CRITICS RAVE FOR TONY KUSHNER’S
ANGELS IN AMERICA
AT SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY
Signature Theatre Company’s (Founding Artistic Director James Houghton; Executive Director Erika Mallin) production of Tony Kushner’s ANGELS IN AMERICA: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, opened last night at The Peter Norton Space (555 West 42nd Street). The first New York revival of Kushner’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play is directed by Michael Greif. The production, originally slated to run through December 19, has been extended a second time through February 20, 2011.
Here’s a sample of what critics had to say about Tony Kushner’s ANGELS IN AMERICA at Signature Theatre Company:
This Time, The Angel Is In the Details
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ben Brantley
October 29, 2010
“Signature’s warm embrace of a revival is glowingly acted. What “Angels” does as well as any play I know is create a visceral sense of public and private catastrophes as prisms of one another. The received wisdom about Mr. Kushner is that he is a great playwright. This production reminds us that he is also a good one, which as far as satisfying nights at the theater are concerned, may be more important.”
Return of Angels Welcome Indeed
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Mark Kennedy
October 29, 2010
“The great thing about a diamond is that it cannot be tarnished, by age or if put in the wrong hands. It can be remounted, the setting gussied up or stripped down, but the beauty remains. The Signature Theatre Company has just such a precious stone in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” an astonishing seven-hour epic whose power hasn’t dimmed since its two parts were first staged in the early 1990s. Director Michael Greif keeps it all moving at a stunning tempo.”
Angels returns in all its complexity
BERGEN RECORD
By Robert Feldberg
October 29, 2010
“After nearly 20 years, it’s clearer than ever that “Angels in America” is a great play. The reason isn’t easy to put your finger on. A work of wildly disparate elements, it’s almost more a matter of what you experience than what can be articulated. Tony Kushner’s epic, two-part drama about the decay of American life in the 1980s is being given an ambitious, vibrant revival by the Signature Theatre Company, under the sure-handed direction of Michael Greif.”
DAILY NEWS
By Joe Dziemianowicz
October 29, 2010
“Five stars (out of five)! The Signature Theatre Company has done it again. Although it seemed unlikely that they could match last year’s Horton Foote trilogy, “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” they’ve accomplished that with a dazzling revival of “Angels in America.” Credit playwright Tony Kushner for his heady and heartbreaking drama, and Michael Greif, a director who knows his way around complex works, for a gorgeous production. It’s great to see “Angels” fly so high and so potently again.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
By Melissa Bernardo
October 29, 2010
“Angels in America, which tackles the onset of AIDS in the Reagan era, journeys from Antarctica to Brooklyn to heaven, and pinballs between fantasy and reality — is too epic to be confined to a single play. Yet Tony Kushner’s Millennium Approaches and Perestroika (which earned a Pulitzer in 1993, back-to-back Best Play Tony awards, and virtual canonization) are being revived in, improbably enough, Off Broadway’s 160-seat Signature Theatre. Remarkably, Angels loses none of its grandeur in director Michael Greif’s revival. And the seven-hour production’s quieter moments shimmer with newfound intimacy and unspeakable beauty.”
AIDS Looms, Roy Cohn Dies as Kushner’s Angels Triumphs Again
BLOOMBERG NEWS
By Jeremy Gerard
October 29, 2010
“Four stars (out of four)! The Signature Theatre production showcases some of the best talent around, including Zoe Kazan, Christian Borle, Billy Porter and Frank Wood in a career-topping performance as the sneering, foul-mouthed, inexhaustibly mendacious Cohn. There is exceptional work from Kazan, who wrenchingly underscores Harper’s child/woman sides, and Porter, shifting seamlessly between the coaxing Mr. Lies and the combative yet compassionate Belize.”
Seven Ways of Looking at Angels
WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Terry Teachout
October 29, 2010
“Michael Greif’s staging is fierce and exact, that Mark Wendland’s compact double-turntable set is a miraculously efficient piece of design, that Wendall K. Harrington’s digital projections add immeasurably to the set’s spatial richness and that the cast is uniformly splendid, with Mr. Quinto, Mr. Wood (who looks eerily like Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of Roy Cohn in middle age) and the ever-amazing Ms. Kazan taking top honors.”
Angels in America rides the wings of relevance
USA TODAY
By Elysa Gardner
October 29, 2010
“Though set in the Reagan era, during the dark early years of the AIDS epidemic, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic — divided into two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika— evokes political and spiritual quandaries that transcend time and place. The difficulty of, and need for, tolerance of others’ perspectives and passions; the challenges posed by faith, love and progress — what issues could be more universal or more topical? Exploring all this over nearly seven hours, through interwoven stories that draw on history and fantasy, is a tantalizingly tall order. But this new production, which opened off-Broadway Thursday at Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space, is decidedly life-sized, emphasizing the humanity and vulnerability of each character.”
Filed under: ANGELS IN AMERICA, SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY | Tagged: angels in america, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY, TONY KUSHNER |
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