Purlie Victorious Broadway Reviews

Flat-out hilarious and stacked with topflight performances led by Leslie Odom, Jr. and Kara Young, Purlie Victorious is also a triumph when it comes to timing. Suffice it to say the play speaks directly to today’s racial tumult.

Happily, I have no need to keep my mouth shut about Purlie Victorious. (Conveniently, too, since my job is to run it constantly.) Fast, fierce, and big-hearted, the show crackles with the verve of its central performances, and the play, at 62 years old, feels wittier, braver, less careful, and more caring than much contemporary writing. Both unflinching and generous, it’s just about as sharp as satire gets.

A modern audience, a 2023 audience, must travel to 1961—and to Davis’ very deliberate narrative balancing act—to meet the play not just when it was written, but how it was written. This wonderful cast does precisely that, playing the laughs for every ounce of hilarity to be gleaned from them, and then in a sudden turn confronting racism and white supremacy head-on. Ol’ Cap’n, and all he represents, are shown to be both vicious and ridiculous.

Long before Slave Play, decades before Ain’t No Mo, there was Purlie Victorious, the Ossie Davis comedy masterwork that, like those descendant plays, fused broad comedy, satirical minstrelsy, racial satire and still-relevant social commentary to create a play that is so encompassing in its views of history and legacy, so generous in its humanity and pinpoint sharp in its take on debts long owed and now demanded that Kenny Leon’s revival, opening tonight on Broadway, feels as current and bracing as a folding chair.

As playgoers might expect, Odom has all that silver-tongued preaching down cold. One of the chief delights of the production comes from the performance of Young as Lutiebelle. Those who saw her in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s likely realized that she is a star to be, while Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living demonstrated that she’s a fine and intelligent actor as well. Here, she weaves a thorough spell, eyes wide in wonderment at the new world outside “Miss Emmylou’s kitchen” while succumbing to waves of weak-kneed infatuation toward her savior, “Reb’n Purlie.” She has over two seasons given three distinctive performances, each of them excellent, in three very different plays in very different styles. Kara Young, remember that name.

A godawful White character prowls “Purlie Victorious” — the extremely funny anti-racist farce receiving its first Broadway revival — and Jay O. Sanders is having the time of his life playing him. In fact, everyone in director Kenny Leon’s zanily vivacious production — including Leslie Odom Jr. as a dashing preacher, scheming for the money to found his own integrated Georgia church — seems rhapsodically absorbed in the mechanics of Ossie Davis’s wise 1961 comedy.

Originally played by Dee, and now by Kara Young, Lutiebelle is a rich creation, sweet and hungry, down-home and dirty. Young, a two-time Tony nominee known mostly for dramatic roles (“Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” “The New Englanders,” “All the Natalie Portmans”), is also a daring comedian, finding in Lutiebelle a cross between Lucille Ball and Moms Mabley. That she is not afraid to go as far as the part can take her — with a gawky pigeon-toed gait and hilariously lustful line readings in a taffy-pulled Southern accent — is a sign of the freedom the play gives her (and everyone else) to represent a character instead of a race.

Davis and Ludlam both possessed a real flair for the outrageous, but they end up in different places. Ludlam’s aggressive sense of irony was unyielding. Davis, after entertaining us with memorably flamboyant characters, turns to agitprop, but keeps his sense of wicked humor intact. Despite all his sermonizing, Purlie never turns into a pedagogue, thanks to Davis, who has loaded the preacher’s speeches with great one-liners and epigrams — none of which will be repeated here. They need to be experience first-hand in the theater. “Purlie Victorious” is the funniest show now performing on Broadway, and that includes “The Book of Mormon.”

Director Kenny Leon’s supremely well-toned revival of Ossie Davis’ “Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch,” the new arrival at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre, is a knockout show, as hilarious as it is cutting and as emotionally warmhearted as it is politically potent. In the great Broadway tradition, it also should make a star out of the fearlessly fabulous Kara Young, playing Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, the naive, countrified partner in crime of the loquacious preacher Purlie Victorious Judson, as played by the “Hamilton” star Leslie Odom, Jr.

Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, Ossie Davis's 1961 satirical play about Jim Crow racism, opens tonight at the Music Box Theatre in a long-overdue first-ever Broadway revival. The production, under the discerning direction of Kenny Leon, is an outstanding one, with uniformly splendid performances by the entire cast. And six decades in, the play itself remains sharp, funny, astute, and, unfortunately, utterly timely.

The production, directed by Kenny Leon, never turns as grim as its undercurrents – or, for that matter, as its ruefully stated grievances. For one thing, it’s too fleet: the three-act original has been condensed into a 105-minute sprint sans intermission. Moreover, the cast is a joy to watch, seamlessly blending righteous passion and practical laughs, even as the play’s torrents of dialogue threaten to overwhelm them. Though Odom is the top-billed star attraction here, it takes Young all of about 30 seconds to start stealing scenes. She gives Luttiebelle a slightly cracked voice and, when she’s called upon to perform as a college-educated Cousin Bee, a teetering case of nerves; it adds up to a perfectly judged case of playing daft but not dumb. Davis’s script has funny lines for everyone, but it’s Young who earns the biggest guffaws from pure performance, like her pronunciation of “obliged” or her uneasiness in high heels.

Directed by Kenny Leon, the beauty of the Black vernacular is embedded in the “Purlie Victorious” script. Specificities of Black American life are infused within the jokes as Odom and the cast deftly switch from comedy to drama on a dime. The rapid pacing of the 100-minute show, running without an intermission, means that portions of the audience erupt in laughter at the sharp jokes. In contrast, others sit silently, the countless one-liners soaring above their heads. It presents a stunning contrast.

Ossie Davis’s 1961 play—in which the actor and activist originally starred opposite Ruby Dee—may not seem a likely candidate for revival. Comedies often age badly, and comedies about race are even riskier. But Purlie Victorious doesn’t crack: Directed knowingly by Kenny Leon, the show’s new Broadway production is a joyous affair, broad in comedy and in spirit. Davis populates his play with deceptively familiar types (the simple-minded country girl, the loyal mammy, the villainous Confederate, the simpering Uncle Tom) who have more dimensions than expected; the actors who inhabit them take manifest delight in subverting stock figures from the inside out.

At the center of this prodigious cast and Leon’s clockwork staging—the pearl if you will—is Kara Young. With several Off Broadway and now three Broadway shows to her credit, Young (Cost of Living, Clyde’s) always astonishes. She’s a walking paradox: demure yet fiery; petite but imposing; seemingly naïve yet a conduit of deep, witchy wisdom. Her physical comedy is outrageous, especially when Lutiebelle, worked into a tizzy about facing Cotchipee, falls apart and reassembles right in front of us. Wobbling on heels, one hip jutted out in a burlesque of urbanity, arching neck and back 30 degrees upstage to catch prompts from Purlie as her eyelids alternate between dilated terror and fluttering on the verge of a fainting spell, Young seems to have packed the clowning of five virtuosi in one compact body. Purlie is victorious indeed; but anyone who gets to see Young in her comic glory is a winner.

Satire doesn’t always age particularly well. Fortunately, the new production of Ossie Davis’ 1961 play Purlie Victorious has sidestepped any issues about its being dated for two reasons, one good and one bad. The good is that director Kenny Leon has provided such a breakneck, well-staged rendition, superbly performed by its terrific ensemble, that the fun never lags. The bad is that the issues depicted in the play have lost little of their resonance even in these supposedly “post-racial” times. For evidence of the latter, simply look to the hysterical reaction from the audience to one character swinging a metal folding chair in menacing fashion (look up the meme online). That’s not to say that the production entirely succeeds in its wildly farcical depiction of a traveling preacher, the elegantly named Purlie Victorious Judson (Leslie Odom, Jr.), who attempts to claim a $500 inheritance by duplicitous means in order to fund his dream of starting his own church. The humor leaps from broad to wildly over-the-top to mixed results, with not all of the gags landing. And some may have trouble with the “white savior” trope with which the proceedings are resolved, although it’s here employed so charmingly that it’s hard to resist.

The parts, though, do rise above the whole, including Derek McLane’s rather stunning set, which slides in, windowpanes locking into place, to transform the wood-framed walls for each scene before metamorphosizing in a final transition that offers the play’s most emotionally transcendent moment. And in a final sermon, Purlie erupts into gorgeous, empowering poetry: “I find, in being Black, a thing of beauty…Be loyal to yourselves: your skin; your hair; your lips, your southern speech, your laughing kindness—are Negro kingdoms, vast as any other.” If Purlie Victorious never completely conquers in cohering its disparate ambitions, its last moments offer an unexpected, quiet triumph.

Along with the revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window earlier this year, this second-ever Broadway production of Purlie Victorious makes you wonder how many other vital works by Black playwrights are sitting somewhere, underused and underseen, waiting to be brought up under the bright lights where they belong.

It’s hard to picture a better cast for this first Broadway revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 broad, biting comedy about racism in the Old South. As the title character, Leslie Odom Jr., assuming the role originated by Davis himself, feels especially well-matched. Odom of course made his name on Broadway delivering with uncommon clarity the pithiest raps in “Hamilton,” as smooth-talking, untrustworthy but surprisingly sympathetic Aaron Burr. Similarly, as Purlie Victorious Judson, a newly-minted preacher, Odom must toggle between sounding like a comic mountebank (“I ain’t never in all my life told a lie I didn’t mean to make come true, some day!”) and like an impassioned civil rights advocate (“We want our cut of the Constitution, and we want it now: and not with no teaspoon, white folks – throw it at us with a shovel!”) As deft as the acting is, the audience also winds up toggling – between the (sometimes outdated) comedy of the plot and the (often still timely) underlying outrage.

It is also one of few moments when this revival of Ossie Davis’ razor-sharp satire Purlie Victorious (A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch) fully comes to life. Back on Broadway for the first time since its historic 1961 premiere, Davis’ play has lost little of its bite. But under an ill-suited Kenny Leon’s direction, it has received an unevenly paced and tonally confused production that never finds the same delightful boldness as Young’s performance.

Purlie Victorious was a challenging show for me as a white audience member, but I appreciated every moment in which the actors/characters did not hold back on my account. I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of the Uncle Tom philosophy (which makes me very uncomfortable despite, or perhaps because of, how genuinely likable Gitlow’s character was in the show) and the public direct advocacy of Reverend Purlie (more in line with my modern perspective and social/political movements in my lifetime). I would even go as far as to say the show is more about the clash between these methods of achieving dignity even more than it is about a clash between races. FULL REVIEW: pagesonstages .com