November 28, 2006

Stoppard's Utopian 'Voyage' a huge hit with critics

Nearly unanimously, the critics are falling over themselves to praise Tom Stoppard's "Voyage," Part I of "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy, which opened on Broadway last night.

The three-play drama about Russian philosophy, literature and mostly, ideas, opens in 1835 with a sprawling cast including Billy Crudup, Ethan Hawke, Brian F. O'Byrne, Martha Plimpton, Amy Irving, Jennifer Ehle, Richard Easton, Josh Hamilton, David Harbour and Jason Butler Harner. It's directed by Jack O'Brien and the sets, by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask, are appropriately awe-inspiring and epic.

Part II, "Shipwreck," and Part III, "Salvage," have not yet begun previews. "The Coast of Utopia" plays through March 10 at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, located at 150 West 65th St., map.

The reviews:

New York Times - "It isn’t simply the industriously employed revolving stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where the play opened last night, that gives the heady sense of an entire culture about to spin off its axis. As directed by Jack O’Brien and performed with freshness and vigor by an immense and starry cast led by Ethan Hawke and Billy Crudup, “Voyage” pulses with the dizzying, spring-green arrogance and anxiety of a new generation moving as fast as it can as it tries to forge a future that erases the past."

Variety - "O'Brien, his cast and creative team have set themselves a formidably high standard with "Voyage." If they can maintain it in "Shipwreck" and "Salvage," New York will have another theatrical epic to stand in terms of magnitude, ambition and achievement alongside such milestones as "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Angels in America.""

Daily News - "Like any Stoppard play, "Voyage" is brainy and complex. There's talk of art, philosophy, politics, love and morality. Not all of it is scintillating. Nor do we come to care about the characters, even as they die or are exiled. That's a problem. "Voyage" ultimately feels less like a cohesive story than a series of snapshots. But the snapshots are impressive."

Post - " But forget what you may have heard about the plays: There is no required reading list, only a willingness to accept art as wondrously disordered as life. Stoppard has hit upon an enthralling, little-known story and deftly welded it into a soap opera for the thinking classes. "

Associated Press - "If Stoppard's language is dense (at least for the men), the production design — sets, Bob Crowley and Scott Pask; costumes, Catherine Zuber; lighting, Brian MacDevitt — is buoyant and staggeringly beautiful. There are some memorable images, particularly an endless line of peasants spread across the wide Beaumont stage, and a wintery Russian palace, looking as if it were constructed out of ice."

Newsday - "But first a warning. The first act is an ordeal. Before intermission, when Stoppard introduces the people and ideas that will drive the marathon into spring, the scene feels like a parody of "Masterpiece Theatre" on intellectual steroids. Set in 1833 through 1841 at the country estate of Alexander Bakunin - father of Michael, the future anarchist - this quasi-Chekhovian preface is crammed with so much dropping of names and philosophical theories that we flinch."

Sun - "Each of the plays is built around one of the six central intellectuals, and "Voyage" rests on the excitable shoulders of Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke, the only real weak link in the 36-member cast)."

Hollywood Reporter - "The first part, "Voyage," is, as with so many of Stoppard's works, alternately fascinating and tedious, poetic and discursive, informative and frustrating. It offers many rewards for those with enough patience to endure its Chekhovian longueurs, but it is hard not to wish that the playwright had demonstrated a little restraint and perhaps reined in its sprawling focus."

Newark Star-Ledger - "The brainiest British playwright since George Bernard Shaw, Stoppard has given the stage such deeply cerebral works as "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" and "The Invention of Love." This latest epic shapes up as his most ambitious and demanding of all. With two more plays of the trilogy still to come this season, "The Coast of Utopia" already is the headiest drama on Broadway."

Bloomberg - "Granted, Stoppard delivers clever harangues and tart epigrams from drolly idiosyncratic characters, but all their twisting and turning becomes exhausting to follow. "

Washington Post - "The hope is fueled by O'Byrne's intriguing cameo and even more solidly by Billy Crudup's wonderful turn as Vissarion Belinsky, a rumpled, rodentlike book critic who has assigned himself the task of championing a new Russian literary tradition. Of the three dozen actors in "Voyage," Crudup makes the most magnetic case for "The Coast of Utopia" and its narrative curlicues into the lives of its assorted mavericks."

Earlier: The high cost of 'Utopia'
Broadway’s blogging, podcasting and map-mashing
'The Coast of Utopia' free-drinks cheat sheet
NY getting a slightly changed 'Coast of Utopia'

November 28, 2006 06:59 AM in Broadway, Upper West Side

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