American Beauty

A quarter century on from its original premiere, a stunning new version of Tony Kushner’s epochal Angels in America returns to Broadway. 

- Adam Green

Every once in a great while comes along a piece of American born theater, large of scope and ambition, that is both a genuine work of art and a commercial blockbuster—something that not only taps into the Zeitgeist but reveals and defines it, illuminating who we are as a country and a people. Such a supernova was Tony Kushner’s magnificent two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which opened on Broadway in 1993 and went on to become the signal cultural event of the decade. My father took me to see George C. Wolfe’s production of part one, Millennium Approaches, soon after it opened, and I was bowled over— I’d never realized that one play could contain so many ideas and feelings, so much invention and humanity. After the curtain came down, my father, a writer of musical comedies of an earlier era, turned to me in excitement and said, “It’s so fucking theatrical. And it’s about everything.” It’s hard to convey the fervor that attended Angels at the time—the critical acclaim, the box-office mayhem, the Pulitzer and seven Tonys—though, as Nathan Lane puts it, “it was the Hamilton of its day.”