Ambition and betrayal reign supreme in this electrifying reimagining of Shakespeare’s poetic masterpiece. Set in 1980s Manhattan, the neon skyline and shadowy backrooms become an epic battleground of identity and power, where a king’s divine right crumbles beneath the weight of human frailty. Craig Baldwin’s inventive adaptation makes Richard’s tragic descent freshly immediate, staged a stone’s throw from the site of the historic Astor Place Riots, the original American cocktail of politics, insurrection, and Shakespeare.
Critic's Pick. Inside a claustrophobic glass box, representing, at various points, the royal court, a prison and his own mind, Michael Urie looks desperate and insecure wearing the crown, alternating between rubbing and rolling his eyes. He appears most content when describing his miseries; self-pity is his happy place. In the Red Bull Theater’s vigorously populist revival of “Richard II,” his twitchy hands and darting glances also indicate something else, a signature of this magnetic performance: a guilty conscience.
But this Richard II emerges more as an exercise in style than substance, unable to justify why its 1980s glosses enhance our understanding of this story or these characters. “I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world,” Richard says in the opening and closing lines of the show. And Urie fills the lines with a kind of weary resignation that marks his approach to his drawn-out abdication in the second act. But this production fails to make clear how Richard himself is chiefly responsible for his incarcerated fate, the architect of his own misfortune. (And it has nothing to do with his prolonged smooches with a boy.)
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
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