"When the time comes to deliver the knockout punch, it takes a lady to do it. She is Montego Glover, here assigned the task of delivering the coup de grâce of Marco Ramirez's play...There's a lot more to like in 'The Royale', including the novel staging of the fight scenes as interior monologues. All five members of Rachel Chavkin's cast are first-rate...It's interesting how every so often a powerfully wrought play seems to resonate far beyond its own borders."
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"The fusion between writing and direction is so airtight that it borders on Expressionism...Every word, hit, clap, and stomp echoes with that authenticity…The Big Fight itself depends on a trick of writing and staging that is more heavy-handed and half-hearted than the rest of the play...But it's a testament to how good everything else is that even that doesn't matter very much…Real boxing matches may have more blood, but I've never seen one as exciting or as moving as 'The Royale.'"
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"Chavkin leads these five superb performers through 90 minutes of intense work. The extreme stylization of text and design may interfere with the emotional involvement of some playgoers. But when 'The Royale' reaches its horrifying conclusion, all that's non-naturalistic about the creative team's approach culminates in a sense of magnitude and of the mythic, and Ramirez's compact drama is transformed from a tale about a bygone era to a parable for all time."
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"Staged with thrilling, even ritualized theatricality by the exceptional young director Rachel Chavkin...the 75-minute, “six-round” play..lands blow after blow...There are no false notes in the ensemble, led by the...completely convincing Davis as Jay and the ferociously determined Glover as Nina...‘The Royale’ may not float like a butterfly but it stings like a bee. It’s bare-knuckled dramatic fisticuffs with a one-two punch that will send you reeling."
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"Director Rachel Chavkin has set the pace for Marco Ramirez’s play, 'The Royale,' with claps and stomps, creating visceral partners between words and movement and making us the plays sparring partner. Her brilliant staging, mustered with Ramirez’s story and the flowing connected ensemble of this marvelous cast is like watching a jazz band riff off of each other...Go! Get a ticket! Run to The Mitzi E. Newhouse at Lincoln Center! Don’t wait until it’s too late!"
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“A 90-minute blast of inventive staging that is 'loosely inspired' by the life of Jack Johnson...What does “The Royale” add to the abundant literature on the Champ? Not much...What it offers is intense and innovative theatricality directed by the extraordinary Rachel Chavkin...If the playwright is most effective in establishing the jazz-like percussive rhythms of the action, he also shows promise as a theatrical heavyweight in a handful of punchy lines."
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"'The Royale' is boldly theatrical, well-acted and the very definition of 'promising'...'The Royale' is given a pretty sterling production...[The play] would have been stronger if they had pared some of the artifice, if they'd cut back on the speechifying toward the end and allowed Jay to enter the ring with the fierce determination he needed to triumph."
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"Man, oh man, 'The Royale' is a play worth seeing--especially in a production as tightly realized and inventively directed and as beautifully performed as this one is…It doesn't tie up the loose ends in a tidy bow. That is, of course, to its credit…'The Royale' is so consistently engrossing, Jay's inner game so engagingly depicted, and the cast and direction so flawless and fine, that the ending is not the point so much as the getting there is."
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