The Cottage
Opening Night: July 24, 2023
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: thecottageonbroadway.com
Broadway’s brand-new, side-splitting romp is an outrageous tale of sex, betrayal, and desire as one woman decides to expose her latest affair to both her husband — and to her lover’s wife. The true meaning of fate and faith, identity and infidelity, love and marriage are all called into question as a surprising and hilarious web of secrets unravels in this ridiculously funny romantic comedy.
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July 24, 2023
But after all the temporizing and flatulating earlier, the last-minute arrival of a point seemed, well, beside the point. Had I laughed more than twice in the play’s previous 119 minutes, I might even have found it funny.
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July 24, 2023
Audience members seemed eager to yield to Rustin’s shticks and howl along, but in reality there’s more delight in looking at “The Cottage” than laughing along to it.
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July 24, 2023
Sandy Rustin’s The Cottage has no pretensions to seriousness: It’s a brazenly straightforward drawing-room farce, created for light amusement and delivered on a platter by a properly silly cast of six.
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July 24, 2023
The Cottage tries to emphasize the fizz, but nobody remembered to shake the soda can beforehand. It’s full of explanations, light on mess
READ THE REVIEWJuly 24, 2023
The play is a sensational, feminist twist on a classic British period drama that features knockout performances, melodramatic reveals, and some seriously outrageous one-liners. If home is where the heart is, then The Cottage is where the mind’s deepest, darkest, and most salacious secrets go to fight and frolic in the fresh air.
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July 24, 2023
The Cottage is not a dud; its momentary outbreaks of hilarity thankfully break up stretches of conversation about characters’ tangled pasts, and restatements of the comic setups in front of us. But, as wittily complicated as those summaries can sound, we’ve already got it. It’s been unpacked for us in the moment, over and over again. If The Cottage isn’t a farce, what is it? This critic couldn’t tell you, and—as presented—the production doesn’t seem to know the answer either.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 24, 2023
Just check with everyone in your group: Some will be tickled pink by “The Cottage” and thrill to the très outré (and highly skilled) comic stylings of Laura Bell Bundy, Eric McCormack, Alex Moffat, Nehal Joshi and Lilli Cooper. Others will be ready to head to the basement bar at intermission to nurse their headache and remain there.
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July 24, 2023
There are few things more pleasant on a steamy New York afternoon or evening than to sit down in a cool theater, turn off your brain, and laugh for two hours straight. The Cottage more than fits that bill.
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July 24, 2023
A lowbrow-highbrow mashup isn’t the worst idea, granted, but here it translates to “Shout til it’s funny.”
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July 24, 2023
The laughs are there, thanks to a comedically fine-tuned cast, but, befitting a bed-hopping plot, a tender, surprising altruism keeps them on your face.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 24, 2023
The Cottage is an airy — and gassy — comedy about cheating. Sandy Rustin wrote the play with a single-minded mission — to keep you in stitches — and it largely hits the mark.
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July 24, 2023
Yes, there is a world of lousy theater beyond New York City, and “The Cottage,” which opened Monday on Broadway at the Hayes Theatre, is destined for it.
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