Reviews

Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Directed by Sean Graney
Produced by the-hypocrites in association with
Graney’s Angels In America is powerful, profound and stunning---a true work of theatrical magic.
I consider Angels In America (both parts) as the ‘greatest’ play(s) of the last half of the 20th Century. Tony Kushner’s masterwork won the Tony Award in 1993 & 94, the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and almost every theatrical award offered. This brilliant, complex, benumbing political drama is a true epic as it scales time, space while including three storylines with several dozen characters. The play deals with AIDS, homosexuality in the mid 1980’s when personal identity became muddled as being Jewish, a Mormon or a Wasp or being gay or black can either divide us or be the basis of a strong sense of community.
This highly charged drama rivets us with its scathing attack not only on right-wing conservative Republicans but also admonishes the left-wing liberals for being much too docile. Kushner hates to see us treading water politically when we keep the equilibrium and preserve the past. Radical change is needed and it begins with action toward change in personal identity and change in our view of what makes our society and our wider community. Angels In America may seem a bleak play but on second thought it is about hope and Kushner offers a dose of political optimism.
Director Sean Graney, while stead-fast to Tony Kushner’s vision, has mounted an easy to follow, quickly paced production of a complex, dense work that has baffled many a director. Graney got it right here as he uses effectively two video screens and square banks of light that change colors for each scene (lighting design by Jared Moore) together with mood setting sound (designed by Michael Griggs & Mikhail Fiksel) that set the tones magnificently. The ending sounds effects were chilling and breathtaking. Kudos to the production staff for fine work.
You’d be hard pressed to find a finer cast than Graney has assembled for this non-Equity production.
This amazing show is so engrossing, so filled with rich lyrical language and emotional performances that you’ll be on the edge of your seat totally transfixed with this epic drama. Listen to the text, see both parts separately then see them on the same day to get the complete message of this tremendous play. Kushner has much to say and Graney’s production gives it clarity with a steady mounting dramatic tension that engages us throughout.
This is excellent theatre! For only $25 or $40 for both shows, you’ll not find a finer theatre value. I can’t wait for Part II: Perestroika. Thanks, Sean for a terrific night of theatre.
Not To Be Missed
Date Reviewed March 5, 2006



The Philadelphia Inquirer
FEBRUARY 14, 1997 Friday SF EDITION
DARK VIEW OF REAGAN-ERA U.S. IN 'MILLENNIUM APPROACHES'BYLINE: Douglas J. Keating, INQUIRER THEATER CRITICSECTION: FEATURES WEEKEND; Pg. 46

Before the play begins, the audience at the Villanova University production of "Millennium Approaches," Part 1 of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, has become familiar with the massive set filling the curtainless stage. It's a commanding creation that thereafter never leaves the theatergoer's consciousness, but ultimately does not fully serve the play.
David P. Gordon's imaginative design suggests a ruined government building. In the background are large stone steps marred by a gaping hole. In the foreground are large slabs of uneven concrete that appear to have been shifted by some superior force of war or nature. Coupled with Jerold R. Forsyth's cool, harsh lighting, the production design portends the millennial destruction that is on the minds of some of the characters.
It also serves as a vivid, eloquent metaphor for the play's bleak view of America in the Reagan years of the mid-'80s - a time when the full awfulness of the AIDS epidemic was becoming known and such discoveries as the hole in the ozone layer presaged environmental destruction.
The play's not-very-coherent, if deeply felt, vision of America is strongly colored by Kushner's description of Angels in America as "a gay fantasia on national themes."
While not everyone will agree with Kushner's dark perspective on the nation, the personal concerns of Angels in America are something everyone can relate to. This is a very human play, peopled with passionate characters, and Gordon's hard-edged set - a design that turns one raised concrete slab into a desk or table, and another into a bed - tends to play against these aspects.
The Villanova cast especially could use a set more amenable to the human concerns of the play. These are demanding, difficult roles for graduate-student actors of limited experience to undertake. Pushed by directors Harriet Power and James Christy, they stretch to the full extent of their talents and abilities, and they do an admirable job. Still, as the touring version of the show that played Philadelphia last season demonstrated, the characterizations need to be better developed and the emotional connections - which are, perhaps, hampered by the cool, dark atmosphere of the set - more strongly felt.
Angels in America is a well-written, often lyrical work of sharply etched scenes of personal revelation and conflict, intertwined with humorous yet pertinent dreams and hallucinations. The Villanova production may not fully realize the play's humanity and poignance, but under the sure, comprehending direction of Power and Christy, the production compels attention with its vivid scenes and high sense of theatricality. The angel descending from heaven at the end of the play, a sure test of inventive theatricality, is marvelously handled.

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
April 28, 1995, Friday, City Edition
'Angels' on the markBYLINE: JOHN FLEMINGSECTION: TAMPA BAY AND STATE; THEATER REVIEW; Entertainment
DATELINE: SARASOTA Tony Kushner achieved a great thing with his two-part epic, Angels in America.
At a time when theater was in danger of becoming irrelevant as a vehicle for serious thought, the playwright created a world onstage that mirrored the complexities of modern American life.
Wednesday, both parts were performed by the national touring company, directed by Michael Mayer, at Van Wezel Hall.
Part 1, Millennium Approaches, was in the afternoon, and then there was a break followed by The play expands from Prior's dire predicament to cover social, sexual and political issues in daring, even dangerous fashion.
In some ways, it is a testament to the vitality of U.S. society that such an adventurous work - subtitled A gay fantasia on national themes - is a success. In other ways, it is a disgrace that it took so long for a play about AIDS to gain acceptance by a wide audience.
Kushner's writing has an aphoristic virtuosity that alternates profundity and shtick in dizzy profusion.
Angels in America is like a sprawling opera. However, unlike opera, in which the arias count the most, Kushner's play is best in the dramatic counterparts of duets and quartets, reflecting his focus on relationships. The portrayal of Prior and his lover who walks out, Louis Ironson (Peter Birkenhead), is comic and fearful and angry by turns, a masterful depiction of a gay couple torn apart by AIDS.
The touring show demonstrates that less can be a lot more, with pared-down production values that express the playwright's intent better than a costlier staging. On Broadway, Harper's hallucinatory trip to Antarctica had machine-driven plastic icebergs. On the road, her Antarctica is a bolt of shimmering white silk, evocatively lighted, and it works like a dream.
The one place where scenic designer Paul Gallo pulls out all the stops is in a vision of heaven that resembles a gloriously funky flea market.
It would be wrong to say Angels in America is seven-hours-plus of perfection. Political correctness hurts the play, as in the one-dimensionally virtuous black drag queen Belize (Reg Flowers). Even Prior occasionally shows his unattractive side, but Belize is a saint from beginning to end.
The Angel's utterances tend toward mumbo-jumbo, and Prior's appearance before the Continental Principalities, a group of angels, is like a bad science-fiction movie. The play's insider political references may date badly. Perestroika's Epilogue speech, delivered by Prior, is more than a little sentimental.
But Angels in America has the feel of something durable in this first-rate production. From a literary standpoint alone, the play is comparable to other important advances in fiction since the 1960s.
Like the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American novelists, Kushner's script stretches the boundaries of extravagance on stage and has a fluid sense of time and place. The frank language and male nudity does for gay sex what John Updike's novels did for sex in the suburbs.
Angels in America returns to the bay area Dec. 15-17 at Ruth Eckerd Hall.
Copyright 1995 Times Publishing Company

The Globe and Mail (Canada)
October 1, 1996 Tuesday
THEATRE REVIEW ANGELS IN AMERICABYLINE: BY KATE TAYLOR Directed by Bob BakerSECTION: THE ARTS: THEATRE; Pg. DATELINE: Toronto
Written by Tony Kushner Starring David Storch, Steve Cumyn Alex Poch-Goldin, Karen Hines and Tom Wood Rating: ****
Angels mixes poetry, comedy in epic sweep
CANADIAN Stage artistic director Bob Baker has said he is obsessed with Angels in America. He beat out commercial producer David Mirvish for the Toronto rights to the prize-winning play, negotiating for four years with the playwright's agent, who wouldn't sign a deal until the broadway run was over. But if Baker is in love with the much-heralded Angels, he is not blind to its faults. His solid production of Part One: Milennium Approaches, which opened last night at Canadian Stage's Berkeley Street space, finesses its more difficult passages, presenting Angels in a strong light.
Tony Kushner's play is hugely ambitious and very long -- Part One runs 3½ hours followed by an equally lengthy Part Two, which Canadian Stage opens in November. It ranges from moments of grand speechifying to passages of cramped, television-style dialogue, daring to be both poetic and ironic about its own poetry. It offers scenes of hard realism and comic surrealism, and its characters include not only fictional people but also historical figures, ghosts and angels.
Its strength is its ability to place large, universal themes in the context of a strong contemporary narrative; its weaknesses include some unnecessary scenes, some underdeveloped themes and, most of all, some underdeveloped characters. A weak production of Angels, like the Manitoba Theatre Centre's Canadian première last January, can leave you wondering what all the fuss is about. A good one should make you feel admiration and gratitude for Kushner, the playwright who has reintroduced epic scale into humanist drama.
Set in New York in 1985-86, Part One follows two couples, one gay, the other nominally straight. These contemporary figures are placed in a large historical and spiritual context.
Baker stages this story simply, moving small scenes quickly around a basic black set designed by Leslie Frankish to a hard and fast score composed by Don Horsburgh. Rather than essay an overwrought, expressionist style, which would be one possible approach to this sprawling material, Baker tones down the extremes of the play, bringing them together in the middle. For example, Harper's hallucinatory visit to Antarctica is cleverly but very plainly staged using a huge white sheet and blinding white light. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Baker tactfully separates Louis and a leather queen he has picked up, placing them on either side of the stage for the anal sex scene that is the one moment in Angels one could call gratuitous.
Baker has also drawn strong, naturalistic performances from his cast, further unifying the piece. Patricia Hamilton, for example, neatly manages both Joe's mother Hannah, Ethel Rosenberg and several male parts, bringing a fair degree of realism to Kushner's tough decision to use drag casting in some minor roles. Similarly, as the hate-spewing, obscenity-spouting, telephone-clutching Roy Cohn, Tom Wood is funny, but he doesn't allow his twitchy version of the man to descend to comic caricature. Roy is Kushner's denunciation of a right-wing, me-first philosophy and Wood certainly recognizes that an extreme interpretation would let the audience pass over the politics to laugh at a joke.
The other characters' political and social concerns are skillfully fitted into the story but Harper's fear of environmental collapse, like the appearance of a bag lady toward the end of the play, sounds like Kushner ticking issues off a very trendy list (AIDS, homelessness, the ozone layer . . .).
As the play's Everyman figure, Prior is also short on character. Steve Cumyn is awfully healthy looking for the role, but this actually adds both physical and psychological power to the part. Cumyn's Prior is real enough that we start to see ourselves in this frightened figure struggling toward hope when he's actually much better at the cynical quip. That this tidy production can achieve such a moment of recognition is a testament to the straightforward approach Baker maintains right through to the arrival of a cheerfully baroque angel.
The Times (London)
May 7, 2007, Monday



Angels in AmericaBYLINE: Shona CravenSECTION: FEATURES; Times2; Pg.
Theatre. Angels in America. Citizens, Glasgow. ****
Fifteen years have passed since Tony Kushner completed Angels in America, his devastating, Pulitzer prize-winning epic about the Aids explosion of the 1980s.
The play was already a period piece by the time an acclaimed HBO film adaptation was screened in 2003; the first of its two parts is titled Millennium Approaches.
Theatregoers may no longer be shocked by scenes involving gay sex, or the horrific reality of an illness that is now discussed freely and compassionately, but Daniel Kramer's frequently gut-wrenching co-production for Citizens Theatre Company, Headlong Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith feels fresh and vital, and conveys the physical and emotional suffering of its characters with an intensity that is at times almost overwhelming.
Seven hours might sound like an indulgent running time for a play that essentially charts the breakdown of two relationships, but Kushner's fiercely intelligent, no-holds-barred discussion of love and religion, politics and race is an experience to savour. Ultimately optimistic and life-affirming, as well as sublimely witty, this is for people who like to stay up into the small hours putting the world to rights.
The world may have progressed from regarding Aids as a gay plague, but many of the other complex issues raised -racism, homophobia, drug addiction and religious oppression -are as pertinent as ever. Just witness last year's gleefully documented downfall of the closeted congressman (and sometime Scientology fan) Mark Foley, or the recent free-speech debate triggered by the sacking of the racist radio host Don Imus.
Technically dazzling and beautifully designed by Soutra Gilmour, this isn't just a wonderful production, it's a genuinely thrilling theatrical experience. The stage becomes littered with detritus, and Carolyn Downing's memorable soundtrack combines pop music, rumbling thunder and the haunting screech of a winged intruder.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Part 2 (Perestroika) contains fewer jaw-dropping moments, but it is no less captivating. Some of the finest lines are saved until last, as death, forgiveness and recovery allow the characters to disentangle their respective life stories.
To do justice to such an extraordinary play requires outstanding performances, with each actor playing up to seven different roles. Setting aside the frustrating blip of a very variable accent from Greg Hicks as Roy Cohn, a New York lawyer, this eight-strong cast is rock-solid. Kirsty Bushell, Mark Emerson, Ann Mitchell and the mesmerising Golda Rosheuvel are particularly divine.