Ben
Brantley

November 2, 2015

Now this is what you call a room with a view. Early in “Rear Window,” Keith Reddin’s hot and bothered adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s classic crime story at Hartford Stage here, the walls that have hitherto separated a housebound alcoholic from the pulsing world beyond come apart. And there, laid out for his (and our) prurient delectation, is a gorgeous grid of disparate urban lives. For this production about the pleasures and perils of voyeurism, directed by Darko Tresnjak and starring a very good Kevin Bacon, the set designer Alexander Dodge has created a multilevel facade of a Manhattan apartment building from the late 1940s. What’s more, this edifice is populated by a an assortment of metropolitan archetypes, whom we glimpse going about their varied business through windows on different stories.