Purlie Victorious Review
7 / 10
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 As deft as the acting is, the audience also winds up toggling – between the (sometimes outdated) comedy of the plot and the (often still timely) underlying outrage.
