The New York Times Reviews Dead Poets Society, Starring Jason Sudeikis

While we were blowing our nose, Dead Poets Society previews started at Classic Stage Company. The play stars Jason Sudeikis! The New York Times got Ben Brantley a ticket, and he has this to say about the show:

“Dead Poets Society” has to be one of the most conventional works ever written about the importance of defying conventions. It fits squarely into the mossy tradition of fictions that were meant to wear the subtitle “The Teacher Who Changed My Life” and have included the popular weepers “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and “Good Morning, Miss Dove.” (Alternative title for “Dead Poets Society”: “Good Golly, Mr. Keating.”)

The great dissenter within the genre is Muriel Spark’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (the novel, as well as the play and film it inspired), which found a toxic and potentially lethal ego within the sort of teacher who turns classrooms into devotional cults. Like Miss Brodie, our Mr. Keating is perceived as disruptive and dangerous by the fusty establishment at his school.

But when tragedy befalls a student — as it does in Ms. Spark’s story — it’s made clear that it is not the big-hearted teacher who’s to blame but the other, small-minded grown-ups. (Personally, I’d have run a mile if a professor ever asked me to address him as “O captain! My captain!,” as Mr. Keating does with his charges, but maybe I’m just a philistine.)

The 1989 film “Dead Poets Society,” directed by Peter Weir, was full of the same “carpe diem” hokum and misty uplift. But it had the saving grace of the performance by Robin Williams, whose charismatic strangeness usually gave a weird, anchoring conviction to treacly parts. (Well, up until “Patch Adams,” anyway.)

Mr. Sudeikis, a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus whose films include “Horrible Bosses” and “We’re the Millers,” exudes no similar credibility. He has a natural stage presence and a mellow baritone voice, and he’s charming when Mr. Keating delivers jokey, improv-style asides to his students.

The production is directed by John Doyle, CSC's new artistic director and "the British genius of theatrical shorthand responsible for the smashing 2005 Broadway revival of 'Sweeney Todd' and the current Tony-winning makeover of 'The Color Purple.'” The script was written by Tom Schulman, adapted from his own screenplay. It runs at Classic Stage Company from Oct. 27 to Dec. 18, 2016.