Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The sensational Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES is hilarious, intoxicating

• By drediman
• April 25, 2018
• No Comments

Peter McDonald, Tom Hollander, Scarlett Strallen, and Sara Topham in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Travesties” by Tom Stoppard at the American Airlines Theatre.

Last night, the sensational Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard’s Tony-winning 1974 play Travesties opened at the American Airlines Theater. The Roundabout Theatre Company production is a remount of Patrick Marber’s well-received staging for London’s prolific Menier Chocolate Factory, which subsequently transferred to the West End. Travesties is in essence a memory play gone amuck. In it, we nose dive into the muddled mind of one fictitious Henry Carr, an inconsequential British diplomat who lived in Zurich during the early 20th Century. Actually also living in the city was a trio of the most influential artistic and political figures in Europe at the time – James Joyce (novelist), Tristan Tzara (artist), and Lenin (political revolutionary). The play recounts, with considerable hilarity and amusingly confused inaccuracies, Mr. Carr’s relationship with these three titans, vis-à-vis an amateur production of Oscar Wilde’s The Inprtance of Being Earnest (which Mr. Carr had fondly starred in) (!). Although Travesties can be categorized as top-drawer farce, it’s much more than that; it’s also an astute and dazzling exploration of memory, history, and art that only Stoppard could have concocted.

Lucky for us, Mr. Marber has given us a truly delicious production to savor. Travesties is a rich, complex play, and this staging gives equal weighting to both the work’s madcap sensibility, as well as its rigorous historical and intellectual references. The production has a deep bag of tricks – much like that other British import playing just next door, the magical Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – to make Stoppard’s potentially tiresome play come to intoxicating life. By setting the play in a purgatorial study of endless curiosities, Mr. Marber has brilliantly given theatrical form to the play’s wall-of-mirrors aesthetic. The production also features a spectacular cast that really gets Stoppard’s dense intellectual musings and wicked sense of humor. Leading the company is Tom Hollander, who repeats his duties as the clueless Henry Carr (he had played the role across the pond to great acclaim), and he’s simply divine as the fumbling, delusional, but lovable diplomat. The rest of the mostly American cast is right up there with him. To say that this revival is the funniest and smartest thing currently playing on the Great White Way wouldn’t be a stretch. Indeed, an apt way to think of this Travesties is to envision it as the thinking man’s The Play that Goes Wrong. That wouldn’t be too far from the mark.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

TRAVESTIES
Broadway, Play
Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre
2 hours, 30 minutes (with one intermission)
Through June 17