SOURCE: "Angels in America, Devils in the Wings," in Theater, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1993, pp. 21-9.

In the essay below, Rogoff sardonically traces the evolution of Angels in America, maintaining that the changes made in the course of its various stagings lessened the work.

As one who lives a life rather than a "lifestyle," I'm not sure what a gay play, let alone a gay fantasia, might be. But there they fly, those miniprovocations and tiny half-thoughts, now glued permanently to whatever may be dredged from the experience of seeing George C. Wolfe's musical-comedy version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes." Well, if not exactly a musical-comedy, a play now underscored with so much musical blather instructing us what to feel or think, that it might just as well go all the way. A few years ago at the Public Theatre...