Arison can be a little stiff in those stand-still-and-reflect-on-something-monumental sections he really comes alive when he’s channeling that goofy 12-year-old, playing games and climbing trees with Hassan. Inevitably, The Kite Runner gets dragged down by all of those stories-not to mention by Amir’s constant narration. “Well, people need stories too, to divert them at difficult times like this.” Her father, General Taheri (Houshang Touzie), looks down on Amir’s ambition of becoming a writer. “Sad stories make good books,” she comments. When Amir meets Soraya (Azita Ghanizada), the woman he’ll eventually marry, she has her nose buried in Wuthering Heights. Amir fails miserably at sports, so turns to short-story writing, and as a preteen he pens a beautiful fable about a magic cup and a man whose tears turn to pearls. Because Hassan cannot read (“That Hassan would grow up illiterate like most servants was decided the minute he was born,” explains Amir), Amir read the Persian epic Shahnamah to him Hassan especially liked the tragic tale of “Rostam and Sohrab”-so much that he eventually names his son Sohrab (Sirakian in a natural and excellent bit of double-casting). But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and nothing was going to change that either.” Hassan and his father, Ali (Evan Zes) may have lived in a mud servants’ shack, but Amir’s father, Baba (an exceptional Faran Tahir), treated them like family.Įveryone talks about stories in The Kite Runner. “I spent the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan, but back then, I never really thought of him as a friend,” Amir says. We first meet our ever-present narrator, Amir (Amir Arison, who just wrapped a nine-season run on NBC’s The Blacklist), at age 38, in his adopted hometown of San Francisco in 2001 he then takes us back to 1975 in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was born and raised and watched John Wayne movies with the best kite runner he’d ever known, Hassan (Eric Sirakian, speaking volumes even in his character’s quietest moments). Judging by all the surprising audience reactions at my matinee-gasps, sighs of disbelief and relief, applause-many theatergoers weren’t familiar with the twists and turns.) Even the opening and closing lines are the same.

If you know the book, you could practically follow along as you watch the show that’s how faithful Spangler’s version is to Hosseini’s original. 1 New York Times best seller that’s sold millions upon millions of copies worldwide? Matthew Spangler’s absorbing adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which just opened on Broadway, chooses the latter-and, let’s be honest, more commercially viable-approach. When taking a story from the page to the stage, things usually go one of two ways: Use the book as a blueprint and create an entirely new experience (e.g., The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or, at the more extreme end, anything by Elevator Repair Service) or follow the novel to the letter. Twitter Amir Arison and Azita Ghanizada (seated) as the groom and bride with Faran Tahir (far left) and Houshang Touzie (far right) as their respective fathers in The Kite Runner.

The minutes broadway cast