Angels in America is up there with the greatest works ever written for the theatre, but this NT production is seriously sub-standard in many respects. While the brilliance of Kushner's work shines through, this is nevertheless a limp, one-note, caricature-filled interpretation of his plays(s), unimaginatively designed, and directed, for the most part, like a middling sit-com. Andrew Garfield is mostly annoying as Prior Walter. He gives a performance that is fey and whiny beyond anything in the script, with too little of the strength and intelligence that is also there. He reduces the part to just another bitchy queen, seemingly more inspired by a camp Bette Davis impersonation than any real three-dimensional gay man. I also question why the director chose to depict three of the four main gay characters as flaming, sibilant, wrist-flapping sissies. Two of the four are wearing nail varnish throughout. Now, seriously, do two of every four gay men you know wear nail varnish? Do any of them? And does a gay man covered in lesions, shitting blood, dying of AIDS really take time to re-apply his nail varnish?! It's just one detail, but it's a telling one, in that it is typical of the way this production reduces characters to caricatures, rather than goes for complexity and nuance. The main saving grace of the production is Nathan Lane, who is appropriately chilling and revolting as Roy Cohn. His speech dismissing his AIDS diagnoses and denying that he's even gay, shows exactly where Donald Trump learned his "fake news" tirades (Cohn was Trump's lawyer and mentor). But Lane's star turn is not enough to make this a worthwhile interpretation of Angels. At the end of it all I just wanted to watch the HBO adaptation of the plays again, so that that superb version would wipe this one from my memory.
