Othello Broadway Reviews

In short, as I felt the production’s blunt force more and more, I grasped its aura and aims less and less. “Othello,” unique among Shakespeare’s tragedies, is lean. (It’s even leaner in this production, thanks to some judicious cutting.) It has fewer major characters than most, and fewer sideshows. (Among the cuts: the annoying clown.) Its poetry is extraordinary. And though four principals die, all ultimately by Iago’s hand or influence, it does not tumble indiscriminately toward the blood bath. The deaths are specific and necessary to its themes. Leon’s “Othello” gets all that, except the themes. A good enough bargain, I suppose — or would be, except that center orchestra tickets are selling for $921. You could spend a lot less — or a lot more — to learn the sad truth “Othello” dramatizes: that those who choose to assume the best in people are most vulnerable to the worst. Innocence is ignorance, certainty a death wish. In a world (and on a stage) that loves not wisely but too well, Iago will always win.

I was looking forward to the production – not just because of the track records of Washington and Gyllenhaal (who have both given excellent performances on Broadway in recent years) and Leon (who helmed a stunning production of “Our Town” at the same theater earlier this season). “Othello” is a play about the dangers of misinformation and mistrust as engineered by an exceptionally persuasive orator. It should speak directly to this cultural moment. Instead, it’s a hollow star vehicle – expensive but cheap, flashy but dull.

The audience giggles a fair amount at this story that ends in brutal deaths — from start to finish. It’s weird. “Othello” isn’t witty “Hamlet.” The play is not even as funny as “Macbeth.” Maybe it’s because they’re in the presence of celebrities. But I get the sense that the viewers are searching for something — anything — to grasp onto on this long, chilly ride they maxed out their credit cards to sit through. And they choose laughter. Laughs in lieu of gasps or tears.

Yes, I have seen the new Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, the one that is raking in almost $3 million a week by selling out Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre with tickets priced at up to $900. And no, you probably won’t see it. Jealous? Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not just that jealousy itself—famously described in Othello as ”the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on”—is deleterious to the soul. It’s that this production, though perfectly good in most regards and better than that in several, isn’t worth voiding your purse.

The performances are all in sync, never an easy task in modern productions with shortened rehearsal periods featuring actors trained in different techniques and styles. But here they’re all speaking the speech uniformly. Mastering the Iambic pentameter rhythms is always a challenge, but the cast pulls it off quite consistently; and after a while, our modern ears found the Elizabethan language less and less foreign. It’s impossible to pick up everything they say, and the lines are often spoken too quickly to decipher the full meanings but the intentions always come through loud and clear.

Leon’s staging has its predictably silly touches, such as frequently having actors march through the aisles to the stage as if they’d wandered out of the theater for a smoke break only to find the stage door locked. A key scene is played in the dark, illuminated only by flashlights, which is more annoying than ominous. And the climactic scene set in Desdemona’s bedchamber is prefaced by florid background music that Douglas Sirk would have dismissed as too kitschy for one of his ‘50s melodramas. Lacking an overriding concept or strong directorial vision, this Othello fulfills its basic goal of putting its two stars onstage and letting them rip. But it’s hard not to wish that it had strived for something more.

Unfortunately, all these performances are a bit undermined by the somewhat confusing and inconsistent modern-day setting. Why is the action still set in Venice and Cyprus, with Iago being described by Cassio as a kind and honest Florentine — yet he has a United States flag patch on his army fatigues? Why is there so much stabbing and knife play still taking place in the 2020s? Beyond all the camouflage, sharp suits, and fashionable Desdemona ensembles, what is the point, really?  

The show, instead, belongs to Gyllenhaal, an actor of singular intensity who makes a meal out of Iago’s desperate two-facedness. He opens the show with a hypnotic screed against “The Moor” he so loathes – a denigration of blackness (of soul and skin) in Shakespeare’s time titled just enough to resonate more clearly in ours, and never ceases to mesmerize. At turns preening, desperate, boastful, plaintive, easily convincing in his maneuverings of the guileless lieutenant Cassio (Snow White’s Andrew Burnap), as well as gullible townsman Roderigo (Anthony Michael Lopez), Desdemona and Othello, Gyllenhaal’s Iago is the one truly fun performance to watch throughout the show’s nearly three-hour runtime.

When you come out of Othello mostly thinking how impressive the actors playing Cassio and Emilia were, something’s askew in the balance. Those secondary roles acquire vitality and depth of feeling thanks to very fine work by Andrew Burnap and Kimber Elayne Sprawl, respectively. But the insidious scheming by Iago to discredit newly promoted Cassio by poisoning Othello’s thoughts with jealousy too seldom makes sparks fly.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Iago, certainly gives the Moor of Venice plenty to fight against, if he chose to do so. Here is far and away the most dynamic performance of the night, a riveting, turbo-charged interpretation that avoids any and all villainous cliches, or flowery self-doubts, and just presents a malevolent but highly effective military guy who sets out to do what he wants to straightforwardly do, a train hurtling down a track, gaining speed with every scene, determined to knock the Othello and Desdemona carriage into the ditch.

Unfortunately, the modernizing premise – aside from the de rigueur costumes and odd laptop, more pretense than premise – seriously impacts the emotional punch of the ending. We might assume that in ages past, Othello’s murder of Desdemona was presented as something cockeyed noble, misguided through Iago’s duplicity, a mean trick played not so much on the woman but on the gullible man (the full title of the play is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, not The Tragedy Of Desdemona, His Horrifically Murdered Wife). By setting the action In The Near Future, any hint at sympathy for Othello – especially after we’ve just witnessed Osborne perform Desdemona’s heart-wrenching, useless pleas for her life (“Kill me tomorrow!”). Washington’s tear-jerking post-mortem apologies are likely to fall on deaf audience ears, Othello’s suicide a decidedly un-noble good riddance.

With an ensemble as mighty as this, it’s a shame that director Kenny Leon’s prosaic staging feels like such an afterthought, given his artful recent work on "Our Town" and "Purlie Victorious." An opening title card announces that the story is set in a vague “near future,” where the men dress like Murray Hill bros, while the women look as if they stepped out of a Talbots catalog. (And please, dear God, it’s time for a moratorium on army fatigues in modern Shakespeare productions.) Derek McLane’s scenic design is frustratingly rote – mostly consisting of moving columns – although lighting designer Natasha Katz manages to create some stunning silhouettes as the violence ramps up in the second act.

Gyllenhaal delivers the most engaging Iago I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some pretty good Iagos: Christopher Plummer with Jones and Daniel Craig with Oyelowo. Gyllenhaal’s performance fuels the show, and when his Iago takes a needed break after getting Cassio wounded and Roderigo murdered, this “Othello” never quite regains either its focus or its propulsive momentum.

For all its star power and chemistry between the leads (Washington-Gyllenhaal and Washington-Osborne), however, not much of this production is particularly original or groundbreaking. Standout Kimber Elayne Sprawl is a breath of fresh air as a whip-smart Emilia. But setting aside the excitement of a beloved lead in an iconic role, Leon’s buttoned-up production is a perfectly enjoyable, if not particularly memorable Othello.

That Washingtonian authority demonstrates the production’s one big idea — to place two big stars at the center of the stage and trust that their talent and charisma will carry the day. And, for the most part, they do; no fan of Washington or of Gyllenhaal will leave disappointed in the actors. Leon lets his two stars cook, but hasn’t stocked the production with anything to give what they’re doing any flavor.

It may be that Washington’s lackluster performance stems from a misfiring if understandable desire to avoid stereotypes of outsize passion—of big, blustery emotional fireworks in a thorny role of color—yet the result is that we go on no journey with his Othello. We listen to him say words; we don’t, even as he enters the bedroom of his innocent wife, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), to strangle her, experience his awful interior transformation. Instead, as he approaches her in these fateful moments, a truly unsettling percentage of the audience is still laughing.

Unfortunately Mr. Washington, here and throughout, fails to transmit the powerful majesty of Shakespeare’s writing for this character, “the Othello music,” as it has been called. Mr. Leon’s staging is roughly contemporary—taking place in “the near future,” we are obscurely notified—so one may infer that Mr. Washington and his colleagues have been encouraged to make the verse accessible to today’s audiences.

This world is colorless and impersonal (Derek McLane’s towering gray columns on wheels), and so are its inhabitants. At the top, a supertitle says the story takes place in some unspecified tomorrow. How I longed to jump to that near future, in which Washington has taken his bow and I’m sipping a martini at Joe Allen.

It pains me to say, as an admirer of thorny texts and risk-taking celebrities onstage, that “Othello” offers scant reward, even if your only sacrifice were time — and even that is arguably too precious. What does “Othello” have to say about “the near future,” where a projection at the outset places us? It’s a question that, by its own admission, the first Broadway revival in more than 40 years needs to contend with. But this staging from director Kenny Leon offers little provocation to suggest it’s even worth asking.