Hippah silent clock2/22/2023 ![]() That viewing technique is even more required for the very crowded Act 3, set at a bris in 1924, when most of those principals from Act 1 are now minor characters and their adult children take over the narrative without much introduction from Stoppard. But anyone who has seen Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love” knows how to pay close attention only to the principals to keep your head above the overpopulated waters of the plot. That vanishing act is true of many characters in Act 1, set in 1899, and Act 2, set a year later. Pre-dating Annie Hall by a few decades, the pretty but vacuous Gretl indulges in an extramarital affair with a ferociously anti-Semitic officer (Arty Froushan), while her shegetz counterpart in the family, Ernst, almost disappears into Richard Hudson’s gilded and gorgeous drawing room set. Gentiles in “Leopoldstadt” are never so clever. ‘American (Tele)visions’ Off Broadway Review: Why the Tube Is Bad for Our Health For example, Herman’s mother (Betsy Aidem, underplaying her character’s infinite wisdom) says of a grandson, “Poor boy, baptized and circumcised in the same week.” ![]() Before the Nazis arrive, however, they get all the best lines. “You seem to think becoming a Catholic is like joining the Jockey Club,” Herman tells his brother-in-law, while Ludwig answers, “It’s not unlike, except that anyone can become a Catholic.” It’s not the only argument Ludwig wins, because Jews are doomed. ![]() Their debates on everything from Zionism to Freud to the burgeoning arts scene in Vienna fuel Act 1 and only George Bernard Shaw, arguably, was better than Stoppard at talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. Herman (David Krumholtz) is the optimist, who improves his business prospects by converting to Roman Catholicism and marrying a Gentile, Gretl (Faye Castelow, underplaying her character’s infinite vapidity). ![]() Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz) is the skeptic, who takes refuge in the purity of math, which he teaches. The playwright introduces us to the members of this very large and extended family much earlier, in 1899, when two Jewish husband-fathers debate the future of the people of Leopoldstadt, the affluent Jewish section of Vienna, Austria. The Nazis here arrive on Kristallnacht 1938, which is the fourth act of Stoppard’s five-act play, which runs 130 minutes without intermission. There are a few surefire moments of crushing heartbreak in the theater and the movies: When the nun’s dead born-out-of-wedlock son shows up at the church doors in Puccini’s “Suor Angelica.” When all the people who died of AIDS show up on the beach of Fire Island in Norman Rene’s “Longtime Companion.” (Matthew Lopez lifted the scene to end the first half of his play “The Inheritance.”) And when the Nazis show up to break down that attic door in Amsterdam in “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Even as leaden an adaptation as George Steven’s 1959 film, with Millie Perkins and Richard Beymer woefully miscast as the young Jewish lovers, “Diary” always delivers at the very end.Īnd so does Tom Stoppard’s 2020 play, “Leopoldstadt,” which opened Sunday at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre after an Olivier Award-winning run in London. ![]()
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