The Little Foxes OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF The Little Foxes

  

  A Dysfunctional Family, Greedy With ‘the Gimmes’

  Ben Brantley

  September 21, 2010: The foxes have been skinned, of course. With the viscera-probing Ivo van Hove in charge, how could it be otherwise? This experimental Flemish director specializes in stripping intricately wrought classic theater characters, from Blanche DuBois to Molière’s Misanthrope, down to their naked impulses. He has now applied his scalpel to the Hubbards, the entrepreneurial Southern family of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 melodrama, “The Little Foxes.” And guess what? It turns out that beneath their mean, greedy and conniving exteriors, the Hubbards are mean, greedy and conniving.

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• CURTAIN UP REVIEW OF The Little Foxes

  

  The Little Foxes

  Elyse Sommer

  September 22, 2010: If you had to sum up Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes in a tweet: It's a story about money and how to use it or how to acquire more of it through deceit and greed. If ever a play seems ripe for a revival, it's certainly this saga of the rapacious Hubbards, Hellman's symbols of the merchant under class clawing its way up the social ladder after the Civil War to usurp the wealth and power of top bananas. The greedy and deceitful Hubbards can easily be seen as the forbears of the financial wizards whose reckless, self-serving practices have left not just the poor blacks of the Hubbard's small Alabama town behind , but workers and home owners all over America.

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• NY1 REVIEW OF The Little Foxes

  

  Time Out Theater Review: "The Little Foxes"

  David Cote

  September 22, 2010: Greed never goes out of style. Gordon Gekko has risen again on the big screen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," and now the rapacious Southern diva Regina Giddens has swept back onstage. Regina, the anti-heroine of Lillian Hellman’s "The Little Foxes," has been given savage new life by Elizabeth Marvel in a bold, iconoclastic revival by director Ivo van Hove.

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• THEATERMANIA REVIEW OF The Little Foxes

  

  The Little Foxes

  Andy Propst

  September 22, 2010: No Victorian furniture or Spanish moss is in evidence in Ivo van Hove's contemporary, ultra-stark, and decidedly brutal staging of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, playing at New York Theatre Workshop. But the show's lack of physical trappings -- the action of this potboiler unfolds within a cube of deep purple velvet where a video screen held within an ornate gold frame, a small electronic organ and four ultra-modern chandeliers are the only adornments -- actually serves to put a host of powerful and fiercely committed performances in stark relief. Indeed, the viciousness of the production extends well beyond Hellman's cutting script.

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• THE L MAGAZINE REVIEW OF The Little Foxes

  

  The Little Foxes, a Small-Minded Revival

  Dan Callahan

  September 22, 2010: Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes is not a great play, maybe, but it is an unstoppable bit of stage machinery, and it does have great things in it. Hellman's abiding sin as a writer was a need to see everything in black and white, but in The Little Foxes, Tallulah Bankhead brought such charisma to the role of the murderous Regina Giddens that she complicated Hellman's anti-capitalist intentions with an all-out star turn that became a theater legend. In a smaller corner of the play, Patricia Collinge broke hearts as Aunt Birdie, and her work was preserved for us in the 1941 film starring Bette Davis, who gave a controversial performance as Regina that some felt was too cold and controlled after Bankhead's fireworks. The play has had an odd life since then; there were two productions at Lincoln Center, one in the 1960s with Anne Bancroft, and one fairly recently with Stockard Channing, and both were considered failures. Elizabeth Taylor made a success of it on Broadway in the early 1980s, but no one really took that very seriously. And so Hellman's most famous play hasn't quite had a New York revival that would revitalize or re-juice it.

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