‘The Audience,’ With Helen Mirren, Opens on Broadway
Ben BrantleyMarch 8, 2015: Her Majesty will see you now. That’s the implicit — and for royalty-worshiping Anglophiles, thrilling — promise of “The Audience,” Peter Morgan’s history-skimming chat show about a monarch and her prime ministers, which opened on Sunday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Yes, that most private of highly public figures, Queen Elizabeth II, is currently receiving visitors on Broadway. What’s more, her celebrated majesty is being embodied by the same majestic celebrity who won an Academy Award for portraying her on screen: Helen Mirren, who picked up a mantelpiece’s worth of prizes for playing Elizabeth in the 2006 film “The Queen” (which had a screenplay by Mr. Morgan). Even if she’s not the real royal deal, this is still about as close as most of us are going to get to a cozy tête-à-tête with the best loved of the regal Windsors. The possibility of privileged access to the glamorously inaccessible is one of the greatest marketing lures there is these days. (Check out any newsstand or bookstore.) And “The Audience,” staged with intimate stateliness by the pedigreed director Stephen Daldry and the designer Bob Crowley, is offering a sort of two-for-one bargain in that regard.
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