Les Liaisons Dangereuses BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Les Liaisons Dangereuses

  

  ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ Uses Love as a Weapon

  Ben Brantley

  October 30, 2016: In the high-stakes sport of extreme stage acting, Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber are champion cliff divers. Give them an emotional precipice to jump from, and they’ll soar through the air and stick the landing. Think of Ms. McTeer’s dawning, devastating disillusionment as the pet wife in “A Doll’s House,” or Mr. Schreiber having the mother of all meltdowns in “Talk Radio.” Or Ms. McTeer competing with a rainstorm and winning as the title character of “Mary Stuart.” And Mr. Schreiber casting a slime of moral pollution over everything that moves as Iago in “Othello.”

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• DEADLINE REVIEW OF Les Liaisons Dangereuses

  

  Liev Schreiber Dons Wig And Accent In ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ Broadway Revival

  Jeremy Gerard

  October 30, 2016: Idle rich do the Devil’s work in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, turning innocents and believers into pliant lovers ripe for betrayal, all for their personal amusement. Cruelty and revenge are her driving passions, La Marquise de Merteuil says to Le Vicomte de Valmont, her former lover and now co-conspirator in random acts of physical and emotional devastation. They’re odd anti-heroes for our time, having been the subject of an epistolary novel published in the years leading up to the French revolution but re-emerging in modern times first through a celebrated play by Christopher Hampton seen in London and on Broadway, and then in two popular films: Stephen Frears’ 1988 Dangerous Liaisons (Hampton won an Oscar for the screenplay) and Milos Forman’s 1989 Valmont.

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• TIME OUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF Les Liaisons Dangereuses

  

  Les Liaisons Dangereuses seduces Broadway again

  David Cote

  October 30, 2016: The French famously call an orgasm la petite mort, "the little death"—an elegant term to justify that postcoital sadness you may sometimes feel in your lover’s arms. Tristesse, however, seems inadequate to describe the morbid, alcohol-soaked depression into which the Vicomte de Valmont has fallen. As portrayed with pickled, bullish melancholy by Liev Schreiber, Valmont may take momentary joy from seducing virgins (Elena Kampouris) and corrupting pious country ladies (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), but that endorphin high crashes fast, leaving him gulping glasses of red and squinting sourly at his own debauched badinage.

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• HOLLYWOOD REPORTER REVIEW OF Les Liaisons Dangereuses

  

  'Les Liaisons Dangereuses': Theater Review

  David Rooney

  October 30, 2016: "I always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own," the deliciously amoral Marquise de Merteuil tells her male interlocutor in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. As personified in a blazing performance by Janet McTeer — her voice like velvet and her physical bearing a cloak of studied artifice encasing a flesh and blood woman of ferocious cunning — there's never cause to doubt her claim. Her accomplice-turned-opponent in their games of cruel conquest is a different matter. But even if Liev Schreiber is ill-suited for the part of the "conspicuously charming" Vicomte de Valmont, Josie Rourke's evocative staging provides a compelling portrait of a dissolute aristocracy on the brink of devouring itself.

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• ASSOCIATED PRESS REVIEW OF Les Liaisons Dangereuses

  

  NYC revival of ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ crackles

  Mark Kennedy

  October 30, 2016: Late in the new Broadway revival of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Janet McTeer encounters a real, flickering candle. She’s playing a devious aristocrat who is angry and happy to prove her mettle. So the actress quietly puts her palm over the flame, lets it hang there for a moment — and then snuffs it out with a slap.

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