‘The Minutes’ Review: History Goes Missing In Tracy Letts’ Thrilling Comedy-Mystery Featuring Noah Reid In Broadway Debut

deadline.com:

Tracy Letts’ The Minutes would be one of the most thrilling new plays on Broadway this season even if recent real-life events hadn’t made it seem as uncanny as it is funny and, ultimately, disarming.

The Minutes – there are a brisk 90 of them in all – begins as one thing and ends up quite another, and every step along the way is so finely rendered that we’re too busy savoring the moment to see what’s waiting just ahead.Featuring an impeccable cast headed by Noah Reid – the Schitt’s Creek star makes a wonderful Broadway debut here – The Minutes reunites playwright and cast member Letts with his August: Osage County director Anna D.

Shapiro, and together they find once again the eccentric, perfect balance of laugh-out-loud humor, dark undercurrents and emotional violence that made the prize-winning August unforgettable.If the new play, opening tonight at Broadway’s Studio 54, doesn’t have the widely relatable, if curdled, domesticity of August, it is nonetheless charged with the shock of truth, both in its dead-on depiction of bureaucratic, any-town pettiness, personal greed and the larger delusions at the dark heart of American history.

And you won’t even see it coming.The play – a comedy, a mystery, an allegory – unfolds entirely in real time at a city council meeting of Big Cherry, a small town that could be anywhere shy of the Twilight Zone (or maybe not so shy).