Review Roundup: Kevin Bacon Leads REAR WINDOW at Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage presents the sold-out world premiere of Rear Window, adapted for the stage by Keith Reddin, and directed by Hartford Stage Artistic Director Darko Tresnjak, which opened October 30. Check out ALL the reviews from the show below!

Joining the previously announced Kevin Bacon, who will play Hal Jeffries, will be McKinley Belcher III as Sam, Melinda Page Hamilton as Mrs. Thorwald and Gloria, John Bedford Lloyd as Boyne, Robert Stanton as Thorwald, and nine ensemble members.

The play is based on the same short story-"REAR WINDOW" by Cornell Woolrich-that inspired the Alfred Hitchcockfilm, a 1954 Academy Award nominee. It is the classic story of a man confined to his apartment who thinks he may have witnessed a murder in a nearby building. Rear Window is presented by special arrangement with producers Charlie Lyons, Jay Russell and Jeff Steen.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

Karen Bovard, BroadwayWorld: Hartford Stage's new adaptation of Rear Window is an exercise in style, full of spectacular visuals that exploit theatrical technology, as well as being a significant reworking of a famous story for our time. And it offers a celebrity sighting: Kevin Bacon in the role made famous by Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's thriller, based on the same source material. So the production's been sold out for weeks with only a few seats and standing room being released day by day.

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: For this production about the pleasures and perils of voyeurism, directed by Darko Tresnjak and starring a very good Kevin Bacon, the set designer Alexander Dodge has created a multilevel facade of a Manhattan apartment building from the late 1940s. What's more, this edifice is populated by a an assortment of metropolitan archetypes, whom we glimpse going about their varied business through windows on different stories. The audience audibly purrs when this impeccably detailed vision appears, and well it should...Mr. Bacon, it must be said, is credible throughout, lending a tough-guy drollness to Jeff's delusions that doesn't conceal a core of fearful hysteria. But even he can't fend off the anachronisms and clichés that keep hurtling toward him...Mr. Tresnjak and Mr. Dodge previously collaborated on the Tony-winning musical "A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder." And their "Rear Window" has promising glimmers of that earlier show's playful macabre wit. It does not, unfortunately, share the same confidence of tone.

Frank Rizzo, Variety: Bacon, in his first major stage role since his solo turn on Broadway in the 2002 production of "An Almost Unholy Picture," plays another solitary man, this one a sexually repressed alcoholic writer who is filled with guilt, shame and loneliness and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. As a man who's more than a little in love with death, Bacon is properly dissipated, depressed and tormented. But his decline into possible madness is dramatically unrelenting and at times tedious: Another drink, another peek, another bit of self-loathing and bang, someone's dead. Even redemption is a passive activity.

Donald Church, Examiner: Film, TV and stage star Kevin Bacon was clearly in character from start to finish as the active guy who is temporarily confined in a leg cast and a wheelchair. His limited mobility didn't prevent him from doggedly effecting stage action to keep the play moving at a steady pace. This premiere production of Rear Window, adapted for the stage by Keith Reddin, is a work in progress that needs to fill a few big holes in the script. It would give away the plot to mention them here, suffice to say if a character or action is muddled or isn't plausible, rewrite it.

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