"Stunning new Broadway revival...The director reaffirms with 'The Crucible' his credentials as one of the most intriguingly imaginative engineers of the modern stage...van Hove assembles a cast with refined antennae for the story’s tempests and tendernesses...Van Hove’s fully-realized version puts ecstatic new flesh on the estimable bones of one of Miller’s greatest plays."
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"Eye-popping and wholly unconventional...A more potent, angrier John (and a more complex Mary) would help this production by leaps and bounds, but it remains a fascinating piece of theater, one that adds layers of visual and sensual meaning to Miller's literate verbosity and thus freshens its point of view...This is a 'Crucible' that focuses on how really decent people can be destroyed by fear and hatemongering; were Miller alive today, he would have approved of its emphasis."
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"The play’s easy-to-understand themes of mob mentality and mass hysteria have made it Miller’s most produced work, yet the piece is somewhat flat...Thus the prospect of maestro Belgian director Ivo van Hove putting his inimitable stamp on Miller’s work is too tantalizing to resist. Even if the results are mixed...Van Hove has a knack for stagecraft, that’s for sure...Van Hove’s bold, electric production doesn’t quite juice Miller’s morality play with the ambiguity it needs to be truly tragic."
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"Ivo van Hove’s Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s 1953 Salem witch trial drama/political allegory 'The Crucible' is so bewildering that I hardly know where to start. That being said, the production is, more often than not, absorbing and blazing with intensity...Van Hove is an unapologetically avant-garde artist. His experimental, otherworldly approach is ill-suited to mid-century realistic American drama but can nevertheless be electrifying."
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"Van Hove does not reinvent so much as he distills...The lead performers are most impressive...Ben Whishaw with Sophie Okonedo as John and Elizabeth Proctor share a raw intensity that burns through our collective consciousness long after the final curtain...Purists may balk at Van Hove's tinkering and some of the effects seemed unnecessary, but Miller's message, that society can be just as blind as justice, comes through clear and resonant as ever."
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"Van Hove is the master of visually arresting moments: The alarming third-act opening will have audience members clinging to their seats...Unfortunately, the beats between these set pieces often seem neglected...This may be van Hove's way of dressing up Miller's overwrought dialogue and uneconomical plot development, which causes even the strongest mountings of this play to sag. This is the best production of 'The Crucible' I've ever seen. It is by no means a perfect drama."
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"Ivo van Hove's tackling of Arthur Miller's classic seems rather tame...There appears to be a sincere effort to work with the material, rather than completely overwhelm it with his scarcely related vision...By the play's end van Hove seems to be telling us that, yes, the devil is at work here, undercutting the playwright's intention. While there's a cold distancing throughout the evening that keeps the production from fully engaging, there are still numerous good points."
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"Van Hove stages 'The Crucible' as a horror film...Performed, down to the smallest role, by a superb cast. However, you sometimes have to squint your eyes in order to find them among all the special effects...'The Crucible' sometimes seems like a relic of 19th-century melodrama. Yet it persists because it accurately diagnoses a neurosis that continues to afflict the body politic. Van Hove's production sometimes gets at this and sometimes gets lost in a welter of staging ideas."
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