A Few Good Men review – Aaron Sorkin’s legal drama makes unwelcome return to stage

Given the current state of the US military brass, it makes some sense that audiences would want to drift back to an older, nobler idea of the armed services, in which bad actors exist but are rooted out by the good guys in uniform. That perhaps explains the Broadway revival of A Few Good Men, Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 courtroom drama about a cocky military attorney defending two young marines who followed an illegal order with fatal results. The play is at once sharp and misty-eyed, critiquing a hallowed institution while reverently imbuing it with a certain dignity – in some ways, it does for the military what Sorkin’s The West Wing did for the Oval Office.

A Few Good Men was turned into a hit Oscar-nominated film in 1992, starring a then boyish Tom Cruise in the role of recalcitrant navy lawyer Daniel Kaffee and a frightening Jack Nicholson as Kaffee’s ultimate enemy, Colonel Jessep, the hardliner in command of the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, where a marine has died under troubling circumstances. Directed by Rob Reiner, the film is a clever, old-fashioned crowd pleaser, culminating in a classic trial scene punctuated by an iconic line. “You can’t handle the truth!”, Jessep memorably bellows at Kaffee just before confessing to his misdeeds. Those in search of crackling drama and sentimentality about the military should just watch that film, rather than plunking down a considerable sum of money to see the play in its current form at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont theater.

The production is helmed by Michael Arden, an actor turned director who is no stranger to courtroom intrigue: he was behind the lovely 2023 revival of the musical Parade, about a wrongly accused man standing trial for murder. But that show had songs to rely on, whereas A Few Good Men has only its complicated Sorkin dialogue to propel it along. Arden proves less adept at turning that fast talk into music; in his hands, the play is lurching and awkward, rarely finding the rhythm necessary to keep Sorkin’s verbosity afloat.

It doesn’t help that the Beaumont is an enormous space, and Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey do nothing to make it more intimate. They use nearly the whole depth of the stage, and highlight the proscenium’s height with looming beams and a guard tower meant to evoke Jessep’s outpost in Cuba. That volume effectively swallows up the rapid, close chatter of the play, rendering it all quiet and tinny. We feel little of the propulsive charge of the story, as Kaffee navigates setbacks and, in the process, finds the principled conviction his career had previously lacked. There is a curious diffuseness to this A Few Good Men, the sense that we are watching the dim memory of something that was once exciting, rather than the thing itself.

Perhaps an actor of sturdier stock than Tom Blyth could have made things more resonant. As Kaffee, Blyth – a 31-year-old Briton most famous for a 2023 Hunger Games prequel film – has the arrogant, golden-boy strut down pretty well. But he struggles to convincingly convey Kaffee’s legal acumen, his cunning in getting the desired result from a cornered witness. As dogged internal affairs attorney Joanne Galloway (played by Demi Moore in the film), musical theater mainstay Krysta Rodriguez has similar problems of gravitas – she’s a bright presence, but one does begin to wonder what a plucky ingenue from a 1940s romp is doing at a court-martial.

The real sore spot in the ensemble, though, is a direly miscast Bradley Whitford as Jessep, a role that should radiate imperious menace, but in Whitford’s rendition comes across confused and unfocused. Whitford totters around the stage with his legs wide apart, as if he is doing a creaky John Wayne impression. He half mumbles and half growls his lines, a strained simulation of macho might. Whitford proved in two separate television series that he can more than handle Sorkin’s signature patter. (He’s also now doing great work on the Sorkin-esque series The Diplomat.) But Jessep is not one of Sorkin’s zippy smart guys. He’s a bull, a bear, something atavistic and scary. That’s not exactly in Whitford’s wheelhouse, it seems.

This clash of actor and part would be more tolerable if, in the performance I saw, Whitford seemed more confident with his lines. Blyth also struggled in that regard, particularly in the climactic scene in which Kaffee provokes Jessep into disclosing the real truth of the matter on the stand. While attempting to summit the peak of the play, both actors stumbled over their words and, on a few occasions, seemed to go blank for a moment. Which killed any momentum that Arden had managed to whip up; the scene came and went at a limping stagger and then the story huffed to a close. Hopefully Whitford and Blyth have fared better at other performances, but even then I doubt that this A Few Good Men generated much heat or electricity. It’s a starchy, listless production that never finds a proper sense of scale.

Not all is lost, though. There are some great turns from actors in smaller roles, including Nick Blaemire as a wise-cracking and morally concerned second-chair lawyer; Thom Sesma as a conflicted lieutenant colonel; and Michael Oberholtzer as the lead prosecutor on the case. They find the right cadence and timbre to make Sorkin’s ornate language sound casual and credible. If only they were in a smaller theater – where audiences could really feel the cramp of the courtroom, the pressure of a military base – and led by more suitable stars. As is, they are but a few good players in a production disappointingly derelict in its duty.

• A Few Good Men is at Vivian Beaumont theater, New York City, until 10 January 2027