Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago, closes Feb. 13 and reopens in Washington, D.C. Feb. 25). Tracy Letts, the author of August: Osage County, stars in a stunningly direct and unadorned production of Edward Albee’s best play, backed up by a perfect ensemble cast and directed with precision and simplicity by Pam MacKinnon. I saw it a week too late to cram it into my best-of-the-year list, but you can be it’ll be there come 2011 (TT).

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (Joyce, 175 Eighth Ave., closes Jan. 2). The Trocks are an all-male ballet company whose “women” dance in drag. Sometimes they do the classics more or less straight, sometimes they dance brilliantly witty parodies, and sometimes they do out-of-left-field works like Merce Cunningham’s Patterns in Space, which is on the first of the two programs that they’re dancing during their current New York season. No matter what they’re doing, the results are at once uproariously funny and mysteriously illuminating. To spend an evening with the Trocks is to think twice–or more–about what ballet is and how it works. Very strongly recommended, even to those who (like me) are usually allergic to drag acts (TT).

The Busch Quartet, Beethoven: The Late String Quartets (EMI Classics, three CDs). If you read my recent Wall Street Journal column about Adolf Busch and the Nazis and want to hear how this courageous artist made music, the place to start is EMI’s collection of the Busch Quartet’s legendary 78-era recordings of Beethoven’s last six string quartets, which is available on CD or as a digital download. The playing may strike contemporary listeners as less than ideally polished, but the interpretations are uniquely penetrating, and Busch’s violin playing combines forthrightness and Innigkeit in a way that no one has rivaled, before or since. Warning: don’t expect state-of-the-art sound (TT).

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, $30). An extraordinarily compelling history of a disease that once was unmentionable and is now a national obsession. Mukherjee’s theme is the way in which the preternaturally stubborn resolve of generation after generation of cancer researchers has led them to make great scientific discoveries–then prevented them from seeing the flaws in their theories that are discovered by their successors. Sobering and splendidly well written (TT).

Play Dead (Players, 115 MacDougal). An off-Broadway spook show concocted by Teller (Penn Jillette’s silent partner) in collaboration with Todd Robbins, who tells the more-or-less true stories of a serial killer, two phony mediums, a geek (look it up) and a murder victim whom Robbins knew in real life. During and in between these narratives, things…happen. The nature of these grisly occurrences can best be summarized by saying that the white suit worn by Robbins grows steadily redder throughout the evening. Great fun for anyone who likes magic and stage blood, and ideal for kids who are not–repeat, not–highly impressionable (TT).

Coleman Hawkins, To Be or Not to Bop (Wnts). The first great jazz saxophonist was also one of a handful of swing-era giants who successfully embraced bebop, both on and off record. This new mp3-only downloadable collection contains twenty-two of the bop-and-bop-flavored 78 sides that Hawkins recorded in the mid-to-late-Forties with such then-youngsters as Dizzy Gillespie, J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Howard McGhee, Fats Navarro, Oscar Pettiford, and Max Roach, including the premiere recordings of “I Mean You,” “Salt Peanuts” and “Woody’n You.” It’s the first time that Hawkins’ key bop recordings have been released in a single-source anthology. Listen and marvel at his ability to ride the wave of a radically innovative new jazz style (TT).

Sargent and Impressionism (Adelson Galleries, 19 E. 82, closes Saturday). Two dozen-plus paintings and watercolors in which John Singer Sargent, who befriended Monet and looked closely at his work, dabbled in the then-revolutionary language of French impressionism, almost always to striking (if not quite idiomatic) effect. Guaranteed to open the eyes of those who think of Sargent purely as as a high-society portraitist (TT).

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Hallmark). You never know until you look. The much-coveted Columbia Masterworks double-LP set of the original 1956 Broadway production of the most influential play of the twentieth century–complete and unabridged–was sneaked into print earlier this year as an mp3-only download. Now you can hear Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall, Kurt Kasznar, and Alvin Epstein (the last of whom is, glory be, still with us!) performing Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece with supreme, sublime theatricality. No program notes, alas, so to read about how the Herbert Berghof-directed production took shape, read the relevant chapter in Notes on a Cowardly Lion, John Lahr’s wonderful 1969 biography of his father–but do that later. Right now, go straight to your computer, download this album at once, and listen to what the Cowardly Lion made of Estragon. The price? $3.56. Believe me, you’re never going to get a better deal on anything as long as you live (TT).