Oslo (Broadway)

"A deserving and likely candidate for the Best Play Tony award...All the actors in the cast are once again in top form and the production is gripping as ever...A fact-based but highly original drama that's as entertaining and suspenseful as it is informative and thought-provoking. Sure it's talky and long, but as written by Mr. Rogers, staged with dynamic simplicity by Bartlett Sher and with 14 top-drawer actors to bring 21 historic characters to vivid life, the three hours simply fly by." Full Review

"This rich drama of quixotic politics fills to the bursting point its capacious new home...'Oslo' has now become the colossus it was always meant to be, while giving an even sharper focus to the urgent behind-the-scenes intimacy at its fast-beating heart...A marvel of both expository efficiency and exciting showmanship...'Oslo' features a vast cast of characters...Yet somehow, by the end, this production’s vital ensemble makes you feel you have come to know every single one of them." Full Review

“Unequivocally fascinating...Rogers’clever dialogue really is that witty. You get the facts, but you get them delivered with intelligence and humor by this dream of a cast. It’s the petty stuff—the pseudonyms, the clandestine phone calls, the drinking competitions, and all the other trappings of macho bravado—that makes these intimidating characters so human. And so funny...This is what we call drama, and it’s what we live for.” Full Review

"The most engrossing new drama on Broadway. Director Bartlett Sher and his excellent cast have ramped up the tension, resulting in an altogether riveting evening. Let us add, a riveting three-hour evening which breathlessly speeds by...It is near miraculous that playwright Rogers has turned what might have been dryly dusty history into spellbinding, edge-of-your-seat drama...'Oslo' is quite an achievement, and quite a play, and quite an evening of high-stakes theatricality." Full Review

"Hands down the best new play of the season. Creating riveting drama out of the intransigence of implacable enemies is no modest trick, but darned if playwright J.T. Rogers doesn’t pull it off, and grandly. This story of a three-dimensional geopolitical chess match, told as if each player were a complete human being capable of passion, error, humor and honor, reveals the keen eye and ear of a writer working in veritable mind-melding harmony with a superb director, Bartlett Sher." Full Review

"Smart, touching and spiked with spy-novel tension and wry humor...Everything clicks in director Bartlett Sher’s elegant and evocative production...This show flows in near-cinematic fashion and pulls you in so tight that time recedes. That’s no small feat, since the play runs nearly three hours...It helps to have an impeccable cast...Peacemaking is complex. So is 'Oslo.' Broadway is all the richer for it." Full Review

"The extraordinary 'Oslo,' Rogers’ riveting dramatization of a complex political tarantella...It’s even better the second time around...This all sounds talk-talky, and it is—which is what makes Sher’s accomplishment with the text so compelling...Rogers and Sher take the players in this comedy of terrors at face value, refusing to douse it in cynicism or the certainty of hindsight...For an all too brief moment, we can look back to that handshake and recall how thrilling hope can be." Full Review

"Rogers's densely packed, fact-based drama gives us a fascinating fly-on-the-wall view of those painstakingly delicate talks...Under Bartlett Sher's taut direction, the wise and witty three-hour drama unfolds like a political thriller. Complex yes, but Sher's superlative production immerses us in the suspenseful twists and turns that yielded the unimaginable: mortal enemies becoming friends...Besides turning a historic event into high-brow entertainment, 'Oslo' is impressively even-handed." Full Review

"Even if you have little or fleeting interest in the Middle East peace process or diplomatic intrigue, you will find J.T. Rogers’s carefully researched play supremely riveting. Every aspect of it—the writing, the direction by Bartlett Sher, the fine performances—is pretty near immaculate...Sher’s direction is as smooth and clever as Rogers’s writing...'Oslo' is, most surprisingly, a bracing examination of human fortitude and effort against improbable odds." Full Review

"A bold, crackling, and humorous new play about the back-channel peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis in the early 1990's told with humor, charm, heart, and brutal honesty...At times tense, at others humorous, the play effortlessly glides between the two states often and sometimes unexpectedly...A hit that will inform, entertain, and remind us all just how far we've come and how much work is yet ahead." Full Review

“The clarity of this new play by J.T. Rogers does not only rely on the smart yet surefire way it's written, but also on the masterful staging by Bartlett Sher, who, after recent productions of both ‘South Pacific’ and ‘The King and I,’ is no stranger to directing gargantuan shows at Lincoln Center. Given its subject--the Oslo Accord or peace treaty between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) in 1993--’Oslo’ is ultimately an enormous play, but it is told in intimate terms.” Full Review

"Who would ever have thought that history presented on stage could be so compelling?...Brilliant...A taut three hours that hold us breathless and leave us both thinking and weeping...The entire cast is uniformly captivating, particularly Aronov as a rock-star flashy Israeli diplomat, and Oreskes and Jenkins as a duo of can’t-believe-we’re-here academics from Haifa...'Oslo' is not educational, it’s enlightening. And it’s crackling damn good theater too. Full Review

“J. T. Rogers’ riveting historical drama feels right where it belongs–on a world stage. Risk taking is what this thrilling story is all about…The mesmerizing plot involves 21 characters, multiple locales, and a complex political context–packed into three intense hours of stage time…Now, in the majestic Beaumont, the play has expanded in breadth, scope, and impact–gaining the stature that the story justly deserves.” Full Review

“The pacing is ferocious. J.T. Rogers's script has a lot of ground to cover and fast. Bartlett Sher's direction ensures that this happens…You couldn't ask for a better cast here. They are a formidable force. Each of them carries the weight of the situation their characters are living through, and yet also are able to find the humor in the piece. There is rich a vein of dark comedy running through 'Oslo' that the cast plumbs with great regularity…‘Oslo’ is a triumph, and everyone should see it.” Full Review

"The whole cast was fantastic. Most of the actors, except for a handful of the leads, played multiple roles and were wonderfully adept at doing so. The physical production is also terrific...You would think that a play dealing with such fraught politics would be heavy and serious all the time, but 'Oslo' is also surprisingly funny throughout...I'm so impressed by a play that takes a real subject, on which you know the outcome, and still creates suspense and tension. That takes real craft." Full Review

“‘Oslo’ lays bare in exquisite detail and often unexpected humor the gut-wrenching details of the endless negotiating, dining, copious drinking, and eventual camaraderie that predated and thus created the historic signing…Sher's most deft direction takes what could be a confusing morass of facts, figures, and characters and lays them bare at our feet where they entertain and enlighten…‘Oslo’ is a work peppered with humor and constant gobsmacking acting.” Full Review

“Who knew a nearly three-hour history lesson about Middle East politics from the 1990s could be so riveting?...Terrific performances are well-crafted and keep the story together and flowing with heart, genuineness and humor…The story is complicated but under the brilliant direction of Bartlett Sher it flows quickly and informatively like a great political thriller...In the masterful hands of Mr. Sher and team it is tightly presented and never stops grabbing your attention." Full Review

"Gripping and insightful theater that is bound to make even the most die-hard partisans in the seemingly never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine reevaluate everything they think they know...Director Bartlett Sher brings an austere touch to this production that keeps the show flying along at a cinematic clip...While the negotiation scenes are nail-biting, Rogers, Sher, and the cast create a genuine sense of camaraderie." Full Review

"A fascinating if talky play…The three-hour running time went by relatively swiftly for me. The creative team invests the principal characters with personalities…It helps that the adversaries are played so credibly…'Oslo' gives us not only a lucid refresher course on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and provides us entertainment that is both surprisingly funny and suspenseful. It also leaves us with a sense that maybe even the world’s most unsettling situations can someday be settled." Full Review

"Extremely touching and realistically funny...Helping to make the play so entertaining and clever, without undercutting the seriousness of the subject, is that the premise of the fact-based piece begins as a somewhat naïve attempt at a social experiment...Despite numerous locales and characters, the three-hour-long, three-act play never sags. The play is abundantly talky, but it's the kind of crisp, clever talk that continually stimulates." Full Review

"A magnificent new play...The information flies at us rapidly but, as written by the astonishing J. T. Rogers, we follow every detail and every introduction. Meticulously constructed...What an amazing act of tightrope walking we are witness to as directed with the utmost skill and intelligence by Bartlett Sher...I didn’t know peace accords could be so thrilling, so much so that I found myself tearing up at moments when the future of the accord looked dark and foreboding." Full Review

"Under the sterling direction of Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, this production sets the bar for 2017...Undeniably thrilling...As much as we know the outcome of these talks before the play begins, Rogers makes us feel like the game onstage could be over any second...The move to the larger Beaumont proves to be both a blessing and a curse...The set is given more room to breathe...However, some of the play’s intimacy disappears in its new home." Full Review

"Rogers gives us a frame for the play: Can gradualism succeed where traditional negotiations have demonstrably failed? As in Frayn’s 'Copenhagen,' the pursuit of the big idea, however worthy, can get tiresome, if not relieved by credible characters, witty exchanges, deft direction, and fine performances. 'Oslo' offers all of that...Mays manages to give Terje a credible enthusiasm for the task at hand as well as a humanizing vulnerability." Full Review

"Bracing and absorbing...The production seems in constant, almost frantic, motion...Bits of dialogue teeter into speechifying here and there, but you’ll barely notice; the balance of passion, discipline, and suspense is organically, thrillingly theatrical...High stakes and hard choices tend to produce uncomfortable moments, but as this muscular, moving production reminds us, progress isn’t easy—even when it’s incomplete." Full Review

“Mays is outstanding as Larsen, balancing fear and excitement…Ehle excels as his equal partner…Despite its nearly three-hour length, the play flies by, with Sher keeping things moving at a smooth police-procedural-like pace. Rogers’s script melds the comic and the surreal, the serious and the wacky in translating this most unlikely of scenarios into an utterly gripping yet tenderly intimate tale.” Full Review