A quarter-century after stunning the theater world, one of the greatest theatrical journeys of our time returns to Broadway in an acclaimed new production from London’s National Theatre. Tony winner Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield star in the first Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning two-part epic Angels in America, directed by Marianne Elliott (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). This production is strictly limited, playing an 18-week engagement.

SYNOPSIS: In late 1985 and early 1986, as the first wave of the AIDS epidemic in America is escalating and Ronald Reagan has been elected to a second term in the White House, the play’s two parts bring together a myriad of disparate characters whose lives intersect, intertwine, collide and are blown apart during a time of heartbreak, reaction and transformation. Ranging from earth to heaven, from the political to the intimate to the visionary and supernatural, Angels in America is an epic exploration of love, justice, identity and theology, of the difficulty, terror and necessity of change.

Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is an ordeal. A play to be wrestled with. It is funny, disturbing, thrilling, intellectual, guttural, erotic, angry, despairing, hopeful. It is overwhelming. It is eight hours long. Now, it’s back on Broadway for the first time since it debuted in 1993, arriving for a limited run at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre almost fully intact from London’s National Theatre, where it was mounted last summer. As I continue to paw and puzzle over director Marianne Elliott and co.’s dazzling production of Kushner’s work, which I had the odd luck of seeing in one long stretch, a “two-play day,” in the midst of a late-March snowstorm, I kept coming back to the inconceivability that something should be so spectacular, entertaining and mainstream, while also so incisively highbrow, lofty, and academic. Ironically, considering the team of Brits that brought this Angel to life, it is also distinctly American: a great cobbling of the political and historical, with some camp thrown in for fun, peppered with references to Tennessee Williams and Tallulah Bankhead, Shakespeare and the Bible. D …Read more