Good morning, and welcome to Broadway News’ Broadway Review by Brittani Samuel — our overview of reactions, recommendations and information tied to last night’s Broadway opening of “Our Town.”
RUNDOWN
Director Kenny Leon’s conceptually laudable but scrambled production of the revered theatrical staple “Our Town ”— about the everyday lives, loves and deaths of a community in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners — opens with a hurricane of whispered prayers and a heavenly hymn descending from above. It’s a fitting nod to the show’s spiritual core. Especially since “Our Town” meditates on gratitude (a tenet found in most faiths) and the wonders of the cosmos, all under the guidance of a God-like character called the Stage Manager, who controls the dramatic action.
For those, like me, who have miraculously managed to pass through theater education without witnessing or wading through some iteration of the text, the current 2024 revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” will become your new baseline — a fact that I assume excites Leon, particularly because his production embraces diverse casting for its central roles in an attempt to bring the play’s 1901 setting closer to present day. The play centers on two families, the Black Gibbs and the white Webbs, but there is also Deaf actor John McGinty as milkman Howie Newsome and openly gay actor Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager. Leon doesn’t archive early-20th century small-town life (or for that matter, considers the realities of anti-miscegenation and other discriminatory laws), but rather manifests an idealism of what “our town” (really, our nation) could be.
