The Glass Menagerie Broadway Reviews

This revival of Tennessee Williams' 'The Glass Menagerie' arrives on Broadway from Cambridge, Mass., with the excitement usually reserved for 'Breaking Bad' and cronuts: It's genius! You need it! Well, not quite. This is a fine evening at the theater, not a divine revelation. The show is a good take on Williams' memory play, and Zachary Quinto and Cherry Jones offer interesting spins on familiar characters - even if Jones' execution doesn't match her concept of the role.

Like many great stage actresses, Cherry Jones has a magic in person that doesn't translate well. It seems fitting that this performance, and this production, will really exist only in memory - but there it will lodge.

Fortunately, Williams has once again aligned with the ideal cast and creative team, in John Tiffany's staging of 'The Glass Menagerie,' an American Repertory Theater production starring Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto that previously played Harvard and opened Thursday night at the Booth Theater.

The 1944 drama was a call for lyricism and emotional rawness on the American stage. This fresh and keenly urgent production feels like a triumphant homecoming.

I've seen quite a few productions of Tennessee Williams' 'The Glass Menagerie,' and yet, this one stands well above the rest. It retains the haunting resonance of the great classic that it is, and yet, it possesses the originality of a never-before-seen work of art.

Cherry Jones also defies expectations, playing Amanda not as a badgering witch but as a cauldron of disappointment overwhelmed with love and fear for her children's futures. Warm and touchingly humane, she anchors the near perfect quartet completed by Celia Keenan-Bolger, who makes Laura more than just a wind-tossed leaf, and Brian J. Smith's effusively amiable Gentleman Caller, whose kiss embodies all the dashed hope that is Laura's fate. The play has been sensitively staged by the 'Once' team of John Tiffany and movement director Steven Hoggett. You will probably forgive them, as I did, the digressions into mimed business that occasionally stop the play in its tracks.

Must every high-profile revival of Tennessee Williams' 1944 breakout drama 'The Glass Menagerie' be marred by an obtrusive and frustrating directorial concept or design scheme? True, John Tiffany's graceful production is a vast improvement over the 2005 Broadway production and the 2010 Off-Broadway staging. But the excellent four-member cast -Cherry Jones (Amanda), Zachary Quinto (Tom), Celia Keenan-Bolger (Laura) and Brian J. Smith (Gentleman Caller) - is forced to compete against Bob Crowley's chic but inappropriate set design, Natasha Diaz's harsh lighting and Nico Muhly's creepy, synthetic-sounding original music...But aside from these distractions, the acting is absolutely superb. Jones convincingly balances Amanda's brave ferocity and kooky excesses. Keenan-Bolger exquisitely captures Laura's sad, frail beauty. Even if Quinto comes off too casual and contemporary, he imbues Tom with a dreamy lyricism that contrasts with the clean-cut overachiever that is Smith's Gentleman Caller.

[Quinto's] performance, brooding and self-aware, allows you to experience Tom's turmoil: the contradictory knowledge that to save himself, he needs to desert the ones he loves most...Jones, in the months leading up to this opening, left us with the sense she never wanted to play the complex Amanda, but allowed director Tiffany to persuade her. Thank goodness. Her forceful matron is bullying and boisterous, motherly and affectionate, deluded and desperately needy, without ever quite coming off as detached from reality...Keenan-Bolger holds her chin high through every disappointment. Her face remains blank, but she carries the weight of her burdens in hunched shoulders. Laura's low self-esteem drives the action in 'Menagerie,' though by the end of this production, Keenan-Bolger will have you second-guessing just who among the Wingfields is truly the weakest link. Her Laura is frail, but not yet so lost to despair that she is unable to take risks.

No ifs, ands or buts - 'The Glass Menagerie' should break your heart. The new Broadway revival starring Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto cracks it wide open. The striking production also opens your eyes to fresh insights in Tennessee Williams' mid-'40s breakthrough. It's a remarkable achievement, considering how familiar we've become with the drama of overbearing Amanda Wingfield, her fragile daughter, Laura, and restless son, Tom...In keeping with the strong, spare scenery, performances are lean and natural. Jones, a stage great who's won Tonys for 'The Heiress' and 'Doubt,' endows Amanda with potent vitality. She can lose herself in the sweet-scented memories of jonquils and gentility, but she's no shrinking violet. She's fiercely maternal. Quinto, of the 'Star Trek' reboot, streaks Tom, the stand-in for Williams, with exasperation and surliness. His cruel abandonment of his family in the dark is all the more credible. As the delicate Laura, Celia Keenan-Bolger draws you in with her transparent honesty.

The setting is both real and unreal, as are the performances by a uniformly excellent cast, with subtle choreography (by Steven Hoggett) that recalls the unshowy movement in Tiffany's musical hit Once. Cherry Jones is masterful as Amanda...There is a real poignancy in her portrayal, which avoids the extremes that have felled some other Amandas: She noodges without being smothering, and romanticizes the past without seeming delusional. As aspiring writer Tom, who longs to leave his warehouse job and set out on a life of adventure, Zachary Quinto is wryly funny but no less affecting. Celia Keenan-Bolger astutely underplays his sister Laura's limp to emphasize how her most crippling feature is timidity of spirit. And Brian J. Smith, as Laura's former high school crush, hits just the right notes of vanity and vulnerability. As seen through the hazy gauze of recollection, these mythic characters become at once familiar and true. A

If the pattern holds, and we get one Menagerie a decade, this will be a high point. I'm not sure what the two-thousand-teens did to earn this beautiful oubliette of a production (the aughts got Christian Slater in a leather jacket), but let's just say the next decade has its work cut out: This is a grand and true illusion, not just to be lauded and gawked at-though you will, and that's appropriate-but studied. Watch the hands. Be led and misled by them. Remember it differently this time.

there is a breathtaking display of theatre magic in director John Tiffany's glimmering production. It's the kind of magic that enthralls an audience when a masterful play is interpreted with sensitive, theme-enhancing imagination and acted out to perfection by an extraordinary ensemble of actors...The poet, not at all at ease with his past, is played with affection tinged with a sardonic edge by Zachary Quinto...Cherry Jones is arguably the finest American stage actor of our time and revivals of classics come to Broadway specifically so that artists such as her may make indelible marks in their leading roles. Here she is simply magnificent. Her Amanda Wingfield - part canary, part bulldozer - protects her delicate emotions with a brash, muscular exterior...Celia Keenan-Bolger, who has essayed an admirable collection of New York performances as spunky and intelligent girls and young women, has never been better than in her heartbreaking portrayal of Laura.

Jones, one of the greatest stage actresses alive, conveys this in a performance that will amaze even her most ardent admirers in its depth and compassion...This Menagerie...is by no means Jones' triumph alone. The four-person cast is as meticulously assembled as the titular collection of tiny glass animals that is Laura's most cherished possession. Director John Tiffany guides the players with sensitivity and vigor, underscoring both the dreamy, surreal aspects of Williams' 'memory play' and the brutal reality that the characters seem determined to shut out. Celia Keenan-Bolger brings an exquisite physical and vocal delicacy to Laura...As Tom, the family member most in touch with the outside world and also the narrator (describing a past based on the playwright's), Zachary Quinto moves deftly from recollection to confrontation, from dry asides to heated outbursts. A perfectly cast Brian J. Smith completes the company as the affable but mysterious 'Gentleman Caller' whose meeting with Laura sends the play hurtling toward its climax.

People actually seem to hang there on the stage, as selective and eccentric as memory, in director John Tiffany's unsettling, viscerally powerful revival of Tennessee Williams' 1944 masterwork, 'The Glass Menagerie.'...What could be ridiculous and mannered is, instead, bold and terrifically effective in this willful but fascinating vision by Tiffany and much of the team responsible for the enchanting Tony-winning 'Once.' It helps that Zachary Quinto portrays Tom with the wary, restless humanity of a trapped poet, while Cherry Jones carves out a less delusional, more sturdy Amanda with kaleidoscopic layers of hope and bile.

As you can see both in director John Tiffany's beautiful Broadway revival that opened here Thursday night and in a smaller but equally insightful and yet more intense Chicago revival that was the highlight of last season, directors have finally realized that there is no shame in presenting explicit memory in the only medium that can fully serve it...Cherry Jones, one of the great American stage actors, understands that playing a character in a memory play does not mean work informed by the ephemeral. Her Amanda is a great, gutsy woman from a time lousy for her gender. In this fine performance, you discern that her attempts at survival and modest progress are laid low by her own awareness of life's fragility for women, such as her daughter, without visible means of support. Keenan-Bolger spends much of the two hours of stage traffic trying to find some small victories to overcome her own despair; it is another beautiful performance.

People actually seem to hang there on the stage, as selective and eccentric as memory, in director John Tiffany's unsettling, viscerally powerful revival of Tennessee Williams' 1944 masterwork, 'The Glass Menagerie.'...What could be ridiculous and mannered is, instead, bold and terrifically effective in this willful but fascinating vision by Tiffany and much of the team responsible for the enchanting Tony-winning 'Once.' It helps that Zachary Quinto portrays Tom with the wary, restless humanity of a trapped poet, while Cherry Jones carves out a less delusional, more sturdy Amanda with kaleidoscopic layers of hope and bile.

As you can see both in director John Tiffany's beautiful Broadway revival that opened here Thursday night and in a smaller but equally insightful and yet more intense Chicago revival that was the highlight of last season, directors have finally realized that there is no shame in presenting explicit memory in the only medium that can fully serve it...Cherry Jones, one of the great American stage actors, understands that playing a character in a memory play does not mean work informed by the ephemeral. Her Amanda is a great, gutsy woman from a time lousy for her gender. In this fine performance, you discern that her attempts at survival and modest progress are laid low by her own awareness of life's fragility for women, such as her daughter, without visible means of support. Keenan-Bolger spends much of the two hours of stage traffic trying to find some small victories to overcome her own despair; it is another beautiful performance.

Memory floats on a giant plane of regret in American Repertory Theater's epic and intimate production of 'The Glass Menagerie,' trapped forever between a shimmering black sea and an endless void that even an infinite fire escape can't reach. Tennessee Williams' world of poetry and prose is presented gracefully, even wondrously, in this distinctive production - helmed by John Tiffany ('Once') and starring Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto - that no doubt will have Gotham's gentlemen and women coming to call, even if sometimes it's just awkward and disconnected.

After a string of mediocre Tennessee Williams revivals in recent Broadway seasons, theatergoers might be forgiven for becoming jaded about this leading 20th century American dramatist's unparalleled gift for soaring poetry tethered to penetrating emotional truth. It's difficult to imagine a more potent remedy for that fatigue than John Tiffany's transfixing production of The Glass Menagerie, which accesses the extraordinary intimacy of this landmark 1944 play in ways that give the impression you're seeing it for the first time. A performance of towering complexity from Cherry Jonesis flanked by equally illuminating work from her three co-stars, making this essential theater.

The way Laura makes her entrance in the new Broadway production of 'The Glass Menagerie' is jaw-droppingly brilliant. She emerges from out of the middle of a sofa, as if being born anew. It's a tip that a thrilling night at the theater awaits. There's magic from start to finish at the Booth Theatre, where the new production of Tennessee William's great play about regret opened Thursday starring a superb Cherry Jones and a revelatory Zachary Quinto. It's evocative, sometimes surreal and sublimely organic - the perfect package for a play about faded and frayed memories...Director John Tiffany, scenic designer Bob Crowley, lighting designer Natasha Katz and choreographer Steven Hoggett - who all made the musical 'Once' so special - have done it again, blurring text and music and movement into a fresh and flowing, intimate staging.

How can something be this delicate and this strong, so elusive and yet so tenacious? That question radiates from John Tiffany's stunning production of Tennessee Williams's 'Glass Menagerie,' which opened on Thursday night at the Booth Theater and promises to be the most revealing revival of a cornerstone classic for many a year to come. More than any interpretation I've seen of the 1944 drama that made Williams's name, this 'Menagerie' - which stars Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto in career-defining performances - finds the brute force in a play often described, a bit condescendingly, as lyrical, wispy, elegiac. Yes, the tapered fingers of poetry shape 'The Glass Menagerie.' But when these fingers curl into a fist - and they do so again and again in this production, before you quite realize it - be prepared to have the breath knocked out of you.