This is the time that I was waiting, and finally here it comes, here are the first rave reviews of Dan as Alan in the play Equus:
'Equus': Radcliffe revealed as a serious actor
USA Today
The good and bad news about the new Broadway revival of Equus with Daniel Radcliffe is that the actor is aging a lot more gracefully than the play.
In this London-based production, which opened Thursday at the Broadhurst Theatre, the Harry Potter star puts to rest any arguments that his appeal should be limited to moony adolescents and maudlin grown-ups. If only the same could be said for Peter Shaffer's 35-year-old drama.
It's a credit to Radcliffe, his estimable co-star Richard Griffiths and director Thea Sharrock that this Equus transcends the more frustrating elements of the text. In less able hands, Dysart and Alan might be written off as another gifted but troubled shrink and his gifted but troubled charge, but Griffiths and Radcliffe give them rich, real inner lives.
The younger actor evinces Alan's shield of precocity and hostility, then movingly reveals the tender wounds beneath it. Griffiths' stringent Dysart defies the sentimentality woven into the heavier passages, enhancing the production's authority and dignity.
'Equus': Daniel Radcliffe worth seeing
amNy.com
Now that we've gotten that out of our system, let's cut to the chase. Does Mr. Radcliffe have what it takes to play Broadway? Absolutely.
Radcliffe highlights the surmounting pain and agony behind his character's confessional monologues, including his orgasmic horseback ride, the humiliation of his first failed sexual experience, and the infamous climax where he takes a metal spike and vengefully blinds the horses. (Six men, covered in hoof masks and platform horseshoes and engaging in percussive choreography, play the horses.)
Daniel Radcliffe demonstrates he can act on stage
International Herald Tribune
Let's get to the reason you folks bought tickets: Daniel Radcliffe in the nude. And yes, he can act on stage — quite well, it turns out.
The screen star of all those "Harry Potter" movies brings a disarming vulnerability and touching desperation to the role of Alan Strang, the tormented stable boy who blinds horses in "Equus," Peter Shaffer's hit of more than three decades ago. It's now being revived on Broadway after a successful London engagement last year.
The young actor's voice is strong, and Radcliffe doesn't shrink from the physicality of the part. That includes doffing all his clothes during the play's climactic moments. But then, he literally throws himself into the role in a production chock full of startling, imaginative theatrics.
Daniel Radcliffe steps out on Broadway, sheds all in 'Equus'
Chicago Tribune
Daniel Radcliffe’s fresh and moving Broadway debut in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” reveals at least two things about the handsome teenage movie star known throughout the world as Harry Potter. He has some promising stage-acting chops.
And he’s a brave young man.
The most obvious evidence of that bravery is the nudity required by Shaffer’s 1973 drama, a formalist, ritualistic play that traces a child psychologist’s breakthrough with a violent young patient who was remanded by the English court after blinding several horses.
Daniel Radcliffe delivers, but 'Equus' shows its age
NY Daily News
Let's get right to it - Daniel Radcliffe, the marquee man-boy and the reason "Equus" has trotted back to Broadway.
Yes, he's terrific and gives a passionate performance as Alan Strang, the 17-year-old stable hand who worships - and blinds - six horses. Yes, he's nude in a scene, but not gratuitously. And yes, he's (at least partially) in good company in the revival of Peter Shaffer's play, which intrigues but shows its age.
Daniel Radcliffe makes his New York stage debut
NY Metro
Radcliffe, the big draw in this revival, demonstrates that he’s moved beyond his “Harry Potter” adolescence into a serious theater career. Playing a deeply neurotic, desperate teen with no prospects, he stays focused on his therapist, moving from terrified indifference to deep respect.
Equus may star 'Harry,' but no magic here
Hofstra Chronicle
Former "Harry Potter" actor Daniel Radcliffe makes an impressive Broadway debut in a revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 drama, "Equus." Radcliffe plays Alan Strang, a mentally unstable 17-year-old, committed to a mental institution after blinding six horses with a hoof pick. It's up to his psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Richard Griffiths) to do some detective work and figure out what provoked Alan into performing such a terrible act.
Radcliffe is a shockingly good serious actor, and delivers what is perhaps the best celebrity Broadway debut in recent memory. He manages to capture Alan's internal and external conflicts convincingly and checks his "celebrity" at the door to become one of the ensemble. It's a shame that he's not served very well by Sharrock's production.
In the Darkness of the Stable
NY Times
The young wizard has chosen wisely. Making his Broadway debut in Thea Sharrock’s oddly arid revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” which opened Thursday night at the Broadhurst Theater, the 19-year-old film star Daniel Radcliffe steps into a mothball-preserved, off-the-rack part and wears it like a tailor’s delight — that is, a natural fit that allows room to stretch. Would that the production around him, first presented in London, showed off Mr. Shaffer’s 1973 psychodrama as flatteringly as it does its stage-virgin star.
Like many beloved film actors Mr. Radcliffe has an air of heightened ordinariness, of the everyday lad who snags your attention with an extra, possibly dangerous gleam of intensity. That extra dimension has always been concentrated in Mr. Radcliffe’s Alsatian-blue gaze, very handy for glaring down otherworldly ghouls if you’re Harry Potter. Or if you’re Alan Strang, for blocking and enticing frightened grown-ups who both do and do not want to understand why you act as you do.
I had forgotten just how much is made of Alan’s eyes in “Equus,” which became a sensational upper-middlebrow hit when it opened in London and later on Broadway more than three decades ago. His stare is variously described as accusing, demanding and, in the case of a comely lass who just wants to bed him, amazing. Fortunately it projects as big from the stage as it does in cinematic close-up, as does Mr. Radcliffe’s compact, centered presence (which he retains even stark, raving naked). In any case, it’s the look of someone who sees and feels more deeply than ordinary folk. Such depth is to be envied — isn’t it? — even if it prohibits its possessors from fully belonging to human society.
An actor leaves boyhood behind in ‘Equus’
Philly.com
Let's get right down to it, the question people are asking: The answer is, yes, in Equus, Daniel Radcliffe is very good-looking in the buff.
You normally don't see big stars without a thread, so the play's Act 2 nude scene is a Broadway curiosity. But Radcliffe's no longer a child hanging around Hogwarts. He's 19, he's obviously been working out, and he's hugely talented in his first live stage role, even with clothes on. I should be so lucky.
Shaffer begins the play as the boy is remanded to a mental hospital, and to the care of a respected - and reluctant - psychiatrist with troubles of his own. The first Broadway revival of Equus opened Thursday, a production that played last year in London with Radcliffe and Griffiths, by now old colleagues from Harry Potter films - as the title character and the odious Uncle Vernon, respectively.
On stage, they work together beautifully as the tormented boy and the personally scarred doctor, like the clasped but knotty fingers of two hands, folded.
The agony and the 'Equus'-ty
NJ.com
It's old news by now that young Daniel Radcliffe gets naked during "Equus," but the "Harry Potter" film idol bravely and believably exposes his character's troubled soul as well in a smashing Broadway debut.
Bolstered by co-star Richard Griffiths' easy expertise, Radcliffe peels away the emotional levels of the tormented yet ultimately touching stableboy, Alan Strang, with skill and unmistakable stage presence.
Having played their roles in Sharrock's earlier London revival, Radcliffe and Griffiths capably mesh as the haunted youth and his unflappable shrink. Clad in a jeans and jersey, the stubbly chinned Radcliffe's Strang is a slight, boyish figure with a tightly coiled sense of tension that sporadically explodes into agitation and anguish. Sporting a snowy goatee and a crumpled linen shirt, the expansive Griffiths portrays Dysart as a pro in confident control of every situation -- for a while, anyway.
HARRY POTTER WAVES HIS MAGIC WAND
NY Post
But there's no mystery behind the revival that opened last night: It's brought Harry Potter and Uncle Vernon - that is, Daniel Radcliffe and Richard Griffiths - to Broadway.
Despite his almost total lack of stage experience - seven years of Potter in his magic kingdom suggest Shirley Temple rather than Laurence Olivier - Radcliffe, with his luminously intense eyes and fragile but wiry body, looks wonderfully right as Alan, the 17-year-old British boy besotted by everything equine.
His acting, beautifully understated and withdrawn, has just the right manner for this horribly mixed-up adolescent, at the prey of a wayward religiosity and a twisted sexuality cemented together with suburban hypocrisy.
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