Glenda Jackson, just coming off her run in Three Tall Women on Broadway, has already set the date of her return.
Jackson will appear as the title character in King Lear in the play's Broadway run next year.
Jackson is no stranger to this role, playing it previously in 2016 at London's Old Vic. The Broadway production will be entirely different, with new staging.
Gold's production is full of interesting directorial choices that do not quite cohere into a shared universe for King Lear's characters to inhabit. The subtle Ruth Wilson plays Cordelia with soulful, depressive interiority-in a wise stroke of casting, she doubles as the Fool-while the hyperintense Aisling O'Sullivan, as Regan, looks at every moment like lasers are about to shoot from her eyes. Jayne Houdyshell, John Douglas Thompson and Dion Johnstone offer conventional turns as the play's Lear loyalists; Sean Carvajal flails through the thankless role of Edgar. The Duke of Cornwall is played, in a kilt, by deaf actor Russell Harvard, with Michael Arden signing translation.
The rest of Gold's production lacks that kind of laser focus. The time period is murky; let's just say it's after the invention of duct tape, which features prominently in one scene. But there are definite allusions to a certain possibly certifiable current president. Gilded walls...a decorative lion statue...it's very Trump Tower, no? And an often throwaway line by Gloucester (Tony winner Jayne Houdyshell), the play's other deluded dad-''Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind'-is delivered with a surprising heavy-handedness. Then there's the onstage eveningwear-clad string quartet, which pops up at the most inopportune times, almost drowning out moments like the Lear-Goneril-Regan fight with Philip Glass music.
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