Other Desert Cities - Broadway

Reviews

• Review by Mark Kennedy
  from Associated Press
  November 3, 2011

  ‘‘We've all heard this scenario before: Family members gather for a fraught holiday reunion in which embarrassing family secrets – lubricated by booze and resentment – tumble out. But Jon Robin Baitz has taken that cliche and somehow made it vibrant in Other Desert Cities.... The script crackles with life and so do the performances. ’’

• Review by Scott Brown
  from New York Magazine
  November 3, 2011

  ‘‘Like all the great desert tribes of antiquity, Palm Springs Republicans deserve their own sacred text. Jon Robin Baitz, a gay liberal humanist, has delivered them a doozy with Other Desert Cities, his off-Broadway hit, which has now ripened admirably on Broadway. Power, passion, and superbly crafted palaver stippled with blowdarts of wit—this is what Baitz (The Substance of Fire, TV’s Brothers and Sisters) does best. ’’

• Review by Ben Brantley
  from The New York Times
  November 3, 2011

  ‘‘All family reunions should be this satisfying. Having spent months apart and suffered losses that might have leveled a less resilient clan, the Wyeths of Other Desert Cities have reassembled on Broadway at the Booth Theater, and absence and adversity (as they’re supposed to but so seldom do) have made them closer than ever. This means they have even more power to nurture, delight and wound one another and, not incidentally, move to tears anyone who visits them. Cities, directed with a masterly combination of shadow and shimmer by Joe Mantello, emerges as stronger, more sincere and more credible in its Broadway reincarnation.’’