Richard Rodgers Theater
New York
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“The most original drama written about the Iraq war” won’t be found in any art-house cinema, said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Risk-averse Broadway isn’t the first place anyone would look to find a daring, surreal story about an introspective tiger whose ghost roams a shattered Baghdad after being shot in its cage at the city’s zoo. But sometime after the 2009 debut of Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-nominated play, actor Robin Williams began championing it. Stepping into the title role for the production’s move from L.A. to New York, the veteran movie star plays the tiger in Iraqi street clothes and a woolly beard, and proves once again that he can “adapt his manic gifts” to new challenges. He anchors a show that will “challenge mainstream theatergoers” and leave many “profoundly moved.”
At least a few will simply be put off, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. While Joseph’s premise is “clever enough,” he’s created a world in which invading U.S. soldiers are no better than the despotic regime they’re fighting. From the opening scene, in which a “loutishly stupid” Marine shoots the tiger after it bites off the hand of his corrupt colleague, we’re in a world in which “everyone is no damn good.” One would think that special condemnation would be reserved for Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, who’s portrayed here before his death as a man who “tortures and kills because he feels like it.” But no: Uday’s former gardener, Musa, steps forward to tell us explicitly that his new American employers are just as tyrannical.
But Tiger really isn’t a “civics-lesson kind of a play,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. “Man and beast are depicted throughout with a fanciful humor” that still allows us to see the ways war brings out our “baser instincts.” Williams, though “quite funny,” emerges as the play’s conscience, trying at one point to atone for his “tigerness” as he worries that his very nature may be immoral. This “visionary” play does win some laughs. But unlike most Broadway fare, it also “asks us to think and feel like adults.”
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.