Theater review – The Tempest in New York

Sam Mendes has directed a starkly designed, concentrated production of “The Tempest.”

As you take your seat at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, where the Bridge Project production of “The Tempest” opened Thursday night, you can spy Stephen Dillane, the lanky British actor who plays Prospero, sitting quietly among the musicians already assembled on the stage.

With spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose, his hair a spiky, unkempt tangle, he thumbs through a sheaf of yellow pages on a stand before him, immersed in study. When Prospero rises to signal the start of the show, putting on his magic cloak and a belt of fraying feathers, it is with a palpable sense of resignation — a book-bound professor called reluctantly away from his task.

Click here to read more of this review by Charles Isherwood from the New York Times.