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Now open at the Nederlander Theatre, The Lehman Trilogy comes to Broadway after acclaimed, sold-out runs at London’s National Theatre, the Park Avenue Armory, and London’s West End. The raves are pouring in for this new play by Stefano Massini, directed by Tony Award and Academy Award winner Sam Mendes.
In a Critic’s Pick review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes calls the epic play “a vivid tale of profit and pain.” She wrote that “the mechanics of the play, with these deft and lovely actors breathing such life into the brothers, coax us into an ease at odds with moral logic as we watch their genteelly brutal acquisition and stockpiling of wealth.”
For NY Daily News’, Chris Jones said the piece is “far and away the best thing I’ve seen on any stage since before the start of the pandemic.” And in Time Out New York, Adam Feldman gave the play four out of five stars, saying, “The actors’ skill, humor and humanity help personalize The Lehman Trilogy’s depiction of the company’s journey into destructive avarice.”
Tweeting about his review, Naveen Kumar wrote that the play’s”blindness toward race really irked me. [It] romanticizes its subjects while maintaining a scrupulous blindness to the labor they exploited… Though myopia on their cravenness seems to be the point, that doesn’t make the excising of race from a contemporary account of American history any less tiresome.”
The story of a family and a company that changed the world, The Lehman Trilogy unfolds in three parts over a single evening. Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Adrian Lester as the Lehman brothers, their sons, and grandsons. On a cold September morning in 1844, a young man from Bavaria stands on a New York dockside dreaming of a new life in the new world. He is joined by his two brothers, and an American epic begins. 163 years later, the firm they establish – Lehman Brothers – spectacularly collapses into bankruptcy, triggering the largest financial crisis in history.
The Lehman Trilogy
Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st Street, NYC
Through January 2, 2022
