Broadway.com is Positive:
"We don't go to the theater for a lecture. Or do we? Alan Bennett's rip-roaringly enjoyable The History Boys is almost entirely a pedantic exercise; its point of view is never far from view. But Bennett possesses such a large and sympathetic vision, and such a smart ear for incisive, nearly Wildean language, that this teaching lesson is like none we ever received in school. Certainly director Nicholas Hytner's handsome, free-flowing, ideally cast production, which comes to us whole from London's National Theatre, helps Bennett's medicine go down smoothly. But the play's the thing, and in the midst of an intellectually challenged Broadway season, we might embrace The History Boys as a wise elder whose company enriches, even if the message he bears is a tad shopworn.
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It is a tremendously entertaining evening, not least because it captures, in splendidly immediate theatrical terms, the twilight of boyhood camaraderie—a time when the exuberant confusion of youth makes the time buzz by before you know where it went. The eight schoolboys here are a thoroughly lovable and plausible bundle of wisecracking overconfidence and teenage nerviness, from the cocky Dakin (Dominic Cooper) to the good-natured Scripps (Jamie Parker), from the touchingly effete Posner (Samuel Barnett) to the pudgy joker Timms (James Corden).
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Apart from Sweeney Todd, there's probably no better ensemble cast on Broadway this season. The play's action spills energetically around Bob Crowley's expansive rotating set, with scene changes covered deftly by quick-cut film montages or stageside songs from the honey-voiced Posner and the piano-tickling Scripps.
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Indeed, Bennett's attention to behavioral detail, and the bone-deep humanism behind it, is finally what makes History Boys more than a mere thesis statement on the state of education, or a crank's elegy to lost innocence. Bennett's points could surely be reduced to pamphlet form, but that wouldn't be fair to a play this full. When Irwin tries glibly to paraphrase Kipling, Timms stops him and points out, inarguably: "With a poem or any work of art we can never say 'in other words.' If it is a work of art there are no other words."
http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=527937
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
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"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
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