great year for Mr. Will. In addition to Clarke's Freudian take on ''A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the ART, there was an enormously promising debut by the Actors' Shakespeare Project, with many of the state's best Shakespeareans appearing in ''Richard III" at the Old South Meeting House; excellent comedies at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox (''The Comedy of Errors" and ''As You Like It"); and a rollicking ''Merry Wives of Windsor" at Trinity Repertory Company, which also produced three plays under the banner of ''The Henriad" -- ''Richard II," ''Henry IV," and ''Henry V." My colleague Louise Kennedy called the trio ''a beautifully conceived and powerfully realized sequence" of plays.

Not all of the action was onstage. A major book by Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, ''Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare," and a terrific BBC series shown on PBS, Michael Wood's ''In Search of Shakespeare," were rich in speculation, but nonetheless added greatly to how we see his life in relation to his art. And both make it abundantly clear who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.