Review: Is Othello Starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal Worth $921 a Ticket?

“The play’s the thing, and a seat to Othello is worth the ka-ching,” a so-called “insider” quipped to Page Six in response to a manufactured controversy over the show’s exorbitant ticket prices. Let’s be real: if you’re shelling out $921 per ticket to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal do Shakespeare on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre, chances are your mortgage isn’t hanging in the balance. But for the rest of us normal people, it begs the question — is this revival worth landing in the poorhouse?

No, not really. Don’t get me wrong. Kenny Leon’s production offers a sturdy rendering of the tragedy, with the kind of solid but blurry performances you’d expect from major celebrities who go back and forth between screen and stage. It is, at the very least, an accessible and concise modern dress interpretation, taking a play I’ve seen clock in at well over three hours and drilling it down to a comparatively lean 150 minutes including intermission. But while it’s far from the worst Shakespeare production I’ve seen this season, it lacks the essential spark that would elevate it from “not terrible” to “complete revelation.”

What plagues Othello is the same affliction that has haunted all of Leon’s productions this season, from Home last summer to Our Town this past autumn. The actors plow through their lines like they have a train to catch, preventing them from connecting to each other, keeping us from hearing what they’re saying, and robbing the text of its essential poetry. There is vague specificity in a title card that reads “the near future,” yet beyond the contemporary American military fatigues — fastidiously designed by Dede Ayite — the setting feels no more specific than the Saturday afternoon on which I watched it.

That’s a grave misstep in a play like Othello, where palace intrigue and all-consuming romantic jealousy drive every plot twist. Washington is our leading man, the Moorish (North African) Venetian general, newly eloped with senator’s daughter Desdemona (Molly Osborne). Gyllenhaal is Othello’s devious ensign Iago, whose hatred for his boss compels him to deceive Othello into believing that his bride is cheating on him with the loyal captain Michael Cassio (Andrew Burnap). That, of course, starts our characters on a path of destruction that leads to at least five bodies on the ground by the time the curtain falls.

The standout supporting players are neither Osborne nor Burnap, two reliable actors (Burnap’s Tony win for The Inheritance was extremely well-deserved!) who are so lacking in presence here that we forget about them even while they’re talking. They’re bested by Kimber Elayne Sprawl, with an icy, don’t-fuck-with-me glare as Iago’s headstrong wife Emilia, and Anthony Michael Lopez as Roderigo, whose unrequited love for Desdemona pushes Iago to launch his deception mission. Lopez provides several moments of levity as he enters in a succession of leisure outfits that leave the audience in stitches.

It’s not the first, second, or third time that the masses laugh; considering how Othello is one of Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, there’s a weird amount of frivolity in Leon’s production. When Washington and jarhead Gyllenhaal are on stage together gabbing about death (“strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated”), the scenes play like a buddy comedy between the most trusting person on the planet and the BFF he doesn’t realize is a complete psycho.

Gyllenhaal speaks so dryly that the audience titters its way through the murder plot, the sadness of it all being lost in the ludicrousness of his plain-spoken delivery. With villainy in his eyes, he’s an Iago driven by pure malice, which is a rudimentary take, but a valid one, nonetheless. That’s more than I can say for Washington, who hits the marks just fine, but only allows us to see glimmers of a fully developed character as he mumbles his way through his soliloquies and keeps emotion at a safe distance. His Othello is much like his Hickey and Walter Lee in that respect: good by mere mortal standards, but not Denzel-good.

Then again, does any of this matter? The people who are paying ungodly amounts of money for tickets aren’t going because they want to see the sliding Venetian columns in Derek McLane’s set, or Natasha Katz’s foreboding lighting, or Burnap or Osborne or Sprawl or Lopez. They’re not going for Shakespeare and they’re not going for Kenny Leon. It doesn’t matter if it’s Othello or the phone book. They’re seeing two of the biggest movie stars on the planet right in front of them, without the separation of a silver screen.

In that regard, Othello delivers. As for me, I’d rather not miss a mortgage payment.