BROADWAY REVIEW: Putin gets 'The Crown' treatment in Peter Morgan's 'Patriots'

Alas for businessmen like Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg), the storyteller here, puttering Putin went rogue.

The oligarchs failed to see the old Soviet ways were still in place, including the state apparatus of murder — both overt and covert.

All manner of hell rained down upon their heads. A few of the smart ones recalibrated with the new big dog: notably, here, Roman Abramovich (Luke Thallon), a name notoriously familiar to the British public, at least, because he once owned the Chelsea Football Club.

That's the triangular conflict of the play: Berezovsky, who died in Britain in suspicious circumstances in 2013, helps both Putin and Abramovich, only to be twice stabbed in the back. What's especially distinctive about this play, though, is that its most sympathetic figure, Berezovsky, is really not all that sympathetic. He is, after all, an oligarch and a mathematician who simply miscalculated. In so doing, he unleashed upon the world a murderous dictator who sent tanks rolling into Ukraine.

Stuhlbarg is a loquacious, slightly goofy actor who fits Morgan's conception of the character like a fur-lined glove as the thrill of money and power leads him to stray from his professorial mentor (played by Ronald Guttman). Morgan is clearly fascinated with the hows and whys of how such a smart man made one of the great misjudgments of the modern political era.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky in 'Patriots' on Broadway. (Matthew Murphy)

Audiences likely will share that interest, thanks to a lively production from Rupert Goold and a uniformly excellent ensemble cast that includes Stella Baker as Marina Litvinenko and Alex Hurt as her husband Alexander. The latter is the Russian dissident who coined the term "Mafia state" and was poisoned in London in 2006. On his deathbed, he blamed Putin.

"Patriots" has the sweep of a Shakespearean history play, and many of the same points of conflict. But Goold, long fond of a certain trashy beauty in the theater, leavens those tendencies and adds Broadway pizzazz.

Morgan's characters explain themselves at times like they are walking Wikipedia entries. As with "The Crown," these histories always run the risk of making people think they are watching historical fact, not a dramatic rendition with imagined dialogue. But very few people know the Putin backstory; as such, "Patriots" is a helpful, cautionary tale of unintended consequence.