With the smell of doom and regression in the air, perhaps it’s not surprising that the hottest ticket on Broadway this season is for a 400-year-old tragedy. There’s been much ado about the box office for Othello, a new rendition of Shakespeare’s classic given movie-star wattage. The show at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, grossed $2.8m during one week of previews – the most of any non-musical during a single week on Broadway ever, in part because some orchestra tickets are going for a whopping $921.
The sticker shock is not just an Othello problem – tickets for two other celeb-driven plays on Broadway – Glengarry Glen Ross, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, aren’t averaging much less, and it has already been a lucrative season for celeb-studded Shakespeare as Romeo + Juliet, starring screen-famous Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, recouped its $7m capitalization before closing last month. But before it even officially opened, Othello became emblematic of Broadway’s trend toward luxury experience and status symbol over popular entertainment, billing Hollywood names in a hyper-competitive, exclusionary market. (Full disclosure: the Guardian, denied tickets for review, paid $400 for a middle orchestra seat.)
Ticket prices, of course, are not the fault of the show itself, nor typically relevant to a review. But the astronomical ask hangs over this minimalist, almost dystopian production, which puts the burden of imagination heavily on the performers and largely fails to reach the level of transcendence demanded by its cost. Directed by the Tony winner Kenny Leon, who guided Washington to a Tony in 2010’s Fences, this austere, underwhelming take on Shakespeare seems to acknowledge that people are not paying for a revival of this particular play, which hasn’t been on Broadway since 1982 and still has rich insights on the masculinity, human fallibility and race more than 400 years after its debut. Instead, it’s for the opportunity to see Gyllenhaal, one of the most versatile and thrilling millennial actors, and especially the widely beloved Washington, rightly hailed in the Playbill as “the most lauded stage and screen actor of his generation”, without the mediation of a screen.
Othello does provide a showcase for these two heavyweight talents to bend iambic pentameter to their will – to convey, with their considerable magnetism, both the plot and the emotional nuances of this tragedy to an audience that probably does not totally understand what they’re saying. And it does not provide much else. Derek McLane’s scenic design keeps the stage bare except for some peeling columns, the props minimal save for occasional accoutrements of a modern military operation (army fatigues, Apple laptops). A lit message at play’s opening sets this medieval drama in “the near future” – still Venice (and later Cyprus), though when Gyllenhaal’s devious Iago first appears to set the stage for the fateful manipulation of the general, one might mistake him for a hustler at a basement club in Bushwick. His eyes near glow in the spotlight, and a preponderance on blue-white floor lighting (design by Natasha Katz) gives the production, particularly its monologues, the feel of a concert at the ruins of the Colosseum.
Star power does the heavy lifting, though not enough to elevate this Othello into the pantheon of Broadway greats. As expected, Washington, at 70, brings the bearing of an elder statesman to the fallible Venetian general, a role he first played at age 22. This has the double-sided effect of making the character feel especially tragic – the well-respected veteran general, imbued with glorious authority by one of the most well-respected actors, felled by a shocking streak of insecurity – and ill-fitting; his chemistry with Desdemona (a much younger Molly Osborne, an English actor with an unwieldy American accent) feels more father-daughter than new husband and wife, despite Washington’s best attempts at charming, sexy beguilement. Washington has moments of sublime melody as Othello descends into jealous delusion, the kind of rhapsodic deliveries that feel worth whatever price of admission, but the overall tone of his performance is one of perfunctory hyper-competence.
The show, instead, belongs to Gyllenhaal, an actor of singular intensity who makes a meal out of Iago’s desperate two-facedness. He opens the show with a hypnotic screed against “the Moor” he so loathes – a denigration of blackness (of soul and skin) in Shakespeare’s time titled just enough to resonate more clearly in ours, and never ceases to mesmerize. At turns preening, desperate, boastful, plaintive, easily convincing in his maneuverings of the guileless lieutenant Cassio (Snow White’s Andrew Burnap), as well as gullible townsman Roderigo (Anthony Michael Lopez), Desdemona and Othello, Gyllenhaal’s Iago is the one truly fun performance to watch throughout the show’s nearly three-hour runtime.
The rest is a muddled affair, in details and delivery – Italian polizia but American uniforms, Iago prejudiced against the black-skinned general yet married to Emilia, played by Black actor Kimber Elayne Sprawl. Even Washington seems, at the play’s ignominious and violent end, confused by his character, his grip on reality or his evolution from hero to villain slippery. His Othello is never not compelling; the whole thing, in fact, is consistently competent and spirited, though weighted down by expectation – enough that it should keep the green-eyed monsters who miss out at bay.
