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October 20, 2022

Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning love letter to hustlers returns to Broadway in a powerful production. Although Topdog/Underdog premiered off-Broadway in a pre-9/11 United States, under Kenny Leon’s direction, this revival makes it look as if it were tailor-made for the era of betrayal and dissension we live in today.

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October 20, 2022

How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks’s fearlessness.

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October 20, 2022

Under the expert direction of Kenny Leon, the actors have made a delicious dance out of besting one another. Clawing intense audience laughter from Parks’ dark script, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen II are excellent students of “rep and rev” (repetition and revision), a technique that Parks — also a musician — borrows from jazz.

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October 20, 2022

The first Broadway revival, which opened at the Golden Theatre tonight, crackles like a live wire — an American fable with its finger shoved in a socket. Throw in career-high performances from Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and it is a theatrical event in the most essential sense, in that it demands to be seen here and now.

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October 20, 2022

Regardless, the production excels in the sharp and textured interplay between Hawkins (restless, longing, cocky, hurt) and Abdul-Mateen (weathered, mature, guilty, smooth), in which comedy-laced routines eventually culminate in showdown and tragedy.

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October 20, 2022

Twenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog has lost none of its vitality and power and cunning. Director Kenny Leon proves that in a vibrant new production opening tonight at the Golden Theatre.

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New York Daily News
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Chris
Jones

October 20, 2022

Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century. And on Broadway, the director Kenny Leon has put this 2001 masterpiece back on a fresh, vital pedestal.

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New York Theatre Guide
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Joe
Dziemianowicz

October 20, 2022

For this harrowing and humorous two-hander to reach its full firepower, it takes actors equal in might. Director Kenny Leon has cast a pair of aces who consistently match each other across the tragicomic tone shifts.

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Entertainment Weekly
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Lester Fabian
Brathwaite

October 20, 2022

For this 20th anniversary production, the play has found its perfect conduits in Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta ComptonIn the Heights) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (HBO’s WatchmenThe Matrix Resurrections).

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October 20, 2022

Director Kenny Leon has helmed a sharp, focused revival of the 2002 drama, with a pair of cracking performances that never let up.

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October 20, 2022

Now the show is back on Broadway, opening Thursday at the Golden Theatre, where director Kenny Leon has orchestrated two riveting performances from young stars best known for their onscreen work: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen”) plays the older brother, Lincoln, a former street hustler with a demeaning and dead-end job as an Abe Lincoln impersonator in whiteface; while Corey Hawkins (“Straight Outta Compton”) is younger brother Booth, an unemployed man who gets by shoplifting his basic needs while yearning for his brother’s abandoned skills at three-card monte to make some real money.

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Wall Street Journal
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Charles
Isherwood

October 20, 2022

At some point during the more than 20 years since Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” made its debut, the play passed its sell-by date.

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October 20, 2022

Afro-pessimism isn’t a genre in which I’d usually place Parks, let alone Leon. But played without winking in a key of aggrieved, stressed-out toxic masculinity, as it is here, Topdog/Underdog is able to hit that note convincingly. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that this play had another card up its sleeve.

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October 20, 2022

The writing and direction are scythe-sharp and precise, and Hawkins’ and Abdul-Mateen’s are two superlative performances—for this critic, the standout of this current Broadway season so far: energetic, witty, mischievous, searing, tender, and vulnerable.

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October 20, 2022

What a thrill it is to be in the presence of Kenny Leon’s new revival at the Golden Theatre, where two exciting actors — Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II — are picking up the cards and giving us a singular night of theater.

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