The Merchant of Venice (Lincoln Center Festival) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Member Reviews (26)
See it if you want to hear WS well-spoken. A solid production, but unexciting. If you need MOV for your bucketlist, a good opportunity. Great costumes
Don't see it if you dislike audience participation (house lites kept on low). Bad case of nepotism w/ Phoebe Pryce. Difficult plot to make effective.
See it if You like decent English actors speaking Shakespeare, traditional setting with traditional costumes, fan of the High Sparrow,
Don't see it if You expect dazzling, innovative staging, want more than adequate acting, an evening that never catches fire, community-accepted antisemitism
See it if you want to see a spectacular performance by Jonathan Pryce. Not everyone in the cast is up to his level of performance. Stunning staging.
Don't see it if you are not a fan of Shakespeare. Or if you don't like classical drama that resonates in today's world.
See it if M of V presented by a group of actors dedicated to his plays - Shakespeare's Globe; Jonathan Pryce as Shylock;original music and dance
Don't see it if Abuse of Jews in plays upsets you; You cannot follow Elizabethian dialogue and syntax; You think that Shakepeare's plays are dull and boring
See it if you're a great admirer of Shakespeare, want to enjoy the feeling of a traditional Renaissance Globe experience, or love Jonathan Pryce.
Don't see it if you dislike altered endings of classic plays, are sensitive to harsh depictions of Jews, have trouble understanding Elizabethan English.
See it if Jonathan Pryce
Don't see it if Cast were all above average but few others were exceptional
See it if you like excellently performed Shakespeare in a mostly traditional staging.
Don't see it if you've seen the play too many times already or if you have no interest in Shakespeare.
See it if You're looking for a top-notch version of this problem play. Price makes Shylock understandable; his final scene is terrible and poignant
Don't see it if You dislike Shakespeare (this is a long one); you're sensitive to blatant anti-Semitism (of its time, but still uncomfortable)
Critic Reviews (17)
"A brooding, powerful production…Throughout the director Jonathan Munby’s lucid and strongly acted staging, we will remain aware that while this Shakespearean play is classified as a comedy and is poised ambivalently between light and dark, it will generally be the baser aspects of humanity that prevail...Mr. Pryce illuminates Shylock’s anguish so vividly, his face a contorted mask of spiritual suffering, that it all but erases any sense of contrasting light and dark in the play."
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"A stodgy, underwhelming affair. More or less Renaissance Venice in its period costumes and incidental music, Jonathan Munby’s staging is unfussy and direct, but rarely exciting...Pryce speaks his text with that mellifluous, subtly menacing delivery, shifting from complacent self-satisfaction to howling dismay. But his Shylock a generally passive, cerebral performance, all in the voice and very little in the body. Still, what a grand voice. Pryce is one of the last of the classically trained greats."
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"As the much maligned yet ethically questionable Jewish moneylender Shylock, Pryce's multifaceted performance is so nuanced that he dominates Jonathan Munby's mounting...During Pryce's offstage scenes, however, this 'Merchant of Venice' is disappointingly black-and-white. The romantic moments between the lovers never quite gel, with far too many of the performers fading into the background. Only in the climactic trial scene does this production come to life as a whole."
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"Jonathan Munby’s first-rate Shakespeare’s Globe production...Throughout, Munby keeps the disdain for Jews prominent...Pryce plays Shylock as a man of great dignity, despite (because of?) the hatred accorded him...During the parts of the play when the Shylock plot gets a breather and the competition for Portia’s hand and its aftermath takes focus, Munby hews to a more tradition approach every bit as successful as the enhanced Shylock episodes. He has a first-rate cast performing for him."
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"Live sightings of Jonathan Pryce are rare in New York...His complex, blazingly internalized Shylock is a reminder of how much we’ve been missing. Director Munby’s handsome, modest, stylistically jarring production is a mixed treasure. It is obnoxious in its audience-participation clowning, but harrowing in its violent juxtaposition of the merry Venetian gentiles and their unspeakably casual cruelty to the Jews."
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"Pryce’s portrait of Shylock in the dark and powerful production is brilliant and tragic. He invests his character with so much humanity that the distances of time and space vanish...All the performances, under the direction of Jonathan Munby, are excellent, with particularly stellar turns from the three women…A brilliant production, and a performance that will stay with you long after the torches go out."
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"The very best of what a traditional production can be, throwing light on the text but with enough new touches to preserve against boredom…Pryce’s Shylock rescued the role from being a 'comment' on race, and returned it to the story of a battered, angry and increasingly mad old man, pushed to savagery by the savagery around him…In this production he was rendered as a complexly as I’ve seen…The effect of the play was as of a punch to the gut."
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"Though the production might appear at the outset to be conventional, don’t be misled. Mike Britton’s richly brocaded costumes may be period-sumptuous, but this ever-problematic play forsakes sartorial pageantry to land with a telling sting in its tail. Suffice it to say that Mr. Munby and his largely expert company understand the difficulty in classifying as comic a play that is so dominated by the vilification of the Jewish moneylender Shylock."
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