Archives for April 26, 2018

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfers of Travesties and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Here’s an excerpt.

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Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” in which James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, Dada’s founding father, share a stage to lunatic effect, was the unlikeliest Broadway semi-hit of 1975 (it ran for 156 much-discussed performances). Some theatergoers found “Travesties” impenetrably complex, but everybody had an opinion about it, and Mr. Stoppard was thereafter viewed on this side of the Atlantic as a man of consequence. Now he’s the greatest living English-speaking playwright, more or less, and “Travesties” is back on Broadway at last…

I couldn’t begin to summarize “Travesties” accurately in a review three times as long as this one. I’ll say only that it’s a whirligig variation on “The Importance of Being Earnest” in which Mr. Stoppard, having taken note of the unlikely but true fact that Messrs. Joyce, Lenin and Tzara (played here by Peter McDonald, Dan Butler, and Seth Numrich) were all in Zurich in 1917, uses that coincidence as the point of departure for a farce-flavored fantasy….

In addition to the Broadway transfer of the original Royal Shakespeare Theatre production, I’ve seen “Travesties” done twice, by New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in 2005 and Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre in 2014. All of those productions were extraordinarily fine, and so is this one, in which Tom Hollander is sensational as Henry Carr, the now-senile British diplomat in whose fast-disintegrating memory the events of “Travesties” take place…

Rarely has a show been less in need of good reviews, from me or anyone else, than “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the latest line extension of J.K. Rowling’s franchise of novels, films and theme parks, which has come to New York after a stupendously successful 2016 opening in London. This two-part, five-hour extravaganza is the most expensive non-musical production ever to open on Broadway, and every dollar of the $68.5 million ponied up by the producers is visible. The special effects are sensational, especially if you like theatrical “black magic,” and each one was dutifully applauded by the audiences at the previews I saw.

Beyond that, I can do no more than to warn those who care that “The Cursed Child” plays like a musical—most of the show is underscored and all of the putative song cues are self-evident—and might have been slightly more fun had it been one….

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To read my review of Travesties, go here.

To read my review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, go here.

A montage of scenes from Travesties:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, many shows sold out last week, alternating in repertory through July 1, reviewed here)
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Three Tall Women (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, closes June 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, most shows sold out last week, closes May 13, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, remounting of Two River Theater Company production, closes June 24, original production reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes June 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Miss You Like Hell (musical, PG-13, closes May 13, reviewed here)

“If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years, had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago