Camelot
Opening Night: April 13, 2023
Theater: Vivian Beaumont
Website: camelotbway.com
Based on The Once and Future King by T.H. White, Camelot, Lerner and Loewe’s 1960 follow up to My Fair Lady, is a story about the quest for democracy, striving for justice, and the tragic struggle between passion and aspiration, between lovers and kingdoms. This epic and timely tale features the iconic characters King Arthur, Queen Guenevere, and Sir Lancelot as well as the beloved original score with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe which includes “If Ever I Would Leave You,” “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” and the title song “Camelot.” Featuring a book by Academy and Emmy Award winning writer Aaron Sorkin, based on the original book by Alan Jay Lerner, and direction by Bartlett Sher.
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April 13, 2023
Neither content to be agreeable piffle nor ready to be Sondheimesque psychodrama, it aims for a middle path, welding Arthur’s romantic life with a free-spirited queen to his rethinking of governance with a recalcitrant gentry. Both fail, as does the show, in a way that “Brigadoon,” the team’s 1947 hit, aiming lower, does not.
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April 13, 2023
That idealistic ethos is quintessential Sorkin (creator of “The West Wing,” adaptor of Broadway’s recent “To Kill a Mockingbird”), who — with “Camelot”’ — imbues another historical work with gregarious dialogue, broiling romance and boundless hope for a more just future. The result is an at times dramatically lagging, but consistently polished and warming tale playing out at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
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April 13, 2023
If the acting is a shade less satisfying than the singing, it’s mostly the result of the production’s overall conception – a conception that isn’t unjustifiable, just more swing and a miss.
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April 13, 2023
In Aaron Sorkin’s revised script for Lincoln Center Theater’s new Broadway production of “Camelot,” the magic is missing — in more ways than one.
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April 13, 2023
Director Bartlett Sher does not treat Camelot with blind reverence—its weakest element, Lerner’s original book, has been significantly revised by Aaron Sorkin—but the production projects the overarching sense of a beloved old property being propped up beyond its strength.
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April 13, 2023
That’s the trick of Camelot, too, as a show. I can enumerate all its flaws, of which there are many, and yet the possibility of it all sticks in memory. The revival makes you want to believe in a great musical called Camelot, even if such a thing never did exist.
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April 13, 2023
It feels like as if this Camelot—with book by Aaron Sorkin, based on Alan Jay Lerner’s original; its actors lost and unmoored on the cavernously bare stage of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater—isn’t sure what to focus on, beached between its sermonizing about Arthur wanting to make a Round Table of knights not-fighting and generally being standard-bearers for a new just fairness (“might for right”), and then the Arthur-Guenevere-Lancelot love triangle which is bizarrely dull and tension-free. At almost three hours on a spartan stage, it grinds into a numbingly boring show.
READ THE REVIEWApril 13, 2023
Following their heralded 2018 Broadway adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, Sorkin has teamed up once again with director Bartlett Sher on a crusade to bring Camelot to the Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater for one fleeting wisp of glory.
READ THE REVIEWApril 13, 2023
But while the pleasures of the production, chiefly musical, are abundant, the overall impression is one of a studied self-seriousness that tends to smother, as under a weighted blanket, your excitement.
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April 13, 2023
And the Tony Award for biggest disappointment (both literally and figuratively) of the theater season goes to Lincoln Center Theater’s highly-anticipated Broadway revival of Lerner & Loewe’s “Camelot,” the beloved but lumbering 1960 musical which, although admittedly in need of a facelift, has not benefited from Aaron Sorkin’s revised book.
READ THE REVIEWApril 13, 2023
Had Jackie Kennedy seen the revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “Camelot” now at Lincoln Center — with book by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher, with Andrew Burnap as King Arthur, Phillipa Soo as Guinevere and Jordan Donica as Lancelot — she’d hardly have chosen such a connection.
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April 13, 2023
Indeed, this Camelot, which I admittedly could not muster up much enthusiasm for upon entering the Vivian Beaumont Theater, was surprisingly engaging. It feels like bingeing four episodes of The West Wing, with a handful of extremely pretty songs that are gorgeously delivered by the 27-person cast and 30-player orchestra.
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April 13, 2023
Merlyn and his magic tricks aren’t the only things that Aaron Sorkin cuts in his revival of Alan Jay Lerner’s book for the 1960 musical “Camelot.” Gone, too, is almost any sense of romance.
READ THE REVIEWApril 13, 2023
The optimistic notion that greatness is within reach if only for “one brief, shining moment” is indelibly ingrained in Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1960 musical Camelot. Director Bartlett Sher’s gray and forbidding revival of the classic show could definitely use a bit more shine. It’s dark a lot in this Camelot.
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April 13, 2023
The kingdom’s gotten a whole lot younger, and beautifully more agile, in Lincoln Center Theater’s latest revival of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. Solidly directed by Bartlet Sherr from an updated book by Aaron Sorkin, it presents the legend as not too far from a commoner’s reach, but all the more entrancing for its identifiability.
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