Love, Love, Love NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (292)
See it if You want to see a thought provoking and powerful comedic drama that gets more and more dramatic and depressing as it goes on.
Don't see it if You don't like drama. You do not like layered shows.
See it if You enjoy plays that are relevant to the point where you may question your own life and place in soceity.
Don't see it if You're into plays that are artificial, grand, and irrelevant - this was as real as it gets. Read more
See it if You like British writers, history, cultural norms and expectations, "King Charles III"
Don't see it if don't like long shows or intermissions or
See it if You are able to appreciate the relativity of our changing identities in a changing culture
Don't see it if You need a toe-tapping score to be entertained
See it if you want to catch one of the best off-Broadway offerings this season!
Don't see it if you don't care for british accents.
See it if you like amazing acting (yes they play age 19 through like 60 convincingly!) and you live through the 60s/70s (or your parents did).
Don't see it if you're looking for fluff entertainment or a musical (though the soundtrack is great!)
See it if You like great acting, want to be surprised by a show, and be thoroughly entertained.
Don't see it if You need to "like" the protagonists. They were blithely unaware of how unlikeable they were.
See it if you like bruising, original characters pouring it out onstage. A fun, fight for one another's attention.
Don't see it if you don't like your theater pitched at a certain volume.
Critic Reviews (36)
"This play rumbles with a sometimes too easy irony...And yet I have to admit I had a swell time at 'Love, Love, Love,' impeccably directed by Michael Mayer and featuring a nigh-perfect five-member ensemble...The greatest joy in 'Love, Love, Love' comes from the chance it affords its stars to conquer the aging process and to demonstrate how people change — or more to the point, remain themselves — over the years."
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"Although it may sound overly schematic in print, the psychocultural history mapped by 'Love, Love, Love' is filled with interesting detours and switchbacks, abundant humor and a refusal (mostly) to condemn baby boomers outright...Michael Mayer’s fine-tuned and nicely balanced production shows off five actors in top form...It’s a testament to Bartlett’s clever, incisive dialogue that such selfish, limited people should steal our hearts."
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"That the play is little more than a stunt dawns on you only gradually. In the 1967 act, you might be blinded by the brightness and sitcom speed of Michael Mayer’s high-gloss production...Then, when the second act leaps ahead 23 years, the bottom falls out...Craziness is fun to watch, until it isn’t...This is the kind of play that seems to have been written in reverse, starting with a slick structural concept and heading, somewhat haphazardly, back toward human portraiture."
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"Bartlett has given us what looks on first viewing like the best stage comedy to come along since Tom Stoppard’s 'The Real Thing,' and Mr. Mayer’s production is flat-out perfect...The laughs are piled high atop one another, but they’re bracingly angry...'Love' is, in short, a morality play, but one so well made and pulverizingly funny that it hardly ever feels preachy...It’s gloriously funny, but it’s also an important play, one whose harsh message deserves to be heard far more widely."
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"'What did you stand for? Nothing except being able to do whatever the f!!k you wanted.' Harsh, yes, and let’s admit somewhat broad for a generation that included at least a few societal game changers. Yet still ringing of truth, especially in the performances that Mayer has drawn from this amazing quintet...While it’s great fun watching Armitage and, especially, Ryan age seamlessly from callow youth to shallow middle age, it’s the increasingly commanding Kazan who walks off with the show."
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"Mike Bartlett’s caustic comic takedown of British baby boomers is wildly funny and just as blunt...Michael Mayer’s direction is fluid and the acting is sublime, but it’s hard to love, love, love the fact that Bartlett spells things out so baldly."
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"A cross between Joe Orton and Kenneth Lonergan, this snappy satire follows the adventures of a young British couple as they meet in swinging London and follow their bliss to 2011, birthing and discarding emotionally stunted offspring along the way. As Bartlett tells it, with searing insight and mocking wit in a flawless production directed by Michael Mayer, this was the generation that grabbed everything with both hands — and then ate their young."
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"Bartlett manages the neat trick of making us relate to his characters while not particularly liking them. It's a testament to his gifts for incisive characterization, pungent comic dialogue and astute social commentary...The lead performers skillfully handle the difficult assignment of playing characters over several decades, even if they're not always fully convincing in every incarnation...While 'Love' is not quite as profound as it intends to be, there's an awfully lot in it to, well, love."
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