A Few Good Men
Opening Night: October 29, 2026
Theater: Vivian Beaumont
Website: www.lct.org
Military lawyer Daniel Kaffee is known for his wit, charm, and uncanny talent for closing cases before they ever get to trial. When assigned to defend two young Marines accused of murder, his typical strategy is upended by Lt. Commander JoAnne Galloway, a sharp attorney determined to prove the men’s innocence. But the evidence soon leads them to a cover-up, putting them on a collision course with the entire chain of command.
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October 29, 2026
Plenty of what makes Sorkin Sorkin is already evident here — punchy dialogue, swift scenes, moral certainty. (The characters may not always know what is right and just, but Sorkin does.) “A Few Good Men,” though, is weakened by rickety structure and characters who are more like sketches than walking, talking (or given Sorkin’s penchant, walking and talking) human beings.
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October 29, 2026
Yet for all the strengths of Lincoln Center Theater’s sleek new revival of Sorkin’s military drama, at the Vivian Beaumont through January 10, the biggest letdown is how leaden those same courtroom battles suddenly feel. The scenes are certainly the greatest failing of Michael Arden’s frequently workmanlike staging, which draws out interesting nuances along the edges of Sorkin’s text but fails to animate its core dramatic questions.
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October 29, 2026
Like The West Wing, A Few Good Men airs its morality proudly, and there’s an innocence to its structure that could only come from a writer who was still figuring out how to tell stories. A thrilling production, the kind that leaves you hanging on every word, could mask the plot machinations you can guess five minutes before they occur. Arden’s customarily luxurious staging isn’t commanding enough to make that happen.
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October 29, 2026
Sorkin’s dialogue is as ping-y as it was ever going to be, but in what winds up feeling like an oddly muted almost three hours of high-stakes legal drama, its crackles never quite spark to a blaze. They can’t because the container is subtly starving it of oxygen.
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October 29, 2026
A Few Good Men, even in a production as generously appointed and grandly performed as this, offers truths that just aren’t that hard to handle.
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October 29, 2026
While the truth to be handled in this case may be in the eye of the beholder, it shows the difficult questions A Few Good Men still poses almost four full decades after its original staging.
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October 29, 2026
The production may not generate much excitement, but it earns a respectful salute—the proper response to a show whose duties have been discharged honorably, if not with special distinction.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
How do you escape the shadow of “A Few Good Men?” Just ask Michael Arden… It’s a tough act to follow, but under Arden’s crackling direction, “A Few Good Men” is as explosively compelling as ever in a bang-up revival that opened Oct. 29 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
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October 29, 2026
LTC’s revival of Sorkin’s court-martial drama makes it clear that the Tony Awards got it right. “A Few Good Men” is a creaky old play.
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October 29, 2026
Such is this musty old courtroom drama that resembles a million others with its chatty windbags and zero surprises. This is Sorkin at his most oom-pah-pah, earning cheap applause breaks for self-important lines delivered like asteroid impacts. Director Michael Arden’s ginormous revival has a few good sequences and a few good performances, but “A Few Good Men,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, has never really been a good play.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
A Few Good Men has only its complicated Sorkin dialogue to propel it along. Arden proves less adept at turning that fast talk into music; in his hands, the play is lurching and awkward, rarely finding the rhythm necessary to keep Sorkin’s verbosity afloat.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
“A Few Good Men” is a bonafide audience pleaser, a craftful and engrossing piece of writing, even if this very expansive staging with four additional actors from what is typical (the gifted designer Dane Laffrey has re-created much of the navy base, it feels) pushes it to its limit. Arden, of course, is a director who knows both how to create potent visual pictures and how to forge kinetic movement within them. That’s very much on display here, especially when uniformed men rise from where we are accustomed to seeing the orchestra pit, like Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army come to life.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
Director Michael Arden’s glossy Broadway revival is a gripping piece of storytelling, and the production boasts an almost cinematic grandeur that makes the most of the cavernous stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
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As the sole female principal, Rodriguez drives the production. Her plucky Galloway is loaded with charisma and gumption — and a consistent refusal to accept “no” as an answer. She pokes and prods, unrelenting in her pursuit of the truth. Honestly, it’s exhausting to watch her jump through hoops and repeatedly justify her belonging in these rooms. But Rodriguez more than holds her own against the cast of men; it’s delightful to see this musical theater darling show off her acting chops.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
Neither Blyth’s performance nor Michael Arden’s lackadaisical direction, however, are enough to answer the age-old question: Why this play now?
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
If you go to the current Lincoln Center Theater revival of Aaron Sorkin’s play expecting a replica of the high-octane Hollywood legal thriller, you’ll be disappointed. There’s nothing flashy about the Michael Arden–directed production (perhaps a surprise from the mind behind the high-flying The Lost Boys): A Few Good Men is simply, as it always was, an engrossing courtroom drama about two Marines charged with the murder of another on their base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 1989.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 29, 2026
Directed by Michael Arden, a director more experienced with musicals (Maybe Happy Ending, Parade) than straight plays, it’s a generally solid production, even if it strains at times to fill the vast Beaumont stage. But those who’ve seen the film or the original production at the much more intimate Music Box are likely to make comparisons that won’t be favorable.
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