Don't give my regards to Broadway

Denzel, I want my money back

Last week Sheya and I took some friends to New York for the weekend. It was their first trip and we wanted it to be special for them. We ate well, walked much, laughed more and enjoyed their company and the experience of seeing the City through their eyes. We wanted an unforgettable Broadway show, too.

Let’s begin with the promise: Othello on Broadway, staged at the Barrymore Theatre with a $9 million budget and the combined wattage of Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, was supposed to be a landmark theatrical moment.

It wasn’t.

For those of us who don’t live down the block from Broadway, who plan these trips and drop real coin—five-figure coin for these tickets—to sit under those lights and be transported by something unavailable to us in daily life, this show carried high table stakes. It couldn’t just be good, it had to be something special, because there was so much specialness available. What it delivered was mostly disappointment, glossed with a veneer of celebrity. My teenagers would have called it mid.

Denzel, at age 70, stepped onto the stage with decades of acclaim trailing behind him like a royal cloak and the audience in his back pocket. He’s a performer and knows how to use his relationship with the audience. But the performance he offered was strikingly disengaged. He didn’t inhabit Othello so much as haunt him—reciting lines with the same cadence we’ve heard in press junkets, charity galas, and acceptance speeches. At times, it reminded me of drinking one a La Croix water that tastes faintly like something but not enough to know what it tastes like? At others times, the effect was so overdone and comical that it felt like I was watching Tracy Jordan do a Denzel impersonation on SNL, and the wild swing between the two wasn’t an artistic choice of showing how madness creeps into the protagonist’s life. It was just lazy.

Jesse Green of The New York Times noted it too: calling the performance “weirdly distanced” and observing that Washington “seems to mistrust the language, or perhaps his connection to it.” That’s the part that stings—not that he failed, but that he didn’t seem to try to bridge the gap between his persona and Shakespeare’s tormented general, a character that at his age, with his racial background, and from the vantage point of his lofty career should have been a natural fit.

By contrast, Jake Gyllenhaal delivered a slippery, venomous Iago that almost single-handedly salvaged the evening. His command of the verse was lithe, controlled, and acidic in a way that made you lean forward. It wasn’t revolutionary, there was no novelty (nor room for it) in his interpretation, but it was real and stark. You could sense the effort, the understanding, and—most importantly—the risk. I really wondered several times if he felt served in the choice of his fellow cast members. And later I wondered if he was as good as I remembered him, or just good by comparison to lackluster?

We should also deal the play itself. Let’s be honest: Othello was the blockbuster action flick of its day. Critics in the 1600s raised eyebrows at its improbable plot and lurching structure, and today it reads like a rough draft Shakespeare handed in on a deadline. It’s full of implausible turns and characters who pivot on a dime for no apparent reason. In this production, those flaws were left exposed, even magnified.

Director Kenny Leon (who I know from his time at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in the 90s) opted for a futuristic military setting—lots of concrete pillars and sleek costumes—but none of it added clarity or support for the story. Instead, the sparse staging left the audience wandering, unmoored from the emotional heft the text was supposed to carry. I think the idea was to let the language and the acting carry the show, and that would have been good if they had done so.

And yet, despite the artistic letdown, the production is a financial triumph, a testament to what you can charge to see a celebrity do something, even if he does it poorly. It grossed $3 million in a single week, breaking records for a non-musical and recouping its investment of $9 million (spent on what, I don’t know)—an impressive feat in this climate. The producers are in the money, no doubt.

Broadway itself didn’t bite. The Tony Awards delivered a withering verdict: not a single nomination. Not for acting, not for staging, not even a courtesy nod. That silence wasn’t an oversight—it was a statement, and sort of a brave one when Broadway shows are opening and closing with shocking regularity and loss of investment.

Having said all of this, there is still something electric about sitting in that theater. About the swell of expectation when the lights go down. About seeing a real star walk onto a stage you’ve only read about. We wanted to be taken somewhere that night. Somewhere timeless, conflicted, tragic. Somewhere unreachable without art. And when that opportunity is squandered—when all that production value and potential collapses into something that seemed self-indulgent, felt like posturing, was either safe or misunderstood, and characterized by the lowest form of shapeless acting—it leaves a mark, in my wallet and in my heart.

This Othello should’ve shaken the walls. Instead, it spoke too loudly into a mic, stood on its stage marks to catch the light, and pregnantly waited for applause on cue. If you're lucky enough to still believe in theater's transformative power, you’ll walk away from this one wishing it had believed in itself.