A Guide to Theater Shows That Say It All Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti in the Broadway musical "Once." You've been waiting all year to say it. But now 2012 is rolling to an end, and you still haven't found the words. This is when it's time to take advantage of both the holiday gift-giving season and God's great gift to the inarticulate: New York theater productions, written and performed by some of the most eloquent talents on this earth, who give voice to what you cannot - but need to - utter. What follows is a list of shows that speak volumes, while offering more festive, less clinical alternatives to couples counseling and family therapy. If you choose, you can include the italicized message that begins each entry in a gift card, but you probably won't find it necessary. If the recipient is at all sensitive to subtext, you'll find these shows do the talking for you quite nicely, thank you. Of course I love you, honey, but that doesn't mean I don't think about the one who got away, and don't tell me you don't do the same. The year's most original and inventive new musical, the Tony-winning "Once," tells the sweetly stinging story of a love affair that almost was in delicate folk-rock song and dance at the Jacobs Theater. A reminder that romantic regret has its own wistful charms and needn't be suppressed. We've got to stop talking about the kids so much in front of other people. The great cautionary tale of all time on why bringing up baby is perhaps not the best cocktail party fodder: Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," which has been given a spirited 50th-anniversary revival by the Steppenwolf Theater Company at the Booth Theater. Listen, Mom and Dad, I'd be a lot happier if you could stop reminding me that I haven't lived up to your expectations. The handsome revival of "The Heiress," starring Jessica Chastain and David Strathairn as a fatally mismatched father and daughter, elegantly demonstrates how openly expressed parental disappointment can backfire - and warp lives on both sides of the generation gap forever. At the Walter Kerr Theater. And you say I don't know how to tell a story? The tangled narrative web of the theme-park musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" is enough to make any anecdote fumbler look, by contrast, like the most sophisticated (and coherent) of raconteurs. At the Foxwoods Theater. You know, kids, you really don't need an Xbox to have fun. In telling the back story of the boy who became Peter Pan, "Peter and the Starcatcher," at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, creates a complete and beguiling fantasy world with a minimum of scenery technology, making a convincing case that the best special effects are the ones generated by a resourceful imagination. This is why I love musicals and will keep dragging you to them until you learn to love them too./That's why I hate musicals and will never go with you to one again. The juicy satirical revue "Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kicking" offers plenty of ammunition for either point of view, while serving equally tasty entertainment for both lovers and haters of song-and-dance shows, at the 47th Street Theater.