{"id":807934,"date":"2026-10-19T21:16:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T21:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/807934\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T21:16:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T21:16:11","slug":"other-desert-cities-review-julia-louis-dreyfus-and-ed-harris-shine-in-timely-broadway-revival-broadway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/807934\/","title":{"rendered":"Other Desert Cities review \u2013 Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris shine in timely Broadway revival | Broadway"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just in time for the holidays, Jon Robin Baitz\u2019s family reunion drama, Other Desert Cities, is back with an even starrier cast than its 2011 premiere. The revival is a headline-grabber for marking the stage debuts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus<\/a> and Joe Keery<\/a>, alongside the Broadway returns of Ed Harris<\/a>, Allison Janney<\/a> and Lily Rabe.<\/p>\n

But if this raises eyebrows as a takeover of Hollywood vanity, those concerns are easily quelled by the performances \u2013 especially those of the newcomers. John Benjamin Hickey\u2019s staging is well attuned to its cast\u2019s abilities, more than justifying its speedy return to Broadway<\/a>. This Pulitzer finalist play still has a lot to say.<\/p>\n

The question of what should be said is heavy on the Wyeth family\u2019s mind, as daughter Brooke (Rabe) returns to her parents\u2019 swank Palm Springs home for Christmas with a manuscript of her upcoming memoir.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It is 2004, and the public has mostly forgotten that one of the sons of this Republican dynasty \u2013 headed by Lyman (Harris) and Polly (Louis-Dreyfus), one-time Hollywood fixtures who followed their friends, the Reagans, into the more lucrative world of politics \u2013 was involved in a domestic terror attack before killing themselves.<\/p>\n

His death steered the liberal Brooke off the tracks, but now she\u2019s found some peace through the memoir and seeks her parents\u2019 blessing to publish. That their peace is now threatened thrills Silda (Janney), Polly\u2019s live-in sister and former writing partner, now a recovering alcoholic. She and Brooke share a righteous indignation that the family\u2019s self-interest led to its collapse; a belief that\u2019s aired in the memoir.<\/p>\n

What these black sheep don\u2019t care to admit is that their indulgence \u2013 in drink or pity or public excoriation \u2013 might be its own form of selfishness.<\/p>\n

Brooke\u2019s brother Trip (Keery) is a successful producer of reality TV with one foot out of the fight and a handful of flight options at the ready should tensions get too high. He\u2019s too young to remember his brother\u2019s death, so holds a different view of the family dynamics.<\/p>\n

Louis-Dreyfus is impeccable, her turns to iciness genuinely chilling as a study of propriety in action; the venom she struggles to hold back seeping through her teeth. (She also looks great in Tom Broecker\u2019s spot-on costumes, and in the first lady bob which hair-and-wig designer Robert Pickens gives her.)<\/p>\n

Lily Rabe, Joe Keery and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Other Desert Cities. Photograph: Emilio Madrid<\/p>\n

With his born star-gravitas and voice, Harris is the perfect patrician, which makes the cracks in his steeliness all the more heartbreaking. And Keery earns this season\u2019s Alden Ehrenreich award<\/a> for best revelation who should never leave the stage.<\/p>\n

Janney is expectedly great in the role of a sardonic dame, though perhaps too innately lovable for a character who could benefit from darker shading. The similarly dependable Rabe, though alluring throughout, also tilts the scales toward this duo\u2019s version of events, and both spend much of the play as essentially faultless characters.<\/p>\n

This becomes an issue as more is revealed, and Brooke is already something of the play\u2019s achilles heel. She\u2019s continually, improbably shocked that a mother should be concerned about her daughter\u2019s upcoming tell-all. When, by the second act, she is still puzzled that Polly hasn\u2019t given her blessing, you wish she\u2019d get with the program, and we\u2019d get on with the show.<\/p>\n

Those are all relatively minor quibbles, though. Baitz\u2019s play is firmly of the grand \u201cfamily reunion from hell\u201d tradition, so if a few dominoes don\u2019t slam as forcefully into the next, it\u2019s no matter; we know they\u2019ll all end up toppled. A decade and a half after its premiere, this revival makes a strong case for its ranking among the better of those, and a definitive one for its dissection of American rot \u2013 perhaps too eerily.<\/p>\n

Written during the US withdrawal from Iraq and reflecting on the slow stumble of disillusionment set off by the Vietnam war, Other Desert Cities has history on its mind. Baitz could never have predicted Trump\u2019s rise to power, so the play\u2019s jabs against Reagan and celebs turned politicians (the bread-and-butter of safe liberalism) now scan with calamitous prescience, even if it premiered within the relative safety of Obama\u2019s third year in office.<\/p>\n

But the play is set only a year after the Chicks<\/a> had their music career derailed by anti-war comments, and still carries the feel of a current and potentially professionally harmful political missive that this country no longer dares to mount on its biggest stages.<\/p>\n

Louis-Dreyfus and Janney built a large part of their legacies on television series with broadly appealing progressive leanings. Harris, the MVP in this regard, sat memorably stone-faced<\/a> while red-scare abetter Elia Kazan received a standing ovation at the 1999 Oscars.<\/p>\n

Other Desert Cities evokes his bold stance during that era\u2019s intersection of culture and politics, but revivals inevitably invite comparisons between the now and then. The widespread backlash to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are similar in how the nation\u2019s artists responded to them with certainty and immediacy. No one was ever in favor of this latest war against Iran the way many were during Bush\u2019s presidency. The question hovering over theater today: will anyone stage a play about the war we\u2019re actually fighting?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just in time for the holidays, Jon Robin Baitz\u2019s family reunion drama, Other Desert Cities, is back with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-807934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}