The Kite Runner
Opening Night: July 21, 2022
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: thekiterunnerbroadway.com
One of the best-loved and most highly acclaimed novels of our time, The Kite Runner is a powerful play of friendship that follows one man’s journey to confront his past and find redemption. Afghanistan is a divided country and two childhood friends are about to be torn apart. It’s a beautiful afternoon in Kabul and the skies are full of the excitement and joy of a kite flying tournament. But neither of the boys can foresee the incident which will change their lives forever. Told across two decades and two continents, The Kite Runner is an unforgettable journey of redemption and forgiveness, and shows us all that we can be good again.
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July 21, 2022
Indeed, it’s tremendously difficult to adapt a novel as complex as The Kite Runner to the stage, where, when a play is driven by so many interwoven plotlines, the storytelling inevitably feels rushed.
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July 21, 2022
It’s easier in the novel to ride the twists and turns of Amir’s journey, even as he leaves Hassan behind in the first third of the story. Onstage the play shuffles along, and it’s hard to stay invested in this unpalatable hero with Hassan in the rearview mirror.
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July 21, 2022
What the novel slowly reveals through Amir’s reflective point of view, the play just speaks, abandoning all finesse. Like most high school love affairs, Broadway’s “Kite Runner” may be best off forgotten.
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July 21, 2022
Despite its heartfelt intentions and some impressive performances, The Kite Runner doesn’t improve in any significant way over The Kite Runner on screen. And it’s a whole lot talkier.
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July 21, 2022
But Matthew Spangler’s script is just so clumsy, and Giles Croft’s production (which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman in England in 2013 before moving to the West End years later) is just so bland, that I couldn’t help but wonder why this is the theatricalized version of the material that a group of more than two-dozen producers chose to take to Broadway.
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July 21, 2022
That treacherous trap, however, is shrewdly avoided on Broadway, where a moving stage adaptation of the book opened Thursday night, because of the actors’ radiating warmth and the production’s generosity of spirit.
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July 21, 2022
Whether Hosseini’s fault — I’ve not read his book — or that of playwright Matthew Spangler, I cannot say, but the results are an unwelcome throwback to the Bush era’s inelegant emotional manipulation.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 21, 2022
What you get here is a modestly packaged version of a powerful archetypal story. What you miss is the racing present of Kabul: the chaos, the movement, the ancient antagonisms, the rush of youth and danger.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 21, 2022
If only The Kite Runner on Broadway depended less on the novel and trusted more on its stagecraft. There might have been more moments like this, of flight and transcendence.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 21, 2022
With the help of a superlative cast, led by Amir Arison, playing the central role of a character also named Amir, and lucid direction by Giles Croft, the Broadway production brings the largely gripping narrative to life, even if it cannot fully capture the textured complexity of Mr. Hosseini’s writing.
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July 21, 2022
Playwright Matthew Spangler’s adaptation of “The Kite Runner,” Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling 2005 novel about the friendship of two boys living parallel lives in Afghanistan, is a heartbreaker – but so uplifting, it’s worth the pain.
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