Patriots
Opening Night: April 22, 2024
Theater: Ethel Barrymore
Website: patriotsbroadway.com
In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the new Russia belongs to its oligarchs—and no one is more powerful than billionaire Boris Berezovsky. When an eventual successor to President Boris Yeltsin is needed, Berezovsky turns to the little-known deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin. But soon Putin’s ruthless rise threatens Berezovsky’s reign, setting off a riveting, near-Shakespearean confrontation between the two powerful, fatally flawed men.
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April 22, 2024
“In the West you have no idea.”
So begins Peter Morgan’s play “Patriots,” which opened on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The line is spoken by the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, referring to the foods, sights and music that supposedly feed the great Russian soul. These are represented, in Rupert Goold’s entertaining if overcaffeinated production, by boozy singing and balalaikas, sometimes even fur hats.
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April 23, 2024
“Patriots” shines when it releases its need to peacock as a Shakespearean-level epic and gets into some Shakespearean-like complexity.
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April 22, 2024
Ultimately, the first-rate comedy of the first act turns into the second-rate melodrama of the second act.
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April 22, 2024
As history lesson, Patriots is more than worthy. As drama, well, it’s a history lesson.
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April 22, 2024
Goold allows nothing to impede the forward progress of the plot — so why does it so often feel inert? Why does the story of who will lead the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons feel so low stakes?
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April 22, 2024
The problem is, dramatically, he has nowhere to go, and neither do we.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2024
But while the Broadway production boasts creative stage design, it fails to provide useful insight into the politics of post-Soviet Russia.
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April 22, 2024
“Patriots,” a gripping, juicy drama replete with a terrifying performance from Will Keen as a Richard III-like you-know-who, offers up a potted history of Russia from the 1990s, the era of bumbling Boris Yeltsin, to the present. Its central dramatic question? How did Putin happen?
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2024
Morgan’s Wikipedia-esque play does its best to track the perilous tango between oligarchy and politics, but it’s built around the assumption that it’s amusing and ironic that one man who created a monster got chewed up and spit out by it, and the rest of us have to pay.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2024
To accomplish such a welcome feat, Peter Morgan – responsible, among other acclaimed works, for the Tony-nominated Frost/Nixon and The Crown — has done it again.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2024
Featuring brilliant performances by Michael Stuhlbarg as Russian-Jewish businessman Boris Berezovsky and Will Keen, repeating his Olivier Award-winning London performance, as Putin, Patriots is the sort of gripping real-life drama that only makes you want to learn more.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2024
I would advise them all to rush to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Peter Morgan’s “Patriots” is offering one of the most absorbing accounts of political intrigue I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage.
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April 23, 2024
The ties among these three men anchor Patriots, which otherwise can sometimes feel too unwieldy in its ambitions.
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April 23, 2024
“Patriots,” which comes to Broadway following a London debut in a seamless, tech-savvy production by Rupert Goold (“Ink,” “American Psycho”) is an action-packed, engaging saga that follows Putin’s rise to power, going from Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, to Prime Minister, to President of Russia following the sudden resignation of Boris Yeltsin on the eve of the new millennium.
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April 22, 2024
Yet the first stage direction of Patriots is: “A bare stage.” As I left the shadows of Boris and Vladimir behind, I wondered what that version of their story might have looked like, and whether it could have become more than an exercise in (Morgan’s words) “riveting personal interactions”; whether, in its attempt to touch the Russian soul, it could have asked for more of our souls and hazarded more of its own.
READ THE REVIEWApril 23, 2024
In fact Mr. Morgan’s engrossing play, now on Broadway after an acclaimed London run, depicts the rise of Boris Berezovsky, one of the Russian oligarchs who amassed vast wealth, often by shady means, during the tumultuous years after the fall of the Soviet Union. He is portrayed by the fine actor Michael Stuhlbarg, who gives a performance of unflagging energy and febrile intensity; in the play’s denser passages, one almost worries that he will begin hyperventilating, so caught up is he in Berezovsky’s fervent ambitions.
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