Purlie Victorious
Music Box Theatre, New York City ★★★★
“Every piece of theater that’s not a product of the Disneyverse feels like an especially perilous leap of faith these days,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. Perhaps that’s why so many years passed without Broadway hosting a revival of Ossie Davis’ “audaciously funny firecracker of a play,” an anti-racist satirical comedy as relevant today as when it debuted in 1961. “Fast, fierce, and bighearted,” the show is finally back, and it “feels wittier, braver, and more caring” than much contemporary writing. “Both unflinching and generous, it’s just about as sharp as satire gets.”
“Of course, a Broadway show almost always needs a star,” said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. Director Kenny Leon has enlisted an exceptional one in Leslie Odom Jr., the Hamilton alum who plays Purlie Victorious Judson, a dashing preacher hoping to wrest a family inheritance from a plantation owner so the money can be used to purchase and integrate a church in Purlie’s rural Georgia hometown. Meanwhile, “Leon proves a maestro at conducting a cadre of splendid comic actors,” including Kara Young as Lutiebelle and Jay O. Sanders as Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee, “a fulminating fossil of Old South White supremacy.” Young, in the fall theater season’s first breakout performance, “masquerades as a flaky shrinking violet” as Lutiebelle aids Purlie in his scheme by pretending to be his cousin.
“The themes of Purlie Victorious— segregation, racial terror, and the unjustness of sharecropping—are no laughing matter,” said Aramide Tinubu in Variety. But just as in 1961, the pleasure Purlie, Lutiebelle, and their allies take in executing their righteous mission stands in for “an entire people’s willingness to thrive despite the constant obstacles thrown in their path.” The show’s sharp jokes, meanwhile, remind us “why Black Joy was so important amid the pain, and why it remains vital now.”