'Liaisons' revival is dangerously good, seductive

0 Comments | USA TODAY, May, 2008 | by Elysa Gardner

NEW YORK -- Love is a many splendored thing -- except when it isn't.

In the Roundabout Theatre Company's new production of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses (*** out of four), the characters played by Laura Linney and Ben Daniels at first seem resolutely unromantic. Anti-romantic, you might even say.

The conniving Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, her former lover and ally in seduction and destruction, were introduced on Broadway 21 years ago by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman. They're known to movie fans via Glenn Close and John Malkovich, who in the 1988 film adaptation evoked the tortured passions underlying the Marquise's ice-queen malevolence and the Vicomte's cavalier cruelty.

The stars of this revival, which opened...