Theater review
John Proctor is the villain
An hour and 45 minutes, without intermediate. At the Booth theater, 222 West 45th Street.
The loud title of Broadway’s work “John Proctor is the villain” reads as the rare high school essay that was not written hours before it is due.
It is an intelligent and nervous thesis about “the melting”, if not exactly a new idea.
However, the playwright of the playwright Kimberly Belflower, often entertaining, mostly intelligent, frequently false who opened Monday night at the Booth theater could have used another draft.
The promising play set in a turnt school plaetten about hacky through after an early dropped Andway Side To Audience Side To Audience Side To Audience Side To Audience Side To Audience Side To Audience Side To Audience Side To Audience and and Weide Welle and Awtweing His AT “Crucible Akimbo”.
Say what you want about Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama: Maintaining the impulse is not your problem.
“Villano”, starring Sadie Fregin of “Stranger Things”, is developed in an English class of Georgia full of hormonal adolescents who study the tests of Miller Classic’s Salem witches, the main character of what the accused farmer John Proctor is.
His teacher, Mr. Smith.
Then the #MeToo movement hits. A girl named Ivy’s (Maggie Kunz), owner of a business, is demolished by an employee for irregularities, and another claim of bombs is launched to an adult who works at school.
Proctor, who in Miller’s work had an adventure with “I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil!” The accuser Abigail and hits his wormer Mary, suddenly you cannot praise the children of the Z generation surrounded by bad men of all ages.
Even so, not all students in the small southern enclave believe the alleged victims. Cracks and clashes occur, as in the seventeenth century Salem.
Of course, none of the villagers killed in Massachusetts or “the melting” were really witches.
Belflower’s work says otherwise while reflecting Miller’s moral certainty about innocence from top to bottom of his own characters. She throws zero doubts about the men investigated. They did it absolutely.
The talented director Dayna Taymor has hurt adolescents again after the exciting musical of the gang war last year “The outsiders”. She is skilled with this age group and makes a dynamic use of a set of desks without changes and dry.
The energy and camaraderie of his young cast helps lift more slow portions in the long and intermediate show, even if the performance sometimes leans more “Boy knows the world” than reality.
Everyone is memorable, but the most credible in a backpack is fine Strazza like Beth, a smart whip who is friendly with Mr. Smith. Strazza was the last on Broadway as the protagonist in “Matilda”, another lover of early books.
And Morgan Scott is easily fun like Nell, a girl who has just moved to the city from Atlanta and is our window to these communities, Peculia Raties.
Sink, who has accumulated a large number of followers since Netflix science fiction success, returns to Broadway for the first time in a decade like Shelby, a rebel with a cause that resurfaces after months.
Coming from a series of sets on marginalized, fits here and is a safe scene actor.
Shelby has a strobe relationship with Raeylnn (Amalia Yoo) about a boy named Lee (do oliveros). Althegh Yoo is moving, I didn’t buy the sitting conversation that solves its Tiff.
Speaking of Netflix, through “John Proctor is the villain”, the miniseries of the waves of the streamer “adolescence” continued emerging in my mind. That heartbreaking show has marked parents around the world by representing the darkness of the belly of modern adolescent life. His realism has been praised.
“John Proctor” also deals with large and scary issues, Ok, not murderous, who are relevant to young people. But most of the time, the script and production order them.
For example, Raelynn’s problematic relationship with Violent Lee, the guy who has been seeing for eight months, is choreographed to be much easier to see than it should be.
And as events that could break a small separate city and almost surely they are national news, the characters adhere to a comedy style.
That is the work that Belflower wanted to write, and there is something to say humor and lightness keeping the inverted audience. I enjoyed myself.
But while “John Proctor” is a good time, it is not powerful.