19 June 2025
How much macho dick-swinging over-confidence is too much? Well, in a David Mamet play it comes with the territory. And in his 1983 masterpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, the testosterone is bouncing off the walls.
This is a starry big budget revival where tickets – as rare as hen’s teeth for the limited run ending on June 28 – have been changing hands for $1,000 (the show grossed $2,265,261 from just 8 performances last week making it the second-highest earner on The Great White Way).
Glengarry Glen Ross is rocket-grade Mamet from 1983, before he became a hectoring right-wing ideologue. It follows the lives of four desperate real estate agents in Chicago over two days, as they engage in any number of unethical, illegal acts – from lies and flattery to bribery, threats, intimidation and even burglary – to sell shares in property to unwitting prospective buyers and get one up on each other on the all-important company sales leader board.
Glengarry Glen Ross has always been catnip to the finest character actors; Al Pacino starred in it on Broadway and on film and others have included Joe Mantegna, Alan Alda, Jonathan Pryce, Aidan Gillen, Robert Prosky, Live Schreiber and Bobby Cannavale. But amazingly it had a fairly low key world premiere in London in the National Theatre’s tiny Cottesloe (now renamed Dorfman) Theatre, starring Jack Shepherd.
In 2025 on Broadway it’s in the safe hands of TV stars Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean and Donald Webber, Jr. and together they have created quite a buzz both on and off the stage.
This was my first Broadway show of the season and I expected every star entrance – as usual – to get sustained applause. A tiresome practice that has started to creep into the West End. Here the cast is entirely made up of well know face from TV and the movies and applause on entrance in New York is obligatory… but not tonight. Eerie silence was the order of the day – that is until the end, when the house went completely batshit crazy.
The curtain rose on an opulent and almost deserted Chinese restaurant with empty red leatherette booths at the end of the night’s service (a terrific set design by Scott Pask, who also creates a highly detailed real estate office for act 2) and the theatee is immediately rocking to the sound of loud raucous laughter as Mamet’s verbal zingers landed as successive punches to both the gut and head.
Seated on an otherwise empty stage in one booth is Bob Odenkirk, the breakout global TV star from Breaking Bad and his spin-off show, Better Call Saul, as fast-talking Shelley Levene. It’s a role he has told the press he has long coveted and he seizes it with both hands in a thrilling Broadway debut. Levene, an older, once-successful salesman, who has fallen on hard times and who has not closed a big deal in a long time. He begs his boss John Williamson (Donald Webber, Jr. best known as Patten from Apple TV+’s Severance) for more lucrative and promising leads. Shelley talks fast and loud and aggressively shuts down any attempt by his boss to interject. It’s a stunning bravado performance that the audience absolutely eats up.
The first short but punchy scene over, a blackout reveals Bill Burr (Saul Goodman’s henchman, Kuby, on Breaking Bad) again alone on the vast stage, seated in another booth as motormouth Dave Moss, berating fellow agent George Aaronow (Better Call Saul’s Michael McKean – another of the production’s aces in the pack). Moss is a big-mouthed salesman who is seeking an accomplice to help him rob the office to steal all their best sales leads and then sell them to a competitor. This Is another firecracker scene that really flies thanks to Burr’s inate comic timing and some nifty underplaying by McKean, whose demeanor and hangdog face suggest he is completely resigned to his obsolescence within the company sales team hierarchy.
Another blackout and it’s lights up on the production’s star attraction – Kieran Culkin flush from bagging statuettes at every awards show going for TV’s Succession (Emmy, Golden Globe, SAG and Critics Choice awards) or his brilliant road movie A Real Pain (Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, SAG and Critics Choice awards). He’s Richard Roma, the most successful salesman in the office #1 on the leader board. He is ruthless, dishonest and immoral, and succeeds because he has a talent for figuring out a client’s weaknesses and crafting a pitch that will exploit those weaknesses. He is a smooth talker and tends to manoeuvre clients towards a sale by means of grand but vaguely incoherent soliloquies.
Roma isn’t a stretch of a role or character from brash, fast-talking Roman Roy on Succession and filter-free Benji Kaplan in A Real Pain, and at first I wasn’t sure he was right casting for the role, but slowly but surely Culkin cast his spell on me. He was mesmerising to watch as he bounced off the office walls in anger, caffeine free but probably still wired from whatever he was on the night before. Short of stature, he has hilarious explosive burst of anger and rage, kicking out at random office furniture, all the funnier because when he does lash out, tossing back his head in anger, his hair, rigid with product, stands upright like a cockatoo’s crest.
At the curtain call and full house standing ovation, Culkin strikingly kisses the floor of the stage in gratitude before all the cast meet in the centre for a final group shoulder hug line up.
Glengarry Glen Ross, directed with precision by Patrick Marber, is a short sharp shock of a show. An absolute deal winner. I left the theatre on a complete high.
