Re: A FEW GOOD MEN Reviews

TIME OUT NY

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (mildly recommended)

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/broadway-review-aaron-sorkins-a-few-good-men-103026

Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men has a few good moments and one that's pretty great. The latter entered immortality at the climax of the play’s 1992 film adaptation: an explosive exchange between the driven young JAG lawyer Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, and the hard-as-nails commander Nathan Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson, who has been hiding an ugly secret about discipline in the Marines. “I want the truth!” yells Kaffee. “You can’t handle the truth!” retorts Jessep with fury and contempt. Gotcha! Kaffee wins the argument; Nicholson wins the scene.

Nothing so thrilling occurs at A Few Good Men’s handsome and straight-backed Broadway revival at Lincoln Center, directed by Michael Arden. That the production lacks surprise is itself unsurprising.

The production may not generate much excitement, but it earns a respectful salute—the proper response to a show whose duties have been discharged honorably, if not with special distinction.

Updated On: 10/30/26 at 10:52 PM

GUARDIAN

A Few Good Men review – Aaron Sorkin’s legal drama makes unwelcome return to stage

2 out of 5 stars

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/oct/30/few-good-men-aaron-sorkin-review

The production is helmed by Michael Arden, an actor turned director who is no stranger to courtroom intrigue: he was behind the lovely 2023 revival of the musical Parade, about a wrongly accused man standing trial for murder. But that show had songs to rely on, whereas A Few Good Men has only its complicated Sorkin dialogue to propel it along. Arden proves less adept at turning that fast talk into music; in his hands, the play is lurching and awkward, rarely finding the rhythm necessary to keep Sorkin’s verbosity afloat.

It doesn’t help that the Beaumont is an enormous space, and Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey do nothing to make it more intimate. They use nearly the whole depth of the stage, and highlight the proscenium’s height with looming beams and a guard tower meant to evoke Jessep’s outpost in Cuba. That volume effectively swallows up the rapid, close chatter of the play, rendering it all quiet and tinny. We feel little of the propulsive charge of the story, as Kaffee navigates setbacks and, in the process, finds the principled conviction his career had previously lacked. There is a curious diffuseness to this A Few Good Men, the sense that we are watching the dim memory of something that was once exciting, rather than the thing itself.

Perhaps an actor of sturdier stock than Tom Blyth could have made things more resonant. As Kaffee, Blyth – a 31-year-old Briton most famous for a 2023 Hunger Games prequel film – has the arrogant, golden-boy strut down pretty well. But he struggles to convincingly convey Kaffee’s legal acumen, his cunning in getting the desired result from a cornered witness. As dogged internal affairs attorney Joanne Galloway (played by Demi Moore in the film), musical theater mainstay Krysta Rodriguez has similar problems of gravitas – she’s a bright presence, but one does begin to wonder what a plucky ingenue from a 1940s romp is doing at a court-martial.

The real sore spot in the ensemble, though, is a direly miscast Bradley Whitford as Jessep, a role that should radiate imperious menace, but in Whitford’s rendition comes across confused and unfocused. Whitford totters around the stage with his legs wide apart, as if he is doing a creaky John Wayne impression. He half mumbles and half growls his lines, a strained simulation of macho might. Whitford proved in two separate television series that he can more than handle Sorkin’s signature patter. (He’s also now doing great work on the Sorkin-esque series The Diplomat.) But Jessep is not one of Sorkin’s zippy smart guys. He’s a bull, a bear, something atavistic and scary. That’s not exactly in Whitford’s wheelhouse, it seems.

Not all is lost, though. There are some great turns from actors in smaller roles, including Nick Blaemire as a wise-cracking and morally concerned second-chair lawyer; Thom Sesma as a conflicted lieutenant colonel; and Michael Oberholtzer as the lead prosecutor on the case. They find the right cadence and timbre to make Sorkin’s ornate language sound casual and credible. If only they were in a smaller theater – where audiences could really feel the cramp of the courtroom, the pressure of a military base – and led by more suitable stars. As is, they are but a few good players in a production disappointingly derelict in its duty.

THE WRAP

ttps://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/theater/a-few-good-men-broadway-review-aaron-sorkin/

Despite its military milieu, “A Few Good Men” begins much like a rom-com with an overly contrived fight between a man and woman who could not be more different. In the Demi Moore role of LCDR Joanne Galloway, Krysta Rodriguez is the epitome of earnest dedication to the rule of law. In the Tom Cruise role of LTJG Daniel Kaffee, Tom Blyth is the epitome of nonchalant white male privilege. They don’t fall in love, but faster than you can call Whitford’s villain a God-fearing fascist, Joanne and Daniel end up as not-so-strange bedfellows to defend the soldiers accused of murder.

Sorkin, who would go on to create “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” has spoken of resisting offers to revive the play, which he considers part of his juvenilia. Arden’s production, which includes a few rewrites from Sorkin, doesn’t really rebut this. Plenty of what makes Sorkin Sorkin is already evident here — punchy dialogue, swift scenes, moral certainty. (The characters may not always know what is right and just, but Sorkin does.) “A Few Good Men,” though, is weakened by rickety structure and characters who are more like sketches than walking, talking (or given Sorkin’s penchant, walking and talking) human beings.

...the mammoth set, by Dane Laffrey, only highlights the play’s weaknesses.

Arden usually directs musicals, winning Tony Awards for “Parade” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” Here, he has substituted singing with lots of yelling from his actors.

VULTURE

Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont has the quality of certain savvily conceived larger theaters of being able to either disguise or display its size. Some set designs make its 1,000-plus-seat auditorium feel downright intimate. Others waste no time in reminding you that you’re in a Big Damn Room to watch a Big Damn Play.

You can guess which way director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey — frequent collaborators most recently responsible for the much of a muchness that is The Lost Boys — have gone with the space for their revival of Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 play, A Few Good Men. If Laffrey’s soaring aircraft hangar of a set weren’t enough, he and Arden have flanked it with two enormous flags: Lay flat the Stars and Stripes on stage right or the Marine Corps banner on stage left, and you could fit a New York one-bedroom inside their footprint. Neither flag moves or changes as the story of two marines accused of murder and defended by a hotshot junior lawyer — known to most as a young Tom Cruise from the 1992 movie, Sorkin’s first — unfolds between them. They are persistently if quietly menacing, two brutal, complacent giants assured of their own impregnability.

That might be a truly powerful statement — if I actually believed that the production was making it. I don’t.

...Of course, for purposes of character arc, one of those good ones has to wake up to his own goodness. That’s Lieutenant (junior grade) Daniel Kaffee, played solidly if a little safely by Tom Blyth. (Playbill is just as obsessive as the men onstage about listing everyone by proper rank.)

New York Post
★★☆☆

‘A Few Good Men’ review: Aaron Sorkin’s mediocre courtroom drama is back on Broadway

Kaffee describes himself and his two sidekicks as “a pushy broad, a smart Jew and a Harvard mouth,” and that’s really about as deep as this thing gets.

As his legal cohort Lt. Joanne Galloway — the brains of the operation until she randomly isn’t — Krysta Rodriguez is plenty prepared, but there’s an artificiality and stiffness to everything she does that would be more at home in a musical or a sit-com. Frazzed and unserious, she could almost be on “Ally McBeal.” Sorkin is equally responsible for this, but Joanne never comes across as capable or intelligent. She’s just a typical 1980s bucket of neuroses. Sorkin likes to combat sexism while also being kinda sexist.

Rounding out the trio, Nick Blaemire is perfectly fine as their funny third wheel, Lt. Sam Weinberg, only it’s never clear why he’s there. Even Sam is stumped. He brings up his apparent superfluousness multiple times.

Speaking of superfluousness, this is a humongous show. There is a cast of 21 actors — the same size as the musical “MJ” — and gifted designer Dane Laffrey of “The Lost Boys” and “Maybe Happy Ending” has turned the Vivian Beaumont into a cavernous airplane hangar.

At times the scale is exciting, particularly during movement choreographer Ricky Ubeda’s entrancing military rituals. But when it’s just three underdog lawyers in a small room trying to nail their defense strategy or during a meat-and-potatoes courtroom scene, the intensity floats up to the rafters.

That is, until the energizing Whitford arrives at that famous speech and line: “You can’t handle the truth!”.

But by then we’ve handled quite enough, thank you.

https://nypost.com/2026/10/29/entertainment/a-few-good-men-review-aaron-sorkins-mediocre-courtroom-drama-is-back-on-broadway/

DTLI Consensus: Can't handle the truth? Well, you certainly can't handle this uneven first Broadway revival of Sorkin's breakthrough work.

8 mixed, 5 negative (including the NYT), 4 positive.

https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/a-few-good-men/

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Updated On: 10/30/26 at 12:20 AM