Review Roundup: Mike Bartlett's LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Opens Off-Broadway

Roundabout Theatre Company presents Mike Bartlett's new play, Love, Love Love, directed by Michael Mayer, featuring Richard Armitage, Alex Hurt, Zoe Kazan, Ben Rosenfield and Amy Ryan. Love, Love, Love opened officially last night, October 19, 2016, Off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (111 West 46th Street).

London, 1967. Beatlemania is in full effect, the "Me" generation is in its prime and Kenneth and Sandra have the world at their fingertips. It's the summer of love, and that's all they need. But what will happen when the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll fade away and these boomers have babies of their own? Tony Award winner Michael Mayer directs this provocative play spanning more than four decades that lays bare the consequences of growing older without growing up.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: I had a swell time at 'Love, Love, Love,' a Roundabout Theater Company production, impeccably directed by Michael Mayer and featuring a nigh-perfect five-member ensemble rounded out by Alex Hurt, Ben Rosenfield and Zoe Kazan. That's partly because Mr. Bartlett's heat-seeking intelligence can't help locating the telling and authentic emotional detail even within caricature. And there's pleasure to be derived in a comedy as scrupulously and symmetrically assembled as this one is. But the greatest joy in 'Love, Love, Love' comes from the chance it affords its stars to conquer the aging process and to demonstrate how people change - or more to the point, remain themselves - over the years. It's a challenge to which Mr. Armitage, in his New York debut, and Ms. Ryan rise with blissful dexterity.

Jennifer Farrar, Associated Press: Mike Bartlett ('King Charles III,' 'Cock') has written a mordantly funny play, 'Love, Love, Love,' about the selfish complacency of that generation as seen through four decades in the dysfunctional relationships of one British family. Roundabout Theatre Company's edgy, entertaining New York premier opened Wednesday night off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre, smartly directed by Tony Award-winner Michael Mayer. His staging of Bartlett's trenchant wit has the audience constantly laughing at awkward or uncomfortable interactions even when we sense tragedy on the horizon.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: Mike Bartlett's play 'Love, Love, Love,' now playing at the Roundabout Theater Company, takes an amused (and slightly horrified) look at the boomer generation as it arrogantly positions itself at the center of the universe from the 1960s to the present day. A cross between Joe Orton and Kenneth Lonergan, this snappy satire follows the adventures of a young British couple (Amy Ryan and Richard Armitage) as they meet in swinging London and follow their bliss to 2011, birthing and discarding emotionally stunted offspring along the way. As Bartlett ('King Charles III') tells it, with searing insight and mocking wit in a flawless production directed by Michael Mayer, this was the generation that grabbed everything with both hands - and then ate their young.

David Cote, Time Out NY: Michael Mayer's fine-tuned and nicely balanced production shows off five actors in top form. Armitage, a fantasy-film icon from his lead role in the Hobbit trilogy, is superb as the charming yet craven Kenneth. Ryan is all steel and sparks as the cruelly vivacious Sandra. Kazan does some of her best work in a long time, turning a whiny neurotic nearly into the play's moral center. It's a testament to Bartlett's clever, incisive dialogue that such selfish, limited people should steal our hearts.

Jeremy Gerard, Deadline: Before the prodigiously gifted British writer Mike Bartlett wrote last year's Broadway knockout King Charles III and the BBC's Doctor Foster, he was what might be called a New Angry Young Man in the tradition of fellow countryman Stephen Poliakoff (Gideon's Daughter) and our own Michael Weller (Spoils Of War, Moonchildren), casting a jaundiced eye on the Woodstock generation and its discontented spawn. That includes Bartlett's excoriating Love, Love Love, written six years ago and receiving its premiere here in a brilliantly cast production at the Roundabout Theatre Company's off-Broadway Laura Pels Theatre.

Robert Kahn, NBC New York: Ryan is marvelous as a free-loving, free-wheeling adult who grows old, but doesn't grow up. We should dislike Sandra. The woman feels no guilt about putting her own needs first in every relationship. But Ryan's too good: She makes irresponsibility look interesting. Armitage is charming as a slacker just a shade more self-aware than his wife. Kazan bubbles and boils as the only member of the family who worries about anything, and it's her actions in the third act that tie things together and help distinguish 'Love, Love, Love' from messier fare.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: Give or take a couple of years, Richard Armitage goes from 20 to 40 to 60 in the course of Mike Bartlett's new three-act comedy, "Love, Love, Love"...It's hard to say what's more astounding -- that Armitage (he plays Thorin Oakenshield in "The Hobbit" trilogy) is utterly convincing at each age in each act, or that someone has written a three-act play in an era of 80-minute divertissements? Before you panic at having to endure some Eugene O'Neill marathon, "Love, Love, Love" comes in at just over two hours and it's very funny. Armitage makes his New York stage debut, and he's spectacular. Michael Mayer's direction is much bouncier than Joe Mantello's staging of the Stephen Karam play. Ryan brings a real "Ab Fab" flair to Sandra.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

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