Get the latest gossip
Denzel Washington’s ‘Othello,’ With Jake Gyllenhaal, Has Two Great Star Turns But Little Flavor: Theater Review
Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal can't save a poor production.
Well, “the masses” may be a stretch — the new production of “ Othello ” that Washington leads, now playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, has broken box office records on the strength of orchestra tickets selling for over $900 a seat. (That’s not a problem faced by Gyllenhaal, at least, whose alternation between ingratiating suavity and darting, weaselly insecurity turn his Iago into an utterly modern figure — his words may be Elizabethan, but his bearing is that of a men’s rights activist.) I referred earlier to Washington’s excellence with line delivery advisedly: He is made, late in the show, to feign a seizure in a moment that doesn’t land, and the blocking of his final scene, in which the actor mutters to the ceiling while lying on his back, similarly thuds.
Or read this on Variety
