"Angels in America" 2017 London NT Reviews

[+ Cash4Trash]

Saw the NT Live performance of Angels and this is one of Nathan Lane's best performances. Allows him to escape his usually campy portrayal and he has a great chance to win best supporting actor Tony.

[+ WilliamM]

Saw the NT Live performance of Angels and this is one of Nathan Lane's best performances. Allows him to escape his usually campy portrayal and he has a great chance to win best supporting actor Tony.

 

You must not have seen Nathan Lane in "The Iceman Cometh" at BAM

[+ Cash4Trash]

I didn't.

[TruthBTold]

You must not have seen Nathan Lane in "The Iceman Cometh" at BAM

 

I saw it with Lane at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. It was so boring (mostly from his performance) that if I could have killed myself in the audience I would have.

[edjames]

A reminder to all that Angels In America, the London stage version, is still available on NTLive.

Check out the website for viewing times and locations:

 

http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk

 

An easier and more convenient way to watch superb National Theater productions.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I saw it with Lane at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. It was so boring (mostly from his performance) that if I could have killed myself in the audience I would have.

 

Agree. Iceman wasn't his strongest suit.

 

He may be blackballed at the moment, but Kevin Spacey gave a definitive performance in his Iceman. It was electric.

[TruthBTold]

Agree. Iceman wasn't his strongest suit.

He may be blackballed at the moment, but Kevin Spacey gave a definitive performance in his Iceman. It was electric.

 

Another problem (IF IT IS TRUE) is that Eugene O'Neill does not allow that any of his scripts be cut. So the performance I saw was close to 4 hours long. Of course, I can sit through all of Angels no problem.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Another problem (IF IT IS TRUE) is that Eugene O'Neill does not allow that any of his scripts be cut. So the performance I saw was close to 4 hours long. Of course, I can sit through all of Angels no problem.

 

That reminds me of the horror that Edward Albee put his actors through when he was involved in the production of any of his plays. In rehearsal, he'd never allow an actor to drop a line. Ever.

 

You would just have to pause and wait until they remembered what they were going to say. No prompt. And Albee would sit there, with his damned cup of tea and just stare.

[TruHart1]

Another glowing review of the Broadway production of AIA in TheaterMania:

http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/reviews/the-prophecy-of-tony-kushner-returns-to-broadway-w_84581.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=25mar2018

 

TruHart1

[+ WilliamM]

That reminds me of the horror that Edward Albee put his actors through when he was involved in the production of any of his plays. In rehearsal, he'd never allow an actor to drop a line. Ever.

 

You would just have to pause and wait until they remembered what they were going to say. No prompt. And Albee would sit there, with his damned cup of tea and just stare.

 

Some actors take much longer to learn lines than others. So I question your post, Benjamin.

Edited April 2, 2018 by WilliamM

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

So I question your post, Benjamin.

 

You have every right, but my story comes direct from a pal who was in the cast of the Bill Irwin/Kathleen Turner Virginia Woolf

This 2005 New Yorker article gives a similar view of what was described to me:

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/04/passion-plays

[foxy]

I saw part 2 at today’s matinee. Last Sunday I saw part 1. There’s been a lot written about the show already and reviews are all good and I’d agree. It’s a wonderful production. I did see the original but it was almost like seeing the play for the first time these two Sundays. I’d forgotten how funny it is.

I’m not a big Nathan Lane fan but I’d happily hand him a Tony for his performance.

Everyone was terrific in this production. I’m amazed they can find the energy especially when they do both parts in one day.

Lee Pace does do an extended nude scene if that’s important to you.

Today’s performance which clocks in at 4 hours (with two intermissions) sped by. Perhaps seeing the whole show in one day might be exhausting. I had no trouble seeing it over two days.

A word about tickets. Last week I got a 5th row Center mezzanine seat on tdf for $41. It wasn’t listed for today so I went to the tkts booth about noon and got a 6th row Center orchestra seat for $92. It was worth the extra $$$. More legroom but mostly it was nice to be close to the action.

It’s a pretty intense experience but definitely worth the time and money.

[john1973]

Please describe Lee's extended nude scene. Pretty please?

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Please describe Lee's extended nude scene. Pretty please?

 

Google it. I'm sure someone has waxed poetic about it somewhere.

[Cooper]

I have now seen Parts 1 & 2 of the award winning Broadway production of Angels in America. It's playing at the Neil Simon Theatre on 52nd St. Last time this play was on Broadway was back in 1993. It's now celebrating its 25th Anniversary.

 

On Tuesday, May 1st, the nominations for Tony Awards will be announced. We certainly can expect many nominations for the incredible production of Angels in America. The 72nd Annual Tony Awards Show will be televised on Sunday, June 10th.

 

When I first heard that this production was 2 shows lasting some 7 1/2 hours, I thought this better be good, and, yes, it was better than good. The leading actors, Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane headed up a most amazing and talented cast. Most cast members play multiple parts... Each scene was done to perfection. I thought the camouflaged stage hands crawling around like cats was a nice touch. And, the creator of the puppets from War Horse also did the angel wing movements in this production. What a memorable scene that was.

 

An award winning masterpiece by Tony Kushner that covers the aids crisis of the 1980's. An emotional journey for many of us who lived though those times.

 

Edited April 9, 2018 by Cooper

[TruthBTold]

While I recognize that video and live theater are completely different media and completely different experiences, I am surprised that more people have not mentioned the Meryl Streep/Al Pacino video version which was a true work of art. As an actor I can't imagine doing the play. It must be so exhausting, emotionally and physically.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

While I recognize that video and live theater are completely different media and completely different experiences, I am surprised that more people have not mentioned the Meryl Streep/Al Pacino video version which was a true work of art. As an actor I can't imagine doing the play. It must be so exhausting, emotionally and physically.

 

This was more a discussion of the current West End and incoming Broadway production. The ministry series- while not terrible by any means- is very different from seeing it live. I thought that Pacino did a fair amount of Pacino-esque mugging in his role, but Thompson and Streep just nailed it.

 

I can't imagine as an actor trying to climb that mountain, live, every night. I have so much respect for those who can do it.

[TruthBTold]

This was more a discussion of the current West End and incoming Broadway production. The ministry series- while not terrible by any means- is very different from seeing it live. I thought that Pacino did a fair amount of Pacino-esque mugging in his role, but Thompson and Streep just nailed it. I can't imagine as an actor trying to climb that mountain, live, every night. I have so much respect for those who can do it.

 

I totally agree with your Pacino assessment. There are times he really gets on my nerves. But Nathan Lane does also in general when doing purely theatrical work (as opposed to musical). However, I have read Lane is being touted for an Emmy.

[foxy]

Nathan Lane is 62. Not ancient certainly but also no spring chicken. While I’m not usually a big fan as I’ve stated, he was pretty incredible in this performance. There was a lot more than delivering his lines. There was a great deal of physical stuff he did that must take an enormous amount of strength. In retrospect I think he had the most difficult role in the play. I can’t begin to imagine how he does it night after night. I get exhausted just thinking about it. They should hang an Olympic gold medal on the Tony he will surely receive.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I totally agree with your Pacino assessment. There are times he really gets on my nerves. But Nathan Lane does also in general when doing purely theatrical work (as opposed to musical). However, I have read Lane is being touted for an Emmy.

 

 

Lane for an Emmy? Do you mean TONY?

[+ WilliamM]

The Theatre New Yorker

April 16, 2018 Issue

“Angels in America”: Brilliant, Maddening, and Necessary

Tony Kushner’s masterwork reminds us how sexuality dictates and shapes its own culture.

By Hilton Als

 

 

Part winged creature and part radiant hag, the Angel looks like a creation of the illustrator Edward Gorey.

 

Illustration by Jasu Hu

 

It has taken me years to understand that, while I don’t necessarily identify with a number of the characters in “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s brilliant, maddening, and necessary masterwork (now in revival at the Neil Simon, under the direction of Marianne Elliott), I do have deep feelings about the Angel. Not the one at Bethesda Fountain, in Central Park, who watches over some of the story’s action, but the Angel who speaks. She’s played in the current production by the nimble and intelligent Amanda Lawrence; our initial view of her is at the end of “Millennium Approaches,” the first part of the nearly eight-hour, two-part play. (The second is titled “Perestroika.”) We’re in the Manhattan apartment of a young man named Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield). It’s 1985, and Prior, the descendant of a distinguished American family, has aids. He’s just thirty, and when he got sick—when the lesions began to show and he was bleeding and had difficulty walking—his overly verbal, politically but not personally committed lover, Louis Ironson (James McArdle), left him, unable to deal with the presumed inevitable.

 

Fear defined the times. Ronald Reagan was President; the Christian right, including the political-action group the Moral Majority, had helped get him there. The aids crisis had laid waste to thousands of people, but Reagan had never talked publicly about the disease. (That didn’t happen until 1987.) Prior is at home, humiliated by loneliness and his body’s slow failure, when he begins to experience some strange things—especially for an ailing man. A powerful erection, for one.

 

Added to that personal weirdness, two chatty ectoplasms he’s somehow related to come to visit. First, there’s Prior 1, a thirteenth-century figure who carries a scythe. He reveals that he, too, was a victim of “the pestilence.” In some of Kushner’s most vivid, beautiful language, Prior 1 recalls, “You could look outdoors and see Death walking in the morning, dew dampening the ragged hem of his black robe.”

 

But Prior 2 won’t be outdone. A seventeenth-century Londoner dressed in period costume, Prior 2 speaks about death in a plummy accent. During his lifetime, there was, for instance, Black Jack. “Came from a water pump,” Prior 2 says. “Half the city of London—can you imagine?” (Prior 1 is played by Lee Pace and Prior 2 by Nathan Lane. Both have other roles.)

 

The youngest Prior wants to know whether he’s going to die. The older Priors can’t answer that. Prior 2: “We’ve been sent to declare Her fabulous incipience. They love a well-paved entrance with lots of heralds.” The ghostly Priors vanish, and in comes the Angel. And she is fabulous. Part winged creature and part radiant hag, she has eyes that focus intently on Prior, along with eight vaginas that excite the object of her interest. With her wild gray hair and a long, slim body covered in a sooty bodysuit, the Angel looks like a refugee from an old, crumbling discothèque, or like a creation of the illustrator Edward Gorey. (Elliott, who has won two Tonys for Best Director—in 2011, for “War Horse,” and in 2015, for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”—is especially adept at stage choreography.)

 

The Angel tells Prior, “The Great Work begins.” What does she want from Prior? She wants him to speak. To speak is to live. I have seen a number of productions of “Angels in America,” including Ivo van Hove’s outstanding, pared-down version, from 2014, but the Angel’s arrival and command never fail to tear my heart out. The Angel asks Prior to begin his work—their work—by prophesying. Silence and hesitance equal death. Isn’t that what we wanted for our gone friends? To be the messenger for all we wished they could say?

 

“Angels in America” is filled with wishes, hope, rabbinical anger, fantasy—and the kinds of errors in characterization that are bound to happen when big ideas come fast and furious, and authentic characters with beautifully confused intentions serve or get run over by those ideas. (I suggest reading the play before you see this or any production, to absorb Kushner’s bravura language, which can sometimes get a little lost in all the action.)

 

But that’s O.K., because just when you think Kushner is losing sight of how to handle the seven primary characters—eight, if you count the Angel—he brings out a new and hitherto unexplored empathy for a family that is not biological, let alone chosen. Roy Cohn (Lane) is diagnosed as having aids at the same time that Prior is—but that’s a matter of opinion, according to Cohn. If his doctor, Henry (Susan Brown), announces that diagnosis, the hateful, litigious Cohn—who made sure that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were killed in the electric chair; served as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during his crusade against Communism; and, toward the end of his life, represented Donald Trump—will destroy Henry’s career. The truth is open to debate. Cohn says that he has liver cancer, and Henry follows suit.

 

Still, there is something like love in Cohn’s closeted life. He has a protégé named Joe Pitt (Pace), who has lots of ambition but no direction—just Cohn’s kind of guy. He’ll get Joe to Congress, but in return for what? Not realizing that Cohn is gay, Joe can’t tell him—can’t tell anyone—that he’s gay himself; after all, he’s a Mormon, and married. At night, he goes for walks in the Ramble, in Central Park (where the angel at Bethesda looks after us all), to observe men who are in touch with their bodies. When he meets the guilt-ridden Louis, they’re bound by their failure to be honest men. Like most of the characters, except Cohn, Joe and Louis want to be free in themselves, to have their bodies without apology and threat of death or loss. There’s an extraordinary moment when, at the beach—it’s winter—Joe strips out of his Mormon undergarments, as a way of showing that he wants to have no restrictions between him and Louis.

 

Louis is frightened of love, too: he perceives it as a responsibility, not as a freeing agent. But who, during that time, could separate his love for a man from how he’d care for him if the worst happened?

 

Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a black nurse who works on the aids ward in a Manhattan hospital, sees the worst and tries his best to combat it. With his peroxided hair and purposeful stride, he’s the only character in the piece who deals with realism on a daily basis. When Cohn is put on his floor, Belize knows exactly who he is; he takes the AZT—at the time, a rare and valuable drug—that Cohn has stockpiled, and gives it to the needy, including his closest friend and former lover, Prior.

 

There are no corny or soap-opera-ish coincidences in Kushner’s work, really; one of the points he’s trying to make is that we are all deeply connected, simply by being active spirits in the same cosmos, and by being closeted and not-closeted gay men. Sexuality dictates and shapes its own culture. Still, despite Belize’s virtues, I have never felt comfortable in his presence. Even the greatest actor would love to do all the finger-snapping part-time-drag-queen stuff, but I don’t know one black man in nineteen-eighties New York who would have felt entirely himself—entirely safe—“reading” white people while on the job. The character is a dream of black strength, an Angela Bassett of the ward.

 

Similarly, Louis has always got on my nerves. Kushner has poured a lifetime of feeling and thought about Jewish intellectual skepticism into him. He’s a guilty person who fucks up so that he can feel guilty. (Belize: “It’s no fun picking on you, Louis. . . . There’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.”) So, when he learns that Joe worked with Cohn, he doesn’t so much evolve as get woke. When Louis confronts Joe, Pace is so sweet in his confusion that you want to scoop up his tall frame and banish all the terrible things in his life.

 

Elliott does nothing to tone down the butch-femme dichotomy in the work. While the more “flamboyant” characters Prior and Belize suffer and are intuitive, butch trade like Joe are all about outward strength and quiet intensity. Just as I don’t believe Belize, Andrew Garfield, too cut to be dying of aids, engages too much in the limp-wristed school of acting—lots of squealing and literal limp wrists. (Lane plays Lane playing Roy Cohn.) Garfield is a good actor, and, God knows, it’s a part that could kill a less aware star, but flouncing around doesn’t make you gay; it makes you a well-toned actor trying to play an aidsvictim.

 

When I saw “Millennium Approaches,” audience members laughed when Prior first collapsed, bleeding. I was furious, and then saddened when I realized that many of them were too young to know how aids decimated not only a community but the world. They took the scene as another example of Garfield’s amusing overacting. “Angels in America” premièred twenty-seven years ago, a decade after the aids crisis began, and, each time it’s performed, there’s another generation of audience members who can’t understand the love and the urgency that the play grew out of.

[TruthBTold]

Lane for an Emmy? Do you mean TONY?

 

 

His name is Nathan, not Tony.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

His name is Nathan, not Tony.

 

[+ WilliamM]

Garfield is a good actor, and, God knows, it’s a part that could kill a less aware star, but flouncing around doesn’t make you gay; it makes you a well-toned actor trying to play an aidsvictim.

 

Is Hilton Abs right here? I have not seen the revival yet.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Is Hilton Abs right here? I have not seen the revival yet.

 

I saw Garfield in London and would agree. It's not a fully-realized gay character. It feels.... Insincere.

 

The British audiences didn't laugh when I saw it. Whether they understood the gravity of the situation or not, it was deathly silent during that scene.