“There’s no denying denzel Washington’s Magnetism. He Carries HimSelf with A Swaggering Authority Enhanced by the Natural Gravitas of His Voice. The Two-Time Oscar Winner is the Principal Reason Audiences are Shelling Out Upwards of $ 900 to See Kenny Leon’s Freustingly UnderPowered Revival of Otello on BroadWay. Playing The Venetian General Often Disparagingly Referred To”, – WRITE: www.hollywoodReporter.com
Staged On a Stately Set of Distressed Classical Grandeur Designed by Derek Mclane, This Stylish But SHALLOW MODERN-Dress Otello is set in “the near Future,” as an OPENING PROVESSION INFORMS US. But that’s as close to an overarching concept as leon gets.
Among The Productions Strengths Is Jake Gyllenhaal’s Seething Iago, One of Shakespeare’s Greatest Villains. Gyllenhaal Conveys of Hatred and Resentment Coursing Through The Minor Officer’s Veins, But Also The Petulance After He’s Passed Over by Reverked General Other. The Actor Injects Notes of Ingratification Charm Into His Character’s Evil Manipulations, WHICH Lends Credibality to the Number of People Easily Duped By Him, Selling The Commons.
But The Blistering Department of Blinding Ambition, Treachery and Gulliiness that Should Linger Like A Heavy Cloud Over The Blood and Anguish Spilled in the Final Scene Feels Curious.
WHEN YOU come out of Otello MOSTLY THINKING HOW IMPRESSIVE The ACTORS PLAYING CASSIO AND EMILIA WERE, PROHINGING’S ASKEW in the Balance. Those Secondary Roles Acquire vitality and Depth of Feeling Thanks to Very Fine Work by Andrew Burnp and Kimber Elayne Sprawl, Respectvely. But the insidious scaling by Iago to Discredit Newly Promotted Cassio by Poison Other ThoUGHHTS WITH JEALUSY TOO SELDOM MAKS SPARKS FLY.
A Deserting Tony Winner for His Shattering Work in August Wilson’s FENCESWashington is a Great Stage Actor, as Demonstrated repeatedly in his retirns to broadway OR Twice A Decade.
HE WAS A CONTEMPLATIVE BRUTUS, DRIVEN BY CAUSES LARGER THAN HIS OWN IN Julius caesar. In A raisin in the sunhe bristled with the restless energy of a man refusion to let go go of his elius Dreams. His hickey in The Iceman Cometh Dissected The Character’s Conflicting Sides-from Puffed-Up Showmanship Through Sanctimonios Preachyness to Soul-Crushing Emptiness-with a surgeon’s scalpel.
(He was also a riveting macbeth, plagued by the doubts of a man caught up in a plot that spins out of his control, in Joel Coen’s 2021 Film, The tragedy of macbth.)
Washington’s Movie-Star Presence Is Undimmable, But In Each of Those Stage Productions He Was Working in the Service of a Well-Balaned Ensemble. That’s not Always the Case Here, Particularly in the Draggy First Act, Whore The Actor Sems to Be Phoning Iting In, AS IF CONSERVING STEAM for the Climactic Scenes in Which. Pusted to Near-Madness and Violence.
But The Character Seldom Connects – not with IAGO, Who Exploits His Misplaced Trust, Nor Desdemona, The Loving Wife Framed with False Acusations of Infidelity. Desdemona Is Not One of Shakespeare’s Strongest Female Characters, and While London Stage Regular Molly Osborne Gives Her The NECESARY DUALITY OF SELF Flat, Leaving Minimal Impression.
Washington Does Fire Up After Intermission. As Seizures and Needling Thought Betrayal Chip Away at His Sanity, He Shows Glimpses of What A More Fully Inhabited Performance Might Have Delivered. But The Strangulation Scene, WHEN Otello Is Too Far Beyond Reasoning Even to Listen to His Wife’s Sincere Denials, Should Be AFFERING AFFERING AS IT IS SHOKING. He Clearly Still Loves Desdemona Despite The Lies He’s Been Fed.
Here and Throughout the first press performance, inAppropriate laughter sugggestd that some audience members might be too starstruck to pay at the Nuans of the Play. Otello is a tragedy, after all, so isconcerting to hear chuckling who victim of ioago’s scrimming – Field with Grief and Remorse Yet Helpless to STOP HIMSELF – LEANS IN PLANS (“One More, One More… One More, and this the Last”) As He Kills Her.
The staging of that scene is also perplexing, with a Gauzy full-STAGE Curtain Lowered in Front of the Bedroom to the Lush Strains of Music Right Out of a 1950s Hollywood Meldrama. Visualally, It Feels Out of Sync with the rest of the Stark Design Choices, to Say Nothing of the Techno Beats that More of the Fethen Accompany Scene Changes.
Like Washington, Leon Can Be An Excellent Director Who Digs Deep Into A Text – The Actor and Director Collbaratted with Great Success On FENCES an A raisin in the sun. But Leon’s Lack of Illuminating IDEAS HERE IS SIGNALED FROM The START WITH The GIMMICY DEVICE OF HAVING The HANDKERCHIEF – an Embroidered Family heirloom Given Cassio-Suspended in MID-AIR, FLUTTERING OFF INTO the Wings As the Play Begins. IT’s A SHOWY BIT OF STAGE MAGIC WHEN WHAT The Production Really Needs Is A Discernible Perspective.
The Director Has His Actors Barrel Through Scenes, As if Pacing Alone Can Generate Heat. Key Dialogue Is Treated Almost Disposably, Nowhere More So Than in Otello’s “It Is The Cause, My Soul” Soliloquy, Who Iago’s InSinuations Havesen Root, An A Gening Conce. Alleged Adultess is the Just and Virtuous Thing to do. The Avoidance of Declamator Pomp is AdmiRable, But Too Onthen The Actors’ Delivery Robs of the Language of ITS Poetry and Expressiveness.
Leon Leans Into the Virulant Racism in the Early Scenes, As Iago Spits Out References to Other With Kaustic Distast, Knowing that by Spilling The Secret of The General Outraage of Her Senator Father (Daniel Pearce). But color-Blind Casting Aside, All that UndisGuced Prejudice Sems Inconcession With Iago Being Married to A Black Woman.
Luckily, Sprawl (Superb In Girl From The North Country) Imbues Iago’s Wife, Emilia, with Unfaltering Presence of Mind, Keen Perception and The Sturdiest of BackBones, Not -To Mention Unquetableable Loyalty to Desdemona.
Her Scenes Are Among The Production’s High Points, As Are Those of Burnp (a Tony Winner for The inheritancecurrently on screens in Snow White), whose cassio is a righteous man, Clearly worthy of the promotion to lieutenant that Iago was denied. From the hazing scene in a kind of he’s forced by iAago and other soldiers to guzzle more booze than he can handle (Nice Bud Light Product Play (Anthony Michael Lopez, Solid), to Murder Him, We Feel for Cassio in Ways That We Rarely Do for Desdemona or Other.
Every Staging of a Classic Should Stand on It Own and Not Be Subject to Comparisons. But I Couldn’t Help Wishing I Had Been in New York for the Last Broadway Revival, in 1982, Headlined by James Earl Jones, Christper Plummer and Dianne Wiest.
IT WAS HARD ALSO NOT TO WISH BROADWAY AUDIENCES COULD HAVE EXPERIENCED SAM GOLD’S SCORCHING Otello That Played Downtown in 2016. That Production Starred Daniel Craig, David Oylowo and Ruchel Brosnahan, and Built a Binding Concept Out of Its Setting Afghanistan. But Such Cohesion is Sorely Lcking Here.
Venue: Ether Barrymore Theater, New York
Cast: Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Molly Osborne, Andrew Burnap, Kimber Elayne Sprawl, Anthony Michael Lopez, Daniel Pece, Neal BledSo, ROB Heap Julee CERDA, William Connell, Ty Fanning, Ben Grany, Christina Sajouos, Sarah Thorn, Greg Wood
Director: Kenny Leon
Playwright: William Shakespeare
Set Designer: Derek Mclane
Costume Designer: Dede Ayite
Lighting Designer: Natasha Katz
Sound Designer: Justin Ellington
Fight Director Thomas Schall
Presiented by Brian Anthony Moreland