"Shana Cooper’s revival — busy and butch — is so deep in conversation with itself and its dance battles that it nearly forgets to speak to us today...She seems more interested in moving bodies around rather than showing us what the minds inside those bodies might be thinking. Once in a while her work is electric...Mostly, the actors have enough comfort with the language to put across its essential meaning, but not the ease either to play with it or against it."
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"The stage is full of visual ideas, the kind you can tell meant something specific to the people brainstorming but that haven’t made the jump...for all the energetic efforts of its actors, the production never gathers its power...This is the kind of well-intentioned aesthetic mishmash that ironically emerges not from too little thought but from a great deal of it that got caught up in itself...What keeps us engaged are a few individual actors punching through the hodgepodge."
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"Cooper's urgent and worthy interpretation reminds one of just how much this play in particular gains from a fairly straightforward approach - straightforward, that is, except for its bruising physicality...The fact that Cooper manages to imply topical parallels without overwhelming the play's enduring power feels refreshing...It also allows us to focus on the performances of the excellent cast, and thus on the human elements underlying Shakespeare's epic sociopolitical dissection."
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“You can see the outlines of a vision that seems all too relevant to today's America...The power of this Julius Caesar is only a sometime thing, thanks to an uneven cast whose members have apparently not yet settled on a unified acting style...Everyone is so jaw-grindingly intense as to be fatiguing...Overall, this is a 'Julius Caesar' that bemuses: It's good on the big ideas, much weaker on the details needed to support them. Ultimately, it telegraphs its intentions too overtly."
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"Once Cooper’s actors start speaking the poetry and prose—if not trippingly on the tongue, certainly grippingly—things go quite well...Strife is the order of the sinister day and night, and Cooper pulls no punches...I had a reaction to it. I’d never experienced. It’s a marvelous play. That still stands. But is it a thoroughly well-written one? There I have to suggest it has drawbacks that never previously occurred to me...Never mind. This 'Caesar' is in sturdy hands for most of its course."
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"In the 1930's, the play was presented as an anti-Fascist rallying cry. In our own era, it has been presented with various American presidents as the stand-in for Caesar. While Shana Cooper's production for Theatre for a New Audience here called 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar' is vigorous, lusty and lucid, it offers no political point of view. We never understand why the conspirators want to get rid of Caesar or what they want to replace him with instead."
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"Rather than trying to connect the play's eponymous character with a contemporary political figure, she returns the audience's gaze to the play itself and the constellation of characters that make this tragedy such an intriguing work...The current version is a well-oiled machine and that the cast has their iambic pentameters down pat...The real dazzler is the ensemble, however. It can do more with its choreographic movements than the key principals delivering their eloquent speeches."
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"A dystopian head scratcher, but the fault is not in its stars...The lack of clarity about setting and story only muddies the relationships between characters. The show features some stand-out performances...What’s most confounding about Cooper’s wacky vision of Rome is how predictable it is. In a world aesthetically unmoored from the columns and temples of ancient patriarchy, why so few women?...Cooper’s staging has one really riveting moment."
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