Of some 100 productions of The Crucible scheduled this year in the U.S., director Ivo van Hove’s eerie, often enigmatic but periodically powerful Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s most frequently produced play stands out in several ways. It is the only one with a cast that includes so many British and Irish stars, and the only one to feature a live wolf….Van Hove dabbles in the supernatural: At one point, the black curtain rises on a lifeless girl floating ghostlike in mid-air, then quickly falls again. As bewitching as these theatrical effects can be, they wind up distracting if not detracting from Miller’s text, which is a meticulously researched dramatization of the mass hysteria that occurred during the 17th century Salem witch trials.
Click on any photograph by Jan Versweyveld to see it enlarged.
