Tony Award nominee Ethan Slater (Wicked, SpongeBob SquarePants) leads the cast of Marcel On The Train, a stirring new play that premiered at the Classic Stage Company this week. Diving into legendary mime Marcel Marceau's time as a young man in Nazi-occupied France, Marcel On The Train is a tale of resistance and true courage in the face of tyranny. Take a look below to see what the critics had to say!

The Reviews

AmNY

"Slater gives a terrific performance - physically agile and emotionally transparent. He avoids mythologizing Marceau, instead presenting a young man straining to hold everything together. When his cousin fails to appear and responsibility settles fully on his shoulders, the flicker of panic is visible."

"Marcel on the Train does not present heroism as grand or inevitable. It depicts it as improvised born of fear, doubt, and responsibility accepted in real time. In focusing on a young man who did not see himself as a fighter but stepped forward anyway, the production suggests that moral courage can emerge from unlikely places and that even in the darkest compartments of history, someone still has to decide to move forward."

New York Theater Guide

"Echoes of The Sound of Music and Life Is Beautiful quietly rumble, but this thoughtful 100-minute work unfolds as a story all its own. Credit a sharp script laced with tension (again, Nazis) and unlikely humor (about, of all things, a "pee bucket"), co-written by Marshall Pailet, who directs the stripped-back production. The play's world is conjured from a bare stage, a few props, and Brandon Stirling Baker's drama-charged lighting."

"The onstage conductor is, of course, Slater, who's known as a SpongeBob SquarePants Tony Award nominee and Boq in the Wicked movies. With expressive eyes and liquid limbs, he embodies his role with physical and emotional chops alike. He summons our full attention whether speaking or deftly going through the motions."

NewYorkTheater

"What helps "Marcel on the Train" feel aligned with history, paradoxically, is the design, which is largely abstract. But Studio Luna's shadowy lighting, and Scott Davis' set design of a train car, evoked for me the genuinely scary times in which Marcel Marceau lived, which makes it all the more striking that he decided to take action."

Theatermania

"Scenic designer Scott Davis impressively transforms CSC's thrust stage into a train carriage, with benches rising out of the boards and the car's wooden skeleton hanging overhead. Sarah Laux costumes the actors in muted colors and heavy fibers from the 1940s, inconspicuous for travel and just warm enough to make it over the mountains. The train melts away and an alpine forest appears in Davis's most breathtaking scenic transition."

"An unexpectedly savvy playwright, Slater is an even better actor, contorting his rubbery face and tumbling across the stage to inject any bit of lightness he can into this heavy Holocaust drama. His theater-kid charisma becomes Marcel's, and we see him gingerly tiptoe up to the border of reckoning with the fact that not every problem can be overcome by being always ondisappointingly without ever crossing over."

"Undeniably a vehicle for one of the most gifted physical actors currently working on stage and screen, Marcel on the Train also turns out to be a pretty good play. Certainly, it is a worthwhile reminder that we all have the ability to help our fellow humans, no matter how seemingly esoteric our skill set."