DC Theater Arts - Highly Recommended
"...This production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches is a mind-boggling and breathtaking panoramic spectacle, part circus and part nightmare. With its sumptuous costuming (Oana Botez), ritual-inviting set design (Maruti Evans), and multi-layered staging, it is by turns disorienting, devastating, and exhilarating."
DCist - Recommended
"...To paraphrase an old vaudevillian chestnut often attributed to Mel Brooks: Angels in America is like sex or pizza — even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Millennium Approaches, the first half of Tony Kushner’s sprawling opus currently running at Arena Stage, remains bulletproof and trenchant as ever on the page. But as reimagined by János Szász, a Hungarian director known for bold choices, this revival of Angels confounds even as it takes flight."
MetroWeekly - Recommended
"...Cohn, a gay Jew who spent his life shaming, demonizing, and harassing other gays and Jews, went to his grave trying to hide his shame that he was dying of AIDS — a karmic twist of fate that Tony Kushner’s towering Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches elaborates into drama of operatic proportions."
Washington City Paper - Recommended
"...An angel with white feathered wings and a long black coat (Billie Krishawn) walks barefoot in a slow spiral, raking the sand that surrounds a dark pit while a voice lists names of those who died in the AIDS pandemic. Chandeliers wrapped in thick, translucent protective plastic hang from above. This opening movement is not in the published script of Tony Kushner’s Angels In America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, but having seen the work of director János Szász when he was in residence at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, I know him to never be content to present a classic, even a modern classic by a living playwright, as others have before."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...The Angel's stage is beautiful. But during the three-hour-thirty-minute play, Tony Kushner's characters dance, run, roll, swim, sing, writhe, dig, strut, and ruin the Angel's evermore beautiful designs. I have seen no better or more original production of Angels in America than the one at Arena Stage, directed by Janos Szasz. Go."
MD Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"...While this staging does facilitate some of the visual imagery we assume Szász is trying to evoke, at times it proves distracting, the literal grit interfering with the actors’ overall fluidity…then again, maybe that is the point. Overall, this is a must-see production of a classic that, despite being specific to its time period, remains ingeniously timeless."
