‘Topdog/Underdog’ Broadway Review: Corey Hawkins & Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Deal A Winner
21.10.2022 - 05:21
/ deadline.com
Twenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog has lost none of its vitality and power and cunning. Director Kenny Leon proves that in a vibrant new production opening tonight at the Golden Theatre.
Stars Corey Hawkins (The Walking Dead, Tony nominee for Six Degrees of Separation) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen) tear into this play with a force that captivates from start to finish. Like the Three-card Monte sharks they portray, the actors are in full control, pacing their game and teasing out buried histories, secrets and longings with all the grace of a master illusionist.
They play brothers Lincoln (Hawkins) and Booth (Abdul-Mateen II) – named by their father as a cruel joke, just one among many lifelong burdens the sons inherit. With Lincoln, the elder, newly separated from his wife, the brothers are sharing the tight quarters of Booth’s rundown, one-room apartment. It’s a dump, and soon will be a cauldron.
In perhaps the most audacious and risky example of Parks’ pointed, go-for-broke sense of humor, the playwright has Lincoln working as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator – in whiteface – at a local arcade, where customers pay to portray the historical Booth and reenact a certain pivotal moment at Ford’s Theatre. Heritage and destiny – to say nothing of humor and drama – collide in this bizarre display that works as both metaphor and reality. (Too fantastical? New York’s Coney Island had a “Shoot the Freak” attraction as late as 2010.)
With the brothers subsisting on Lincoln’s meager salary and Booth’s shoplifting skills, dreams for a better life come hard. For Booth, escape is all tied up in Three-card Monte,
The website celebfans.org is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.