“The world only spins forward,” says Prior Walter, ravaged with AIDS but still enduring, in the culminating speech of “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s majestic drama about our country and culture in the 1980s. The sentiment might seem questionable today. History is not an arrow speeding inexorably toward progress, but a series of cycles, and our current turbulent times may have you wondering whether the moral arc of the universe is currently bending in the right direction. Even the title of the play’s second part, “Perestroika,” now seems quaintly anachronistic. The long bleak coda that followed the unraveling of the Soviet Union continues to unfold, spreading its toxins beyond Russia’s borders and maybe even into American ballot boxes.
Review — Angels in America — BN+ — Marianne Elliott — Nathan Lane — Andrew Garfield — National Theatre — Tony Kushner — Perestroika — Lee Pace — Russell Tovey — War House — The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — James McArdle — Norma Desmond — Denise Gough — Ethel Rosenberg — Nathan Stewart-Jarrett — Steven Spielberg — Wagner
