Uncle Vanya
Opening Night: April 24, 2024
Theater: Vivian Beaumont
Website: vanyabroadway.com
Sonia and her uncle Vanya have devoted their lives to managing the family farm in isolation, but when her celebrated, ailing father and his charismatic wife move in, their lives are upended. In the heat of the summer, the wrong people fall in love, desires and resentments erupt, and the family is forced to reckon with the ghosts of their unlived lives.
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April 24, 2024
If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.
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April 25, 2024
One can see why top-caliber actors would flock to revel in this flurry of familial relationships, hormonal hangering and endless suffering, but I’m still not convinced audiences need to. Or at least not yet. This “Uncle Vanya” still seems to be finding its footing.
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April 24, 2024
This is the brilliance of this play as rendered by Schreck, Neugebauer, and the entire cast: It shows us that while we have no choice but to go on, despite the frightening state of the world and our own inevitable demise, we could, if we took the hint, recognize how lucky we are.
April 24, 2024
But the audience’s three-camera sit-com chuckle does reveal this “Vanya”’s chief shortcoming straightaway. While the production has got the jokes down pat, it is quite a bit shakier when it comes to the pathos and hardship that spring from them.
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April 24, 2024
It’s got major names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun), a major stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity. And it is, unhappily, an example of how all these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.
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April 24, 2024
Lila Neugebauer directs a very punchy revival of “Uncle Vanya,” which opened Wednesday at LCT’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Anton Chekhov’s characters suffer from ennui, but not so much in this production.
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April 24, 2024
There is logic, then, to the decision to dispense with fidelity to Chekhov’s period and update the play to a contemporary setting for Lincoln Center Theater’s new production, adapted by Heidi Schreck and directed by Lila Neugebauer. To some extent, the gambit succeeds: Many of the production’s most pleasurable moments are connected to this modernization. But it’s also, I think, where the production falls short.
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April 24, 2024
What was the guiding light for Schreck and Neugebauer in tackling Vanya? Based on what’s now on stage at the Beaumont, it’s difficult to say. This revival is competent, rarely boring and often funny, but there is no sense of a larger vision. This staging just kind of sits there, without any clear reason to exist.
READ THE REVIEWApril 24, 2024
Though the bitterness boiling beneath the piece may catch them off guard, Neugebauer and Schreck have crafted an especially accessible adaptation, for better or worse.
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April 24, 2024
But this Uncle Vanya is only enjoyable in fits and starts. It’s modern, but not completely; brisk, while still feeling too long.
READ THE REVIEWApril 24, 2024
Still, the new Lincoln Center production from the typically reliable director Lila Neugebauer is so disconnected and alienating that, frankly, I spent most of the production wondering how on earth such a collection of famous, talented actors — Steve Carell, Alfred Molina, Anika Noni Rose, Jayne Houdyshell, Alison Pill, for goodness sake— had so failed to cohere. Did something go wrong?
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April 24, 2024
Steve Carell makes a solid Broadway debut in a fine, if not overly inspired, new revival of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Smoothly adapted by What The Constitution Means To Me playwright Heidi Schreck and elegantly directed by Lila Neugebauer (demonstrating once again, after this season’s excellent Appropriate, a kinetic crossing-guard facility for keeping large-ish casts moving on spacious sets), this Lincoln Center Theater production places Chekhov’s tale of wasted lives and tenuous optimism amidst a contemporary setting.
READ THE REVIEWApril 24, 2024
By the time the play reaches its conclusion, and thwarted dreamers and would-be romantics surrender to more of the same-old same-old, you can typically expect to feel a twinge of sadness. Or empathy. Or… something. Broadway’s 11th Uncle Vanya left me wanting.
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