Joan Marcus
Camelot (Lincoln Center, Vivian Beaumont, booking to June 25) begins with a deceptive meet-cute. Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) is in disguise as she overhears the revelation of the true identity of a man she has recently been demanding assistance from. She has made it clear to the man that she must get out of England, very much against the idea of an arranged marriage with that country’s King Arthur (Tony-winning The Inheritance actor Andrew Burnap).
Then we hear some guards talking to the man she has been talking to. It’s King Arthur. Guenevere visibly wilts under her hooded disguise. She is briefly mortified. The surreally fascinating thing in this Broadway revival of Camelot, directed by Bartlett Sher, is watching this meet-cute curdle into a stultifying, grizzly marriage of two characters with zero chemistry, and then watching that relationship implode entirely—and not really care about its destruction, because this new Camelot doesn’t make us care. Even the swaggering introduction of romantic fly-in-the-ointment Lancelot du Lac (Jordan Donica) doesn’t inject any life.
It feels like as if this Camelot—with book by Aaron Sorkin, based on Alan Jay Lerner’s original; its actors lost and unmoored on the cavernously bare stage of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater—isn’t sure what to focus on, beached between its sermonizing about Arthur wanting to make a Round Table of knights not-fighting and generally being standard-bearers for a new just fairness (“might for right”), and then the Arthur-Guenevere-Lancelot love triangle which is bizarrely dull and tension-free. At almost three hours on a spartan stage, it grinds into a numbingly boring show.