AIRLINE HIGHWAY Reviews

[LimelightMike]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 1:58am

Post 'em here, kids!

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 8:32am

Saw it yesterday and was pleasantly surprised as heard nothing but bad things about it.It was previously mentioned it ran 2:25. It started @2:05 & we were out by 4:20 so some cuts were made.

Held your interest with all the different characters some more fleshed out than others.The set was dynamite . How it will fare with the critics is a mystery.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 7:04pm

amNY is mixed (2.5 stars):

""Airline Highway" presents a lively, detailed portrait of a lower class community in the South. But nice as it is to have a wide assortment of colorful characters, the focus too often drifts away from the central players of the plot. It ends with many of the conflicts unresolved."

http://www.amny.com/entertainment/airline-highway-theater-review-2-5-stars-1.10323586

[Julie Yard]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 7:17pm

I'm with you Mr. Roxy. I saw this last night and enjoyed it. Not a perfect show, but I appreciated the ambition of this slice of life.. 16 characters, that big set, Julie White and K Todd Freeman. I didn't feel I needed everything to be resolved... wasn't that the point... (spoiler) life is messy/people are messy? Anyway... I went with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised. I hope the reviews are good. 

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 8:05pm

Time Out NY is mixed (3 of 5 stars):

"Although the characters are familiar in many ways, director Joe Mantello and his accomplished cast of 16 breathe spirit into most of them, and the big, boozy party scene has jazzy vigor. (Freeman and White are standouts.) But D’Amour’s dialogue is short on the kind of poetry that might elevate her gallery of beautiful-loser types, and she can’t sustain the wide focus she initiates; Airline Highway’s multiple plot threads are pulled out (or forgotten) in a rushed, unsatisfying denouement that resorts to summarizing its message to the audience in the form of a (literal) high-school class presentation. Like the cinder-block–mounted car on the side of Scott Pask’s seedy multilevel set, the play has color and beat-up charm, but doesn’t go anywhere."

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/airline-highway

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 8:09pm

Deadline is mixed:

"You may as well call this  “The Motel New Orleans,” so clearly does it emulate — in theme if not execution — Lanford Wilson’s Hotel Baltimore (which, perhaps not coincidentally, provided Steppenwolf with one of its legendary productions and also had a long run in New York). I don’t know how the great Wilson play would hold up today; it was so firmly rooted in the culture of another time and place. But D’Amour, while clearly sympathetic to her characters, conjures a world too neatly balanced, too eccentric, too oddly wholesome. They’re types, not people. Under Joe Mantello’s expert direction (no one is better at ensemble staging), Airline Highway never reaches the status of powerful Katrina post-mortem it seems to be striving for."

http://deadline.com/2015/04/the-visit-airline-highway-broadway-review-1201414889/

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 9:55pm

Newsday is mixed to negative:

"Julie White finds genuine new dark corners as the aging prostitute who wonders "who is gonna remember us?" K. Todd Freeman does the same as the wise, smart-talking drag queen, as does Caroline Neff as the melancholy young stripper. Emotions heat up when her old boyfriend (Joe Tippett) comes back from his new reformed life with his teen stepdaughter (Carolyn Braver).

The girl wants to report on them for her sociology class, which, improbably, leads to people spilling their guts to her. A bacchanal ensues and gets ugly, but not before D'Amour (author of "Detroit," a Pulitzer finalist) spells the whole thing out with a plea to "embrace the incoherence of it all." I wish I could."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/theater/airline-highway-review-less-interesting-losers-1.10314358

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 9:58pm

Hollywood Reporter is mixed to negative:

"Given the grand tradition of New Orleans as a place where funerals are jazzy celebrations of life, staging such a bacchanal as the play's galvanizing event makes sense, and the wild bursts of singing, dancing and music keep the energy humming. But the circuitous loops of shouty, overlapping dialogue — like a Robert Altman movie without an editor — become exhausting. As a hymn to the resilient spirit of marginalized sinners, this is somewhat prosaic, and its shortage of fully developed conflict means there's little to invest in beyond the pleasure of watching skilled actors create lived-in characters. In a solid ensemble, White, Freeman and Rhoze are particularly good."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/airline-highway-theater-review-791031

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:00pm

Wall Street Journal is mixed to negative:

"For all its shameless familiarity, the first act of “Airline Highway” is perfectly watchable, even entertaining, albeit in large part because of the superior acting of the cast, with special honors going to Mr. Freeman, Ms. Neff and Ms. White (the last of whom is incapable of giving a bad performance). Not so the second act, in which Ms. D’Amour pulls out the Tennessee Williams stop and makes her characters emit boozy soliloquies in which they vouch for their own authenticity: “This is ecstatic experience….You’re moved past the mirage of stability and the fantasy that life is a neat and tidy package.” Remain calm: By then, “Airline Highway” is almost over."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-highway-review-a-young-playwrights-visit-to-familiar-territory-1429835401

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:03pm

NBC NY is a non-review, so I guess mixed?

"The misfit hookers, strippers and drug addicts of MTC’s “Airline Highway” spend their days along the famous road leading to the New Orleans airport, but none of them are going anywhere anytime soon.

A loose-limbed character study by Lisa D’Amour—her last piece, the anxiety-laden “Detroit,” mined similarly despairing territory—“Airline Highway” arrives via Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and is directed by Joe Mantello. It’s just opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre."

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/entertainment/the-scene/Review-MTC-Airline-Highway-301002311.html

[indytallguy]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:09pm

USA Today is positive: 3.5 out of 4.

 

Nobody (is) getting out of here alive," remarks a character early in Airline Highway (***½ out of four stars), the lyrical, funny, aching new play that opened Thursday at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:14pm

Vulture is positive:

"It’s a minor off-note in a play you receive almost like music. Indeed, Joe Mantello’s Steppenwolf production, re-created at the Manhattan Theatre Club, seems to pour off the stage. Mantello is in top form, keeping a cast of 16 in constant movement, maintaining focus among them as they chitchat, hang streamers, or go about their own business. He is abetted not only by a universally excellent cast (led by Julie White as Tanya and K. Todd Freeman as Sissy Na Na) but by Scott Pask’s knockout set, which, gorgeously lit by Japhy Weideman, is an active player too. In its loving attention to squalid detail, it does a novel’s worth of work."

http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/theater-reviews-the-visit.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:18pm

NY Times (Isherwood) is positive (critic's pick):

 

"But the teeming energy that floods the stage, which has been choreographed with impressive precision by Mr. Mantello, helps roll past the more heavy-treading passages. Just when I began to worry that the play might maintain a rosy-hued vision of the lower depths — becoming a happy-go-lucky “The Iceman Cometh” — Ms. D’Amour allows the darkness to erupt with a thunderclap, as the party turns messy and the recklessness that the characters cannot keep at bay for long begins to consume them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/theater/review-airline-highway-is-a-portrait-of-the-underclass-of-new-orleans.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:23pm

NY Post is negative (2 of 4 stars, though it reads like 1):

"Hungry for clichés? “Airline Highway” is chock full of them. A hooker with a heart of gold, a gruff handyman, a sassy gender-bending African-American, a lonely stripper: Every character in this new Broadway show is straight out of central casting.

You keep waiting for playwright Lisa D’Amour to put a new spin on those archetypes . . . but no. There’s little even the excellent Julie White can do with Tanya, the aging prostitute."

http://nypost.com/2015/04/23/airline-highway-collects-new-orleans-cliches-like-mardi-gras-beads/

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/23/15 at 10:26pm

NY Daily News is negative (2 of 5 stars):

"“Airline Highway” looks very good on paper.

Lisa D’Amour, the author, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist a couple years back for “Detroit.” Joe Mantello, the director, is a two-time Tony Award winner who toggles between plays and musicals. Julie White, who heads the ensemble cast, is a Tony winner who makes every performance exciting.

Yet with all that potential, “Highway” is a road to nowhere that’s potholed with contrived storytelling and characters from Central Casting.

The only part of this long, meandering byway you’ll want to use is the exit ramp."

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/theater-arts/airline-highway-review-lisa-amour-story-down-and-out-article-1.2196492

[goldenboy]

Posted: 5/2/15 at 12:36pm

Saw it last night. This is a flight you should miss. How did this ever get to Broadway?

Dull, Meandering and I'll say it... a miscast Julie White. Not believable as a prostitute

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 5/2/15 at 2:09pm

White was good but she appeared a bit on the thin side weight wise. No idea if she lost weight for the role .

[GlindatheGood22]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 11:41pm

Take my opinion with a grain of salt since I go nuts for southern gothic and gritty, garish, loud plays, but I really had a great night.

Julie White is doing wonderful work, as is everyone else, but for me the highlight was Miss Ruby's soliloquy at the end of the second act. I'd call it a monologue, but it feels bigger than that, somehow. Caroline Neff is also great. The second act stumbles a bit as it devolves into ten minutes of screaming, but she really gives a nuanced, shining performance in the first.

I don't think this is going to win anything it's been nominated for, and I don't think it will be remembered much once it's gone. But it's worth seeing while it's here.