‘Leopoldstadt’ Broadway Review: Tom Stoppard Delivers A Late-Career Masterpiece
03.10.2022 - 06:25
/ deadline.com
The great playwright Tom Stoppard and his simpatico director Patrick Marber make a lasting gift of remembrance in the brilliant, gorgeous and devastating new play Leopoldstadt, opening tonight at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre. But it’s a gift that comes with strings, ropes even, the author seems to be warning us: There’s burden attached to memory, and pain, and, above all, responsibility – duty, even – that accompanies every yellowed snapshot in an old family album and every fading face that once seemed fixed with such clarity.
Most of us, thankfully, won’t have the unbearably catastrophic history to carry through life that the youngest of Leopoldstadt‘s characters are ultimately left with. When we reunite with them at the end of the play, in 1955, their numbers dwindled to three, the survivors of Hitler’s campaign to eradicate Europe’s Jews are all that’s left of the once expansive family we’ve come to know in the previous hours.
When we first encounter, in 1899, the extended family of Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz), its members are as grand and sophisticated as the gorgeously appointed Old World drawing room in Vienna. One of those appointments of set designer Richard Hudson’s detail-perfect surroundings is a lovingly decorated Christmas tree – a nod to the Catholics who have married into this otherwise Jewish family and, perhaps more tellingly, to those Jews – Hermann, especially – who believe that the days of separatism are history, that full assimilation of Jews into the Austria they’ve long called home is at hand. Hermann, unlike his more politically astute and analytical brother-in-law Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz), has no use for radical talk of a Jewish homeland in some godforsaken desert, and places his trust in
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