In this triumphant return to Broadway, Tony and Emmy Award winner John Lithgow dazzlingly conjures an entire cast of indelible characters - and The New York Times says the result is "superb, illuminating and uplifting." With honesty, humor and heart, he combines family memories and timeless tales into a one-of-a-kind event that New York magazine calls "pure entertainment." Don't miss John Lithgow as he elevates the magic of storytelling to masterful new heights. "Rarely have I spent so entertaining and touching a night at the theater." (The Wall Street Journal).
One of the finest things about Lithgow is how unclassifiable he is, how idiosyncratic. Another pale giant with a rabbit face and a plum pudding voice might have become a niche performer, but he has always moved gracefully among classics and schlock, leads and character roles, charmers and drips and villains and extraterrestrials. So it is both a pleasure and a disappointment to find him doing something as aggressively ordinary as this one-man show, which Lithgow first developed a decade ago, alternating family reminiscences with good-natured performances of two short stories, Ring Lardner's Haircut and PG Wodehouse's Uncle Fred Flits By.
Wodehouse isn't as easy to read aloud as Lardner, but Mr. Lithgow takes a great deal of pleasure in mapping sentences whose verbs are barely in earshot of their subjects. And he revels in Dadaist assemblages like this one: 'I know if someone came to me and said 'Jelly this eel!' I should be nonplused.' Yet the Wodehouse, for all its airy wit, is not about nothing: It too is a story of deception, only in this case the kind that delivers delicious comeuppance to the puffed-up and slow-witted. And what could feel more current, more worthwhile, in the first cold days of 2018 than that? The imagination, Mr. Lithgow wants us to know, is a powerful weapon if we don't let it go dull.
2008 | Off-Broadway |
Original Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
2012 | US Tour |
US Tour |
2018 | Broadway |
Roundabout Theatre Company Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2018 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Solo Performance | John Lithgow |
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