Leopoldstadt
Opening Night: October 2, 2022
Theater: Longacre Theatre
Website: leopoldstadtplay.com
Set in Vienna, Leopoldstadt takes its title from the Jewish quarter. This passionate drama of love and endurance begins in the last days of 1899 and follows one extended family deep into the heart of the 20th century.
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October 2, 2022
A transfer from the West End, Leopoldstadt is a production of superb clarity and nuance, with director Patrick Marber at the helm running a smooth and tight ship with a massive ensemble of immense talent, each expertly telling this difficult yet extraordinarily intimate story of confronting one’s own identities and shared generational trauma.
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October 2, 2022
The acting is excellent across the board, with too many standouts to name. The director Patrick Marber’s deep-focus staging keeps all the stories going at once on a set by Richard Hudson that fairly gleams with honeyed smugness under Neil Austin’s lights. And Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes make you long for the elegance of prewar fashions until you are brought up short by remembering what happened to those who wore them.
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October 2, 2022
That’s what makes “Leopoldstadt” resonate beyond being about one family. It’s about how, in a world filled with people being displaced and then forced to assimilate, it’s easy for lineage, language and heritage to become lost. In “Leopoldstadt,” remembering is an active choice, and the play acts as encouragement: Ask about the nameless people in your family photographs, before their names are lost forever.
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October 2, 2022
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.
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October 2, 2022
Still blinded by their faith in their artistic and intellectual homeland, the Mertzes refuse to see what’s before their eyes. But we who know the past can see their future, which Stoppard reveals in a coda set in 1995 – and leaves us shattered.
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October 2, 2022
Still, it is a powerful work which is receiving a lavish production under the meticulous direction of Patrick Marber. Given its size and scale, the fact that “Leopoldstadt” is being produced on Broadway – and commercially, no less – is unbelievable.
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October 2, 2022
Staring mournfully at an old photograph, she says, “Here’s a couple waving goodbye, but who are they? It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family photo album.” That hard truth really stings in Stoppard’s creaky though sporadically moving drama that has arrived in New York from London.
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October 2, 2022
It is, unfortunately, not a very good play. Though intelligently directed by Patrick Marber as a drawing room drama perpetually intruded upon by antisemitism, it manages to say very little during its 2-hour-without-intermission runtime. Stoppard apparently had not realized his own connection to Judaism until the 1990s, and the suddenness of his engagement with these themes is evident.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 2, 2022
It is, indeed, a deeply personal dare from Stoppard himself, who never knew of his own Jewishness until his 50s, when a previously unknown relative made contact. With Leopoldstadt, the playwright declares his own heritage in first-rate, epic, and urgent fashion, seemingly atoning for lost time. Forgetting one’s ancestors, he suggests, is its own tragedy: “It’s like a second death,” one character says, “to lose your name in a family album.”
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October 2, 2022
In each new decade, someone claims the atrocities of the past couldn’t possibly be repeated, and each time they’re proven wrong. So Leopoldstadt is also a warning, as a third great war seems a hair’s breadth away, and the gears of history continue to churn. Yet again, we would do well to listen.
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October 2, 2022
Like a masterful painter working on a monumental canvas, director Patrick Marber brings a delicate hand and a keen attention to detail to his staging. Shifting accents tell the story of dialect as perception: American cousin Sally sounds like a Yank in 1924 (played by Sara Topham) when she is surrounded by her Austrian family, but she sounds distinctly Mitteleuropean in 1955 (played by Jenna Augen, who seems to wear the burden of memory on her shoulders). These little touches make an already rich script feel alive and dynamic.
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October 2, 2022
Krumholtz and Uranowitz succeed in making Herman and Ludwig’s debate in Act 1 absolutely riveting. Stoppard, however, has written Jacob as a one-person screed, and Numrich’s over-the-top “Give me a Tony Award nomination” performance nearly sabotages the act. No help are Jacob’s relatives of his generation whom Stoppard has conceived as Jazz Age heathens whose biggest concerns are what America will come up with next after giving them that wonderful dance called the Charleston. Patrick Marber’s direction, so nuanced in Act 1, suddenly turns blunt. But then, so does Stoppard’s writing.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 2, 2022
“Leopoldstadt,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the Longacre Theatre in a gorgeously sculpted and acted production directed by Patrick Marber, plays in front of an audience listening so intently that it barely moves a collective muscle.
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October 2, 2022
Sir Tom Stoppard’s powerful and beautifully written play—its name derived from the name of Vienna’s historic Jewish quarter—is a reclamation of what has been variously extinguished, murdered, and lost in a time span of 56 years from 1899 to 1955. The genius of Patrick Marber’s direction, aided by Hudson’s design and Neil Austin’s lighting, is that the play flickers ethereally before us. It feels as if we are watching something out of our own reach of time—like old pieces of film found in a box and reanimated, ghosts fluttering in motion before us.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 2, 2022
The theater season is just aborning, but it is virtually inconceivable that it will produce anything superior to Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” An intimate, multigenerational drama about a Jewish family in Vienna, set against the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, the play—inexpressibly moving, unavoidably devastating—ranks among Mr. Stoppard’s greatest works, which is a considerable achievement given his status as one of our pre-eminent living playwrights.
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