Dr. Zhivago NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (36)
See it if You like a great story. The costumes and the set is amazing. Very touching and heartfelt. Loved everything.
Don't see it if Don't care for on old classic.
See it if you like love stories.
Don't see it if want a serious play.
See it if you want to hear a great Lucy Simon score sung passionately. Paul Nolan. Beautiful costumes.
Don't see it if The leads unfortunately lacked chemistry. Zhivago was more compelling in his solo songs which made him seem self-involved. Bad projections!
See it if You love big, epic musicals, no matter how iffy the material.
Don't see it if You have extremely fond memories of the movie and are expecting something on par.
See it if This closed WAY TOO EARLY! It got a bad rep. When I went, it was fab! A little slow, but so was the movie and the mini series.
Don't see it if Haters gonna hate. You should have seen it.
See it if If you like beautiful music and romantic stories.
Don't see it if If you want a perfect book or you didn't like the movie.
See it if you are a fan of the movie. This show was not nearly as bad as everyone said. I was entertained and not bored, so that's a partial win.
Don't see it if You don't like the movie or stories of war and relationships.
See it if You know the classic movie and want to see a different take on it.
Don't see it if You are looking for a replica of the splendor of the film (visually), and if you are annoyed by poor choices of staging.
Critic Reviews (36)
"A turgid throwback to the British invasion of Broadway in the 1980s, and more specifically to the epic-romantic style of “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon.” If full-throated love ballads, thundering militaristic anthems, baggy plots, highly expositional dialogue and doomed romances are your cup of tea, fire up the samovar and give the show a try. But be warned: “Doctor Zhivago” is inferior in most respects to the musicals it is emulating."
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"'Zhivago' is Jean Valjean with a poetic streak and a medical bag...No amount of syrupy, portentous music—swamping workmanlike lyrics—can make us care for the synthetic, drably colored pageant. Des McAnuff’s staging looks expensive but ugly, with cheesy video close‑ups of actors, giant Soviet propaganda posters, eruptions of fire and the occasional explosion or gunshot to wake us up. To Siberia with it."
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"Sprawling European novels do not make great musicals. Unfortunately, this lesson has fallen on deaf ears at the Broadway Theatre — and I don’t just mean those forced to endure the mess that is 'Doctor Zhivago'. I also mean its authors and director, who together have turned Boris Pasternak’s novel into a musical so awful it is almost sadistic."
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"A slow-paced commodity musical suitable only for consumption by tone-deaf tweenagers...I spent two hours and 45 minutes sitting through “Doctor Zhivago.” Unless you’re getting paid to do so, don’t make the same mistake."
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"The tunes are unmemorable, the lyrics are generic and why is everyone speaking with British accents? It’s all bang and no seduction. An unwieldy mess, daunting in scale, assaultive on the ear, humorless and resistant to any involvement on the viewer’s part in this sweeping tale of love, revolution and war. In a word, it’s stinko."
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"Broadway's 'Doctor Zhivago' is an epic miss. Based on the acclaimed Boris Pasternak novel, this miscalibrated musical is yet another attempt to bottle page-to-stage lightning a la 'Les Miserables.' But electricity doesn’t zap. Not much does in this nearly three-hour show."
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"Making a musical of 'Doctor Zhivago', you have to wonder which of the numerous plots in this sprawling narrative the creatives would choose to musicalize. The answer is: All of them. The immortal love story of Zhivago and his Lara is up there, but so is the entire Russian Revolution, which in 1917 completed its upheaval in less than a year. Here, it seems to drag on for ages."
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""Somewhere, My Love," there's a great musical to be made from this classic tale. This isn't it...The notes are all there, but the emotion is sorely lacking. The same could be said of the entirety of this big-budget musical...The show dutifully features all the major characters and dramatic moments familiar from the book and film, but in a breathlessly paced, mechanical style that never manages to engage the heart or mind."
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