"The Cherry Orchard" Reviews

The raves and reviews are flooding in, with a near record quantity of commentary on this show. I have found them to be incredibly interesting in that almost every reviewer is discovering something wildly different in this production. The one thing they seem to agree on is that this play is worth seeing.

Blogger and Arts critic Thomas Garvey on the Hub Review kind of summed it up for me.

"Comedy and tragedy are like two sides of the same ruble; which one you see depends on your perspective. Only the perspectives are so legion, and so shifting, in Chekhov’s last masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard – now in a richly appointed production at the Huntington Theatre - that even defining the great play’s tone has remained elusive. Its central event (the destruction of that famed orchard) is so poignant that the play’s original director, Stanislavski, directed its premiere as tragedy, straight up. This only appalled the dying Chekhov, however, who insisted his swan song was “a comedy – even in places a farce!”

The debate continues – although because of it, sometimes we can't see the Orchard for the trees."

The legion of perspectives (reviews) that I've read, and they are certainly shifting, take the debate way beyond the comedy versus tragedy issue.

So come see the show, and consider your own point of view.

I'd like to know what you thought. You can do that by commenting here (click the comments link below) or by sending us an email.

Then, if you like, read the reviews for yet another angle.