This time around, a cast of black actors plays the Loman family, and that is the revival’s most enlivening aspect. Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke are Willy and Linda Loman in “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway. The pieces don’t connect, and neither do we. Revivals should shake things up (though the 2012 revival starring Philip Seymour Hoffman reused Jo Mielziner’s famous original set to great acclaim), but in director Miranda Cromwell’s production from London they contribute an animatronic, distant quality to what can be a profoundly moving and reliably relatable play. None of these add-ons refresh or galvanize the story - they sedate it like theatrical Xanax. The stage is bathed in dreamy purples and blues, looking more like Tennessee Williams’ memory play “The Glass Menagerie” than the craggy tale of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.Īnd in scenes that briefly whisk us to a more promising past, there are bright, rapid-fire camera clicks that take the word “flashback” a tad too literally.
At the Hudson Theatre, 141 West 44th Street.
3 hours and 10 minutes with one intermission.
