Gregory Bossler

New York theater critics have given primarily negative reviews to the Public Theater’s new Off-Broadway musical production The Visitor, based on the 2007 film by Tom McCarthy. The creative team includes Kwame Kwei-Armah (book), Brian Yorkey (book, lyrics), Tom Kitt (music), Daniel Sullivan (direction), Lorin Latarro (choreography), Jamshied Sharifi (orchestrations), Meg Zervoulis (music supervision), Rick Edinger (music direction), David Zinn (sets), Toni-Leslie James (costumes), Japhy Weideman (lights), Jessica Paz and Sun Hee Kil (sound), David Bengali and Hana S. Kim (video), Matthew Armentrout (hair, wigs, make-up), and Thomas Schall (fight direction).

The cast features Ahmad Maksoud (Tarek), David Hyde Pierce (Walter), Alysha Deslorieux (Zainab), and Jacqueline Antaramian (Mouna) with ensemble members Robert Ariza, Anthony Chan, Delius Doherty, C.K. Edwards, Will Erat, Brandon Espinoza, Sean Ewing, Marla Louissaint, Dimitri Joseph Moïse, Takafumi Nikaido, Paul Pontrelli, and Katie Terza. Below are Antaramian and Deslorieux singing “Lady Liberty.”

Daily Beast (Tim Teeman): The Public hopes the musical makes a timely and piercing point about prejudice, allyship, rigidly unfair laws, and racial injustice. But it does not, and it also doesn’t work as musical theater. … It doesn’t feel like the right story for now if your aim is to raise voices of color, and center those voices in narratives. Indeed, to part-center them when the real story is apparently about a white guy learning about drum rhythm seems madly — no pun intended— tone-deaf. … Our racist justice and political system will destroy the people it seeks to destroy. But hey, at least Walter can play the drums. Happy ending! If this is inclusive theater, we need to rewrite the memo.

New York Times (Maya Phillips): The new musical The Visitor feels so obtuse and helplessly dated. … What does one do with a work of art that, by the time of its premiere, has already been outpaced by the moment? How can you contemporize a work whose very conceit — its whole plot, its central perspective — will land like a well-meaning but ignorant cousin’s comment in a conscientious cultural conversation? These questions, of course, are larger than what the Public has on its stage right now. The Visitor proves that we can’t always pick up exactly where we left off. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

The Slant (Dan Rubins): The basic premise that a college professor could be clueless to the inhumanities of ICE now registers as wildly implausible. Even if the musical were clearly positioned as an historical piece, which it isn’t, there’s little dramatic pull on a 2021 audience. … In the film’s final stirring moment, the roar of a subway drowns out Walter’s drumming: What good does it do if only one man makes his voice heard? The musical, by contrast, doesn’t address the contemporary elephant in the room, the question facing those who come in comprehending full well the pain that their neighbors continue to experience: What if everyone knows and everything still stays the same?

Theater Mania (Zachary Stewart): Can the old coexist with the new? Can the well-established make space for newcomers without fear? And do those old-timers have something to offer the newcomers, while also learning something themselves? These questions hover over both the onstage and offstage story of The Visitor, the sweet and sad — and ultimately disappointing new musical. … The result is a soaring and forgettable score that regularly finds the story paralyzed in the path of an oncoming glory note. None of this is the fault of the cast, all of whom work overtime to keep us from noticing the gaping holes in the plot. … The Visitor exudes all the forced joy and insincere fellowship of a Democratic Party rally in the 2022 midterms.

Time Out (Adam Feldman): The musical starts at a disadvantage: It’s the story of an uptight middle-aged white college professor whose serendipitous encounter with a pair of undocumented immigrants opens his eyes to oppression and opens his heart to groovy new rhythms. … The understatement and nuance that lifted the film above its familiar, white-centric, Magical Immigrant plot are absent from the musical; what remains is a dated exercise in First World consciousness-raising that now has the additional burden of seeming constantly, palpably uncomfortable with its own story. … The irony is that although The Visitor plays like a blunt plea for wokeness, its nearly exclusive focus on the white man’s journey is fundamentally unwoke by nature.

Variety (Ayanna Prescod): The Visitor is a story characterized by white saviorism, cultural appropriation and racial bias. Throughout the production, the show’s title is often challenged: Who is the visitor? The immigrant couple barely surviving in New York seems like the obvious answer, but their story is often told through a one-dimensional lens; instead the text centers Walter’s experience. … The creators seem to have been generously aiming to create a sympathetic portrait of a privileged man’s performative activism. But by centering Walter rather than Tarek and Zainab, the show ends up highlighting the privileged folks who are already coddled more than enough. A story that features important notes on racism and immigrant survival takes a back seat to a script that magnifies the problems of one white man’s mid-life crisis.

The Wrap (Robert Hofler): According to The Visitor, djembe playing is the core of human existence; on the other hand, economics, the subject Walter teaches in college, is an unnecessary bore. Tell that to the starving children of the world. Stickier than the rhythm thing, however, is watching yet another white character play Mother Teresa to the world’s oppressed. The Visitor is as well-intentioned as Walter himself; it’s also very patronizing. … With so much human desperation put on stage in The Visitor,” it’s odd that Walter, and not one of the three immigrants, gets the big 11 o’clock number. Then again, maybe no character of color wants to sing something called “Better Angels.”