Dead Poets Society
Opening Night: November 17, 2016
Closing: December 11, 2016
Theater: Classic Stage Comp.
At a rigorous all-boys preparatory school renowned for its ancient traditions, the unconventional Professor Keating inspires his students to defy conformity and to live passionately. Academy Award winner Tom Schulman adapts his own screenplay for this much-anticipated production.
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November 17, 2016
Back in 1989, I was the exact target audience for Dead Poets Society: fresh out of high school, drunk on art and beauty, still resentful of overbearing, conformist parents (we were all MTV-weaned rebels). So of course I adored Robin Williams cracking jokes with his preppy students, turning them on to Walt Whitman and the liberating joy of a barbaric yawp. Twenty-seven years later, am I still the perfect demo? Let’s just say Classic Stage Company’s earnest but flat-footed adaptation inspires thoughts of Netflix streaming more than leaping up on one’s desk to cry, “O Captain! My Captain!” That stirring Spartacus-like moment at the end of the film is re-created here, but instead of wooden desks, the impassioned students mount stacks of books to show support for the unfairly dismissed John Keating (Jason Sudeikis). In the film, Maurice Jarre’s swelling music combined with low camera angles made the scene instantly iconic. Here, the effect is merely plucky and well-intentioned.
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November 17, 2016
A lone spark of subversion brightens the generally damp proceedings of “Dead Poets Society,” which opened on Thursday night at Classic Stage Company, directed by that streamliner deluxe John Doyle and featuring the comic film star Jason Sudeikis in an advanced state of decency. This enlivening flicker occurs well past the midpoint of Tom Schulman’s tidy adaptation of his Oscar-winning screenplay from 1989, when hopes have worn thin. Here’s the setup for the moment in which it seems that the show might actually catch fire. John Keating (Mr. Sudeikis in the role originated onscreen by Robin Williams) — an anti-conformist English teacher at a conformist New England boys’ school in that ultimate decade of conformity, the 1950s — is overseeing an exercise that requires his students to walk around the classroom.
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