Off-Broadway shows
Love Love Love

Cititour.com Review
“They were careless people, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

While this now-legendary quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald is actually about Tom and Daisy Buchanan (of “The Great Gatsby”), it feels equally appropriate for Kenneth and Sandra, the protagonists of Mike Bartlett’s often hilarious, ultimately troubling comedy “Love, Love, Love,” now at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre, under the inspired direction of Tony Award winner Michael Mayer.

As portrayed to sheer perfection by British heartthrob Richard Armitage (making his American stage debut) and Oscar and Tony nominee Amy Ryan (sporting a believable British accent), Kenneth and Sandra – whom we follow in three separate acts that take place from the 1967 through 2011—latch onto the free-love, pre me-generation ethos of the swinging sixties as teens and use it as the roadmap for their lives. Ultimately, however, we realize that they never let go of that philosophy less because of idealism and more because of pure selfishness, as they wallow in denial, booze, cigarettes, flirting, sex, and yes, money, no matter the cost to the others around them.

Those who gets destroyed as collateral damage includes Kenneth’s straight-laced older brother Henry (a very good Alex Hurt), who brings a 19-year-old Sandra to his flat hoping to get laid, only to have Kenneth seduce her, and, more importantly, the couple’s two children, Rosie (the astonishing Zoe Kazan), whom we see as an equally unhappy and frustrated 16 year old and 37 year old, and the sweet-natured Jamie (Ben Rosenfield, made to look almost like a spitting image of the young Armitage), who ends up as even more of a “lost boy” than his father.

That their offspring’s adult dysfunction could be caused, in no small part, by the couple’s decision to announce their divorce to the kids, decided in just one minute as part of Rosie’s disastrous 16th birthday party, never seems to bother Kenneth and Sandra. (That scene, which takes up much of Act II, is among the best moments currently on stage anywhere.). In fact, the couple are first-rate egotists and narcissists – and in Bartlett’s opinion (or at least Rosie’s, as we find when Kazan stunningly delivers a blistering speech in Act III), the cause of Great Britain’s downfall.

Yet, it remains a testament to Armitage and Ryan that it’s almost impossible to hate these two people (much like Amanda and Elyot in “Private Lives”), even when we question or despise their actions. In part that may be because Mayer definitely heightens the show’s comic elements; there are definitely sections when the Sandra-Rosie dynamic feels suspiciously like it’s been stolen from the British sitcom “AbFab”.

As superb as the acting is, one has to give special credit to the genius of set designer Derek McLane, who provides three completely different home settings, the spot-on costumes of Susan Hilferty, and the show’s delicious musical soundtrack. The title, by the way, is derived from the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” (which figures into the plot as well), a song Sandra and Kenneth only think they know the meaning of -- and which the rest of us know is a vast oversimplification of life.

BY BRIAN SCOTT LIPTON

Visit the Site
http://www.roundabouttheatre.org/Shows- ... -Love.aspx

Cast
Richard Armitage, Alex Hurt, Zoe Kazan, Ben Rosenfield, Amy Ryan

Open/Close Dates
Opening 9/22/2016
Closing 12/18/2016

Box Office
212-719-1300

Theatre Info
Laura Pels Theatre
111 West 46th Street
New York, NY 10036

‘Love, Love, Love’ Review: Not Since Stoppard
Mike Bartlett skewers baby boomers in the best stage comedy since ‘The Real Thing.’
By TERRY TEACHOUT
Oct. 20, 2016 4:59 p.m. ET
0 COMMENTS
New York

The baby boomers are starting, at long last, to march off history’s stage, fervently congratulating themselves on their immortal specialness as they reluctantly quit the scene. My guess, though, is that their theatrical obituary, which will be penned by their resentful children, won’t be a warm one. Mike Bartlett, a 36-year-old British playwright who has attracted much attention on both sides of the Atlantic with “Cock” and “King Charles III,” tried his hand at writing the first draft in 2010 with “Love, Love, Love,” a serious comedy about intergenerational conflict that has nothing good to say about his parents’ generation. “Love, Love, Love” is now making its American debut courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company, which is presenting the play in the Laura Pels Theatre, its off-Broadway house, in a production directed by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”). It’s a major event: Mr. Bartlett has given us what looks on first viewing like the best stage comedy to come along since Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” and Mr. Mayer’s production is flat-out perfect.

Love, Love, Love

Roundabout Theatre Company, Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St.
$89-$99, 212-719-1300, closes Dec. 18


The three acts of “Love, Love, Love,” respectively set in 1967, 1990 and 2011, play like John Osborne rewritten by Neil Simon: The laughs are piled high atop one another, but they’re bracingly angry. In the first act, Sandra ( Amy Ryan), a self-consciously free middle-class spirit who does her thing regardless of consequences, comes to the apartment of Henry ( Alex Hurt), her working-class boyfriend, to sleep with him. Then she gets a look at Kenneth ( Richard Armitage), his feckless roommate and younger brother, and decides on the spot to bed him instead—in part, I suspect, because he’s more upwardly mobile. (Kenneth landed a scholarship to Oxford, while the hardworking Henry is holding down a solid but dull job.) A quarter-century later, they’re married, moneyed and the parents of Rose and Jamie ( Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield), whose welfare they disregard when they decide on a whim to get divorced. By 2011, Kenneth and Sandra are doing just fine, but their children’s lives have been smashed by their selfishness.


“Love, Love, Love” is, in short, a morality play, but one so well made and pulverizingly funny that it hardly ever feels preachy. Not until evening’s end does the laughter dry up as Ms. Kazan takes center stage and drops a truth bomb on her parents: “What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the f— you wanted.”

Ms. Kazan, the outstanding American stage actress of her own generation, plays Rose at 16 and 37 so believably that you never think twice about how hard such a thing is to do. (She’s 33, but you wouldn’t guess it in the second act.) The rest of the cast is superbly accomplished, Ms. Ryan in particular, but the play rests on Ms. Kazan’s shoulders, and she carries it without a trace of strain. Mr. Mayer has filled his staging with sharp-eyed comic details that make you laugh without drawing attention to themselves. Like his actors, he has served the play faithfully and well.

The Roundabout has missed a trick: “Love, Love, Love” really should have opened on Broadway, and I trust it will transfer there once a theater is free. Yes, it’s gloriously funny, but it’s also an important play, one whose harsh message deserves to be heard far more widely. Regional theaters, take note!

‘Love, Love, Love’ review: Generational play wins in the end

By Matt Windman amNewYork Theater Critic October 20, 2016

Review
   

Playwright Mike Bartlett, who skillfully combined the past and future in his political drama “King Charles III” (which imagined a dark and divisive rise to power by England’s Prince Charles in the style of a Shakespearian history play), now casts a critical eye on the baby boomer generation and modern-day generational divide in “Love, Love, Love,” which is named after the opening line of the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love.”

A three-act comedic drama set in the domestic sphere but with an underlying political edge, “Love, Love, Love” is essentially an indictment of a husband and wife over a 50-year period in England, depicting them during adolescence in the trippy 1960s, parenthood in the materialistic 1980s and retirement in the present day. Bartlett also puts their aimless son and whiny daughter on trial.

Act one is set in a dilapidated flat in 1960s London, where Henry (Alex Hurt), a proud member of the conservative working class, has brought his new girlfriend, the stylish, assertive Sandra (Amy Ryan), for dinner, only to see her fall for his younger brother Kenneth (Richard Armitage), a playful, pot-smoking college student with idealistic visions of the future.

Bartlett then flashes forward to Sandra and Kenneth’s home two decades later, where they each confess to cheating on each other and then share the news to their teenage children Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and Rose (Zoe Kazan). Finally, Bartlett ventures into the present day, where Jamie and Rose are struggling to find a place in the world, while Sandra and Kenneth, now divorced, are coasting along.

The first two acts initially seem short and slight, but the play as a whole pays off in the end, as Rose forcefully accuses her parents of misguiding her and attacks their behavior as shameless and self-indulgent. As expected, Henry and Sandra return fire and criticize their daughter.

Michael Mayer’s production also becomes increasingly more entertaining as the atmosphere becomes more combative and the performances hit ridiculous extremes.


If you go: ‘Love, Love, Love’ plays through Dec. 18 at the Laura Pels Theatre. 111 W. 46th St., roundabouttheatre.org.

Matt Windman is the theater critic at amNewYork, which means he sees a show virtually every night of his life. They tend to vary in quality. He is also a lawyer.

A CurtainUp Review
Love, Love, Love
By Elyse Sommer

All you need is love
— from "All You Need Is Love" the 1967 Beatles song that was Britain's contribution to Our World, the first live global television link.

love, love, love
Richard Armitage Amy Ryan, Alex Hurt when life is still stretched out before them. (Photo: Joan Marcus)
If John Osborne were still alive, he'd welcome Mike Bartlett as an heir to the open-eyed freshness with which he and his fellow angry young men playwrights enlivened the theater in the 60s. Bartlett is actually better and more versatile than Osborne and company since his growing body of work reflects an ability to keep coming up with new themes. The only thing repetitive from one Bartlett play to the next is that it's always fresh and entertaining, with challenging roles and sparkling dialogue. Love, Love, Love is no exception.

Unlike his last London to New York transfer, the extraordinary poliitical drama King Charles III , Love, Love, Love is a more ordinary family's domestic drama. True to the title, each of its three acts show its main couple, Kenneth and Sandra, in a different phase of their relationship: youthful sexual attraction . . . love turned sour in mid-life. . .and love turned to friendship and yearning at retirement age. Since all this takes us through some sixty years, the play also functions as a way to look at the generational divide between baby boomers like Kenneth and Sandra and their children. This timeliness has been ratcheted up by the Brexit vote that was still to come when Lizzie Loveridge reviewed the play in London.

The fact that neither Kenneth or Sandra is especially sympathetic does not diminish our pleasure in following their journey from youthful hope to laid-back maturity. Ditto for their children, Rose and Jamie.

Naturally, even a work from as assured and original a playwright as Mr. Bartlett calls for topnotch performances to bring out the humor and nuances of his script. King Charles III insured a safe New York landing of all those elements by bringing the original cast, director and creative team along. Love, Love, Love arrives at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theater with an Amerian team. But with Michael Mayer directing a well-chosen cast there's nothing to worry about in the acting department. Nor will American audiences have a problem relating to these characters.


Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan with Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield as their teen-aged kids. (Photo: Joan Marcus)
Bartlett's smartly structured script gives its most incisive and funniest dialogue to Sandra, and Amy Warren more than delivers on all counts. She's hilarious as the stoned 19-year-old Oxford student who even at her most devil-may-care gives voice to a recurrent refrain "we're all going to die." She's unlikeable but compulsively watchable as an imperfect middle-aged working mom who drinks too much and is on the brink of divorce. She also convincingly becomes a wiser but still acerbic and good looking sixty-plus.

Richard Armitage, probably best known as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, more than holds his own as the rebel collegian descending on his more straight-laced older brother Henry (Alex Hurt, doing well by what turns out to be a minor character). His and Sandra's relationships begins with an act of betrayal (she has a date with Henry but quickly sees the bare-chested visiting Kenneth as more her type) which signals that their continued relationship will not be smooth sailing —and that like many of these Sixties dreamers they will remain tethered to their youthful selfishness. (Brother Henry does show up again before the end, but not as you might expect).

The changes in costumes (Susan Hilferty), hair styles (Campbell Young Associates), scenery (Derek McLane), make it easy to figure out what happens between the long leaps forward in time between acts. The personas of Kenneth and Sandra's teenaged son Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and daughter Rose (Zoe Kazan) in the second act make it it clear that the zany initial meet-up has turned into a less than happily ever after situation. It's become a case of familial dysfunction in the extreme. Rosenfield looks and acts remarkably like his father before he abandoned his slacker ways to go back to college and become a home-owning, well-paid member of the boomer generations. But young Jamie shows every sign of not being able to transition to similar status in a changing economy.


Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan, long divorced but still friends. (Photo: Joan Marcus)
Kazan once again proves herself to be a fine actress as Rose at ages 15 and 37. Unlike her brother she looks and acts nothing like her mother at any time in the play. However, it's to her that the playwright has assigned the job of accusing her parents of raising them to follow their dreams even as they contributed to those dreams no longer being sustainable. Thus both Rose an Jamie represent a disappointed post-boomer generation, with Rose angry enough to demand that her parents help her to get what she can't afford on her own. Bartlett has allowed her accusations and demands to be more than a little over the top — especially since they come at a time when her father has been assigned a sad family responsibility that brings Sandra's youthful comment about everyone dying eventually full circle.

While two intermissions seem excessive in a contemporary play, they're more than justified by Derek McLane's three terrific period and mood defining sets — a messy London flat, a suburban house and an elegant country home. It all adds up to a beautiful, well-paced production, of a beautifully crafted both funny and poignant new play.

Theatre Review: Love, Love, Love Brilliantly Shows The Generational Gaps Between Parents And Their Kids


Love, Love, Love is the time-warping, three act play written by Mike Bartlett and directed by Micahel Mayer. This Roundabout Theatre production focuses on the love, marriage, and parental decisions of two hippies, Kenneth and Sandra that decide to join their lives together for better and for worse. Yet, their love for each other is not as generously extended to others, particularly their children.

Parenting is not easy, but for Kenneth and Sandra it never seemed like a role that properly fit them. In the first act, you meet and Ken and Sandra when they are they are 19 years old, and like all 60’s generation youth, they believe their very existence is the reason the world will be better. From the beginning, these characters are set as the most charismatic, intelligent, and self-absorbed beings you will ever meet. They unite in love/lust immediately after meeting, despite the fact that Sandra was dating Henry (Alex Hurt), Ken’s older brother. The selfishness of Ken and Sandra’s nature is never hidden from the audience as remarks of how each have coldly distanced themselves from their hometowns and parents are casually dropped. Yet, their excitement for life is so infectious, you are willing to forgive their cruel chiding of others’ pain like, Henry’s. The audience’s willingness to like Ken and Sandra throughout all their mistakes comes from the sheer detailing and charm of their actors: Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan.



Armitage and Ryan have made momentous, memorable characters through Ken and Sandra. Ryan is quirky and bright as Sandra, whose silver tongue can seduce and manipulate anyone. She is the most hilarious character of the play, while Armitage does fantastic to show through Ken that a man can age without growing up. They both do excellently at making their characters’ layered and easily examinable for moral lessons. As the next two acts ensue to find these once free lovebirds become corporate persons struggling to see why their kids feel embarrassed by them. Their parenting skills would be cringe-worthy if not for how likeable and intelligent Armitage and Ryan are in giving Ken and Sandra physical and intellectual traits that reveal their humanity. Although Ken and Sandra are all about positivity and peace, they have the tendency to cause emotional damage and never make amends.



Ben Rosenfield as Jamie and Zoe Kazan as Rose represent the valid frustration that one can feel when they realize some of their parents’ answers/advice was destructive. The play travels to different eras in Ken and Sandra’s relationship, which makes you witness the foundation of their children’s future emotional scars (second act) and the self-sabotaging choices they will struggle to heal as adults (third act). It is in the second act, that Kazan shines as the consistently and rightfully enraged Rose, whose angst is palpable along with her disappointment at her parents’ delusional immaturity. Rose transitions from a teenager into an adult that is the constant, yet wrathful voice of reason. She cannot understand her parents’ decisions to either play or plot against each other without any regard to their children' feelings. Meanwhile. Ben Rosenfield does well to counter Kazan’s Rose by giving Jamie a sweet, meek personality. Rosenfield is an eccentric light as Jamie, but, again, it is Kazan’s Rose that is placed center to one of the most important themes/questions of Love, Love, Love: Even as adults, can you blame your parents for your life's choices?



The third act finds Rose 37, seeking a job, with no kids or relationship, and no idea of what she wants from her life. She demands her parents’ fix her life/ economic crisis through their retirement funds, to which they scold and diminish her petition. Although her arguments are not wrong in claiming the vast, emotional turbulence they caused her, Rose exemplifies that the older you grow the less you can blame your parents’. There comes a point where self- accountability must be taken, and childhood wounds no longer seem like a valid excuse for why your life is not going according to any plan. What triggers a person to transition from blaming others to self-accountability is unknown, and the play, smartly does not try to answer that challenge.


I was enthralled by Love, Love, Love. The cast was stellar, and the set design by Derek McLane of one 60’s, one 80’s, and one present- day living room helped built this multi-era dramedy. Bartlett and Mayer have created a production that questions whether some people should be parents, Ken and Sandra, and how much should their lack of parenting skills affect their children, Jamie and Rose, into adulthood. Seeing how generations struggle to extend themselves in love between and for each other is a topic that is timeless, but not as articulately or humorously discussed as in Love, Love, Love. For More Information on Love, Love, Love and to buy tickets to Click Here. The play is currently on till December 18 at The Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY, 10036.

Amy Ryan takes a drag for first time in new role

“Gone Baby Gone” actress Amy Ryan has hit off-Broadway in “Love, Love, Love,” at the Laura Pels Theatre, in which she plays a character at three different ages.

“We’re not going to fool anybody that we are 19 or 64, so it’s really about playing with rhythms and language,” she told Page Six at Wednesday’s opening.

Ryan also smokes in the play, but said, “I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life before this play. They are herbal cigarettes, but we’re trying not to really smoke them. It’s not so bad.”

Co-star Richard Armitage — known for playing hunky dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in “The Hobbit” films — said, “I’m monitoring how many drags I take, because it does take a toll on your voice

CONTRIBUTOR
Love, Love, Love: A fine play about some very unlikeable people - a theatre review by Dr. Lloyd Sederer
1 day ago
Lloyd I. Sederer, MD Medical editor, mental health for The Huffington Post

ROLLING STONES
The Beatles


It is London, the late 1960s with the Beatles gaining the world stage along with sex, drugs and other forms of rock and roll. And a new generation, the Baby Boomers, is coming into its own – in more ways than one.

Baby Boomers were born after WW II and before 1964. Until recently, they were the largest population in the US (but now surpassed by the Millennials). While I was born as the war was ending I certainly did not miss the ‘60s, growing up in NYC and going to City College in Manhattan. I lived that era and have been a witness to the passage of time and the life course of its constituents and their children.

But after seeing, Love, Love, Love, in New York during its previews by The Roundabout Theatre Company, written by Mike Bartlett and directed by Michael Mayer, I realize I have missed what was so wrong about the era instead remembering fondly its spirit of protest and iconoclasm. Tom Wolfe called the Boomers the “me generation” and Christopher Lasch called this the “culture of narcissism”.

Love, Love, Love, of course a reference and homage to the Beatles, is set in three acts. It follows an educated, urban British couple, starting in the ‘60s and onto their family of four about two decades later. It concludes some 20 years after that. The staging, true to each period, provides a wonderful visual backdrop for each of the periods, as well as displaying the progressive accumulation of wealth and privilege.

As 19 year olds on summer holiday from Oxford, Kenneth and Sandra have a chance encounter that sweeps them away into their high end dissolution. Kenneth (Richard Armitage, now enjoying an earned success on stage, film and TV) betrays his brother Henry (Alex Hurt), as does Sandra (Amy Ryan, a veteran of Broadway, on and off, film and TV, including The Office, In Treatment, and The Wire), a free spirit dating Henry. After all, love is all there is, and it calls for adventure, consideration of others notwithstanding. High on pot and rock and roll they set off to live their fantasy lives, or so they imagine. They were not very likeable as late adolescents, and it gets worse.

In the second act, we next see Kenneth and Sandra as prosperous professionals vaingloriously pursuing their careers and with two teenage children, Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and Rose (Zoe Kazan). The parents are both working and making plenty, looking very stylish and enjoying their drinks, while their kids go to prep school and are at the neglected end of parenting. Kenneth and Sandra are truly oblivious of their children and, of course, each other. The playwright has made them quite unappealing despite their looks, and [b]Armitage and Ryan are terrific in creating a subtle abhorrence that the audience is meant to feel.[/b]

The third act fast forwards to Kenneth recently retired, now quite well healed and living in what looks like a suburban mini-estate with Sandra living elsewhere since they are divorced. Jamie has moved in with his pal of a dad, and they are enjoying some quality pub time together. Jamie also has become quite dysfunctional, for unclear reasons that may have to do not just with his upbringing but his likely abundant use of intoxicants. Rose is 37, stuck in an unrewarding and poorly paying job, and single. In other words, Jamie is having a good old, careless time and Rose is miserable. Sandra continues to look gorgeous despite her years and the effects of a steady diet of alcohol – but maybe that’s because she never misses her routine in the gym? The whole lot of them are quite unlikeable as they dedicate themselves to their respective self-centeredness.

Wealth, which has been accumulated by Kenneth and Sandra, is on display. But it is not passed onto their progeny, who are short of opportunities in jobs and housing - and scrambling (at least Rose is) to try to find meaning, purpose and security. We are brought face to face with the inequity we see today in standards of living and prospects for the future even for those with a college educations, which in the distant past just about assured a good career. We witness the consequences of the seeds laid down by the “culture of narcissism”, and how it has played itself out in Western societies like our own. The kids have inherited the entitlement of their parents and little else, leaving them lost, needy and bitter.

Mike Bartlett, the British playwright of this show, was born in 1980 and educated at Oxford. He has no mercy for the likes of his characters, and eviscerates them with a very sharp literary blade. He is a prolific and award winning writer, with five other plays already published and performed, and a stage adaption of Chariots of Fire. The Boomer generation is clearly a terrain he knows well; he is of the age that his parents and their contemporaries were members of that era, and your guess is as good as mine as to what they may have been like.

Love may still be the answer, but don’t think this play will make the case for it. Yet if you want a fine play about some very dislikeable people as well as a highly informed history and sociology lesson neatly delivered as stage entertainment give Love, Love, Love a chance.

GET TICKETS
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
Laura Pels
The playwright Mike Bartlett’s bitter indictment of baby boomers begins in 1967, on the occasion of the first, foolish hookup between two nineteen-year-old Oxford students, Kenneth (Richard Armitage) and Sandra (Amy Ryan). Then it catches up with them at two twenty-odd-year intervals, as they mature into horrible parents. The script is fun when it’s not too on the nose, and Armitage is stellar. The second, most farcical act, in which Kenneth and Sandra improvise a decision to divorce in front of their teen-age children, comes close to hitting the right pitch. But Ryan never accesses the dangerous impulsiveness that Sandra demands; she and Armitage can’t conjure the animal attraction that their characters supposedly share. And, in their daughter Rose’s climactic speech, Zoe Kazan’s performance never catches fire. Which is all to say that Michael Mayer’s direction is strangely tepid for a show that’s meant to be a barn-burner.

Review: ‘Love, Love, Love’s’ Beatles babies, bitter boomers

Updated October 23, 2016 7:21 PM
By Linda Winer linda.winer@newsday.com

REVIEW
WHAT “Love, Love, Love”
WHERE Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St.
INFO $99; 212-719-1300; roundabouttheatre.org
BOTTOM LINE A lacerating study of selfishness without cultural significance.
“Love, Love, Love” — named after the Beatles’ “All you need is love” optimism of 1967 — is apparently meant to be social commentary about havoc wreaked on others as the baby boomers grew up.

But really, Mike Bartlett’s lacerating entertainment is less believably about a cultural and political generation than about the curdling of two outlandishly selfish individuals from larky young beauties to rich monster parents.

Putting broader meanings aside, the two-hour drama — presented in three brief acts interrupted by two distracting intermissions — is a spectacular showcase for marvelous actors to age and transform into almost unrecognizable versions of the same characters.

Bartlett, the celebrated British author of “King Charles III” and the one with the unprintable title often cleaned up as “The Cockfight Play,” writes self-consciously provocative plays that strike me as flashy and facile. As he proves again with this one, however, he creates dazzling character-revealing dialogue and, under the virtuosic direction of Michael Mayer, makes people whose agonies are giddily enjoyable.

Amy Ryan plays Sandra, the girl-to-mother with a wondrous obliviousness to her effect on others and, as she puts it, a “mouth like a train.” Richard Armitage wears the power of Kenneth, the boy-to-father with a dashing, offhand seductiveness. Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield are nuanced heartbreakers as the poor offspring of such extreme narcissism, while Alex Hurt offers hard-boned contrast as Kenneth’s working-class brother. The three realistic sets by Derek McLane and costumes by Susan Hilferty say at least as much about the eras as do the characters.

Magere Kritik im New Yorker, aber der Satz "Armitage is stellar" strahlt :

http://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/theatre

... da stimmt wohl die Chemie nicht ganz zwischen Ryan und Armitage... weder mit Mina Tander noch im Crucible (beide, Elisabeth und Abigail) sah ich da ein Problem der Unglaubwürdigkeit, ganz im Gegenteil. Doch schon bei den gemeinsamen Fotos der Darsteller war mir das aufgefallen , da dachte ich schon, "ob das wohl was wird mit den beiden?". Amy Rayn kommt etwas unterkühlt rüber, eigentlich hat bisher noch jede Film-/Theater-Partnerin sich von seiner Freundlichkeit erwärmen lassen.

Gegensätze ziehen sich an oder so?

Review: ‘Love, Love, Love’s’ Beatles babies, bitter boomers

Updated October 23, 2016 7:21 PM
By Linda Winer linda.winer@newsday.com


REVIEW

WHAT “Love, Love, Love”

WHERE Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St.

INFO $99; 212-719-1300; roundabouttheatre.org

BOTTOM LINE A lacerating study of selfishness without cultural significance.

“Love, Love, Love” — named after the Beatles’ “All you need is love” optimism of 1967 — is apparently meant to be social commentary about havoc wreaked on others as the baby boomers grew up.

But really, Mike Bartlett’s lacerating entertainment is less believably about a cultural and political generation than about the curdling of two outlandishly selfish individuals from larky young beauties to rich monster parents.

Putting broader meanings aside, the two-hour drama — presented in three brief acts interrupted by two distracting intermissions — is a spectacular showcase for marvelous actors to age and transform into almost unrecognizable versions of the same characters.

Bartlett, the celebrated British author of “King Charles III” and the one with the unprintable title often cleaned up as “The Cockfight Play,” writes self-consciously provocative plays that strike me as flashy and facile. As he proves again with this one, however, he creates dazzling character-revealing dialogue and, under the virtuosic direction of Michael Mayer, makes people whose agonies are giddily enjoyable.

Amy Ryan plays Sandra, the girl-to-mother with a wondrous obliviousness to her effect on others and, as she puts it, a “mouth like a train.” Richard Armitage wears the power of Kenneth, the boy-to-father with a dashing, offhand seductiveness. Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield are nuanced heartbreakers as the poor offspring of such extreme narcissism, while Alex Hurt offers hard-boned contrast as Kenneth’s working-class brother. The three realistic sets by Derek McLane and costumes by Susan Hilferty say at least as much about the eras as do the characters.