Just before actor-artistic director Avi Hoffman pulled the plug on Boca Raton's New Vista Theatre Company, the leaders of two of the region's most celebrated companies revealed plans to relocate. Joseph Adler will move GableStage into the to-be-rebuilt Coconut Grove Playhouse, and Louis Tyrrell will take Florida Stage north to West Palm Beach's Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

Providing some of the year's best theatergoing experiences were Les Miserables at Actors' Playhouse, Marco Ramirez's BroadSword at Mad Cat Theatre Company, Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius at New Theatre, David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow and Neil LaBute's Reasons To Be Pretty at GableStage, Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone and Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at Mosaic Theatre. And Erik Fabregat, who was fabulous as a Moliere-inspired Elvis in Mad Cat's Viva Bourgeois and a Looney Tunes interrogator in Mosaic's Why Torture Is Wrong.

TOP FIVE

1. Tarell Alvin McCraney: The Miami playwright continues to make waves with his Brother/Sister Plays trilogy, produced in repertory to great acclaim at New Jersey's McCarter Theatre, New York's Public Theater and, coming up in January, at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. He also was honored with the first Steinberg Playwright Award and is International Playwright in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. And his work still hasn't been produced in Miami.

2. Antonio Amadeo: One of South Florida's busiest, finest actors added to his list of great performances, appearing in Dead Man's Cell Phone and Rock 'n' Roll at Mosaic Theatre and Steven Dietz's Yankee Tavern at Florida Stage. He also survived another year of running Naked Stage's 24-Hour Theatre Project and designed a way-cool set for Naked's production of Ramirez's latest, Macon City: A Comic Book Play.

3. Women go solo: April Yvette Thompson, who mined childhood stories to perform her solo show Liberty City at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, and Lela Elam, intensely engaging as she tackled multiple roles in Nilaja Sun's No Child at GableStage, demonstrated just how dramatically powerful one woman can be.

4. Vices: A Love Story: Clive Cholerton kicked off his promising tenure as successor to founding artistic director Michael Hall at the 34-year-old Caldwell Theatre Company with the world premiere of a sexy, smashing dance-theater piece that will certainly have a life beyond Boca Raton.

5. Touring titans: Of all the touring Broadway shows that occupied the stages of Miami's Arsht Center, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts and the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, the two best -- by far -- were Jersey Boys (the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons story that redeems the jukebox genre) at the Broward Center and The Color Purple (based on Alice Walker's famous novel) at the Arsht. Both return this spring: Jersey Boys plays the Kravis March 10-28, and Color Purple visits the Broward Center April 6-18.