"This “Topdog/Underdog” is never in danger of being dragged down...The ending loses none of its explosive shock even if we’ve understood from the start that the odds in a hustle are always with the house."
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"Superlative acting is at the core of the experience...Together, these two performers keep you guessing even as the play moves inexorably toward an outcome that has been in the cards all along."
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"A massive Old Glory looms large and conveys a weighty sense of history. 'Topdog/Underdog' does that, too, in its own theatrical way. In this starry and stirring revival, the play unfurls in all its glory."
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"Afro-pessimism isn’t a genre in which I’d usually place Parks, let alone Leon. But played without winking in a key of aggrieved, stressed-out toxic masculinity, as it is here, 'Topdog/Underdog' is able to hit that note convincingly."
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"The characters’ passive complicity in their fates, and the play’s ultimate descent into violence, feels both simplistic and sensationalized. 'Topdog/Underdog' seems sadly retrograde."
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"Twenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, 'Topdog/Underdog' has lost none of its vitality and power and cunning."
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"All in all, this is really a show about how much we all need love, and to be loved. By our family, our friends and our country."
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"The first Broadway revival...crackles like a live wire — an American fable with its finger shoved in a socket. Throw in career-high performances from Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and it is a theatrical event in the most essential sense, in that it demands to be seen here and now."
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