Wow, someone needs a Midol.
Celebroadway!
“GOING to the theater, to me, meant going to see people, apparently serious people, making a spectacle of themselves,” Eugène Ionesco sniffed, recalling his early antipathy for the art form that would ultimately transform him into a brand name for highfalutin lunacy.
He might well have some qualms about the spectacle Geoffrey Rush is making of himself in the Broadway revival of “Exit the King,” mostly at the expense of the play Ionesco happened to write.
Then again, he might not. Watching apparently serious people - who also happen to be talented and famous - making spectacles of themselves is among the reasons most of us go to the theater, even if we profess to be drawn for more edifying purposes.
There’s no shame in it. Stargazing is perfectly respectable when you’ve paid for a ticket rather than chased your quarry down the block after a street sighting, Twittering with every step. And stars generally achieve celestial stature for solid reasons. Onstage or on screen they shimmer a little brighter than the rest, casting a warm, inviting glow that makes us want to draw nearer, even when they are portraying, say, a murderous Mafia chieftain from New Jersey.
This has become a hard-and-fast rule for Broadway producers. Perhaps anxious that thrifty theatergoers will be shopping only for brand names this spring, they have stuffed the season with famous actors in plays new and old.
It’s almost surprising that the marketing mavens at the Broadway League haven’t come up with some sort of collect-’em-all incentive package. Audiences could be handed something along the lines of baseball cards at the end of performances at celebrity attractions. Avid theatergoers could then impress their friends and acquaintances - well, fellow theater obsessives, maybe - by acquiring a full set.
“Hey, I’ll swap my extra Jane Fonda in ‘33 Variations’ for Jeremy and Joan.”
“No way, man. ‘Impressionism’ could be a collector’s item any day now.”
The asterisk is that virtually all of the celeb-centric plays that have opened on Broadway so far this spring offer little more than shallow diversion. But don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. At a time when semi-apocalyptic news is our daily diet, there is an argument to be made that undemanding pleasures are a useful restorative to frayed nerves. In the interest of clarifying which star vehicles give you the biggest bang for your shrunken buck, I offer a brisk trot through the season’s openings to date, noting the highlights and offering thumbnail assessments - all intended, of course, to supplement more thorough analyses.
Blithe Spirit
THE CONSTELLATION Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole, Rupert Everett, Jayne Atkinson.
THE ACTION Swilling of martinis, exchanging of repartee, raising of ghosts.
THE HIGHLIGHT Ms. Lansbury making like a charmed snake as she goes into her trance.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Assessing how years of glamorous festivity have worn (or not) on Mr. Everett, perhaps the last of the breed of debonair British actors who are spiritual heirs to the Bright Young People of 1920s London.
THE GIST Going to see “Blithe Spirit” is a bit like attending an enticing party that doesn’t turn out to be quite the rip-roarer you imagined it would be. I speak not of this production in particular but of the play itself. Every time it comes around my own spirits lift, as if memories of less than magical productions have been erased. I always seem to leave the theater with both feet firmly on the ground again.
The fact is, it’s not top-drawer Noël Coward. But the cast assembled by the director, Michael Blakemore, makes you forget this indigestible truth intermittently throughout this likable if loose-jointed production. Best of all is the redoubtable Ms. Lansbury, resplendent in crazed-countrywoman garb as Madame Arcati, the medium whose ministrations prove more disastrous than diverting when she is invited to dinner as a postprandial entertainment.
With remarkable finesse Ms. Lansbury contrives inspired madness moment by moment without resorting to shameless showboating. And while Ms. Ebersole doesn’t quite nail the silken Coward style as Mr. Everett and Ms. Atkinson do, she is such a gifted master of her own battiness that it would be churlish to complain.
Exit the King
THE CONSTELLATION Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandon, Andrea Martin, Lauren Ambrose.
THE ACTION The king dying.
THE HIGHLIGHT The king dying.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Extreme relief when the king finally dies.
THE GIST In this vulgarized version of Ionesco’s pitch-dark comedy Mr. Rush, the Oscar-winning star of “Shine,” proves that it’s possible to die of mugging. During the whole first act you could be forgiven for imagining you’re watching an unusually sour British holiday pantomime rather than a potentially chilling dramatic enactment of the scarifying, humiliating, infantilizing confrontation with the unavoidable fact - and the often gruesomely protracted process - of death.
The Australian director Neil Armfield and his ally in the central role of a dying monarch, Mr. Rush, treat this tragic-comic play as an extended Monty Python sketch, stuffing it with shtick that bloats the running time to more than two hours. The first New York production, in 1968, starring Richard Easton and Eva Le Gallienne, came in at about an hour and a half, without intermission. Even then the critic Walter Kerr noted succinctly in The New York Times that the play is not endlessly rich in ideas. “Ionesco establishes and then repeats,” he wrote. “We run out of awe.”
True, but there is more haunting poetry to be extracted from the play than can be discerned through the circuslike antics this time out, hilarious though they often are. (Although I think her performance is as corruptingly heavy as Mr. Rush’s, I still have to admit I adored much of what the industrious Ms. Martin makes of her role as a servant.)
If you are looking for a rigorous-minded approach to Ionesco’s antic but deeply serious comedy, this production offers but a few sharp, searing moments in the second act, when Mr. Rush drops the clown act (if not the makeup). It is not a shattering experience along the lines of Simon McBurney’s brilliant 1998 staging of Ionesco’s play “The Chairs,” still among the most accomplished revivals I’ve seen on Broadway. Still, Mr. Rush makes the king’s long, slow death a great bit of vaudeville.
God of Carnage
THE CONSTELLATION Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden.
THE ACTION Marital sniping, flinging of tulips, consuming of clafouti, tossing of cookies.
THE HIGHLIGHT An aerial assault by Ms. Harden.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Trying to figure out the stage mechanics of Ms. Davis’s character’s sudden attack of nausea.
THE GIST The season’s indispensable ticket for cocktail party chatter, Yasmina Reza’s domestic comedy mixes boilerplate existentialism into the standard formula for plays about marital discord: assemble two apparently happily married couples, add alcohol and watch the fur fly. Consider it a contemporary, higher-brow version of one of those slapsticky “I Love Lucy” episodes in which Fred and Ethel square off against Lucy and Ricky, and then the alliances shift - maybe the one in which they’re all stuck in a snowbound cabin fighting over sandwiches.
But with this potent cast under the incisive direction of Matthew Warchus, Ms. Reza’s regular interpreter in New York and London, the play floats along on merry waves of malice that keep you from registering for long how shallow its attempts at depth are.
Mr. Gandolfini’s adoring audiences are coming out in force, and he acquits himself with impressive ease playing the regular-guy husband somewhat unconvincingly attached to a bleeding-heart wife (Ms. Harden) whose affections are divided equally between the starving in Darfur and the rafts of Rizzoli books on her coffee table. Given that the conceit of the play rests on the idea of adults behaving like children, it also helps that Mr. Gandolfini resembles an overgrown toddler forever nursing a schoolyard grievance.
Impressionism
THE CONSTELLATION Joan Allen, Jeremy Irons.
THE ACTION Muffin eating, muffin discussing, canvas gazing, wistful exchanging of banalities.
THE HIGHLIGHT Marveling at Ms. Allen’s exquisite figure and expensive highlights.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Getting to say you saw it.
THE GIST This inert production of a play by Michael Jacobs is a curious example of the collective blindness that can afflict talented people when the bright lights of Broadway dazzle. It is hard to fathom how Ms. Allen, Mr. Irons and their estimable director, Jack O’Brien, could have perceived that this play’s sitcom setup and trite characterizations were worthy of their attention.
Set in an art gallery presided over by Ms. Allen’s character, who fastidiously refuses to sell anything on the walls, the play is a watery would-be romance that shifts back in time to reveal still more uninteresting things about its bland central characters, a mismatched pair whose eventual union feels about as natural as a rainbow in an oil by Edvard Munch.
33 Variations
THE CONSTELLATION Jane Fonda, Samantha Mathis, Colin Hanks.
THE ACTION Studying, lecturing, dating, dying.
THE HIGHLIGHT The performance of Diane Walsh - at the piano.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE None.
THE GIST Moisés Kaufman’s glossy but empty mix of musicology and mother-daughter angst is airtight in its middlebrow conception and tasteful execution. It gives Ms. Fonda so little to play that the production marks the saddest waste of an actor in at least a season or two, given that it has been more than four decades since she has appeared on a New York stage. As a chilly music scholar trying to unearth the secret history of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, Ms. Fonda is largely required only to lecture us about her research, act standoffish toward her needy daughter (Ms. Mathis) and then slowly succumb to disease.
She does it all with unexceptionable integrity, but you are left wanting a lot more. Ms. Fonda is as serious a person as you could hope to meet, but let’s hope that next time she braves Broadway - and I sincerely hope she does again, soon - she consents to make a spectacle of herself, or at least a spectacle of her formidable talent.
Source
“GOING to the theater, to me, meant going to see people, apparently serious people, making a spectacle of themselves,” Eugène Ionesco sniffed, recalling his early antipathy for the art form that would ultimately transform him into a brand name for highfalutin lunacy.
He might well have some qualms about the spectacle Geoffrey Rush is making of himself in the Broadway revival of “Exit the King,” mostly at the expense of the play Ionesco happened to write.
Then again, he might not. Watching apparently serious people - who also happen to be talented and famous - making spectacles of themselves is among the reasons most of us go to the theater, even if we profess to be drawn for more edifying purposes.
There’s no shame in it. Stargazing is perfectly respectable when you’ve paid for a ticket rather than chased your quarry down the block after a street sighting, Twittering with every step. And stars generally achieve celestial stature for solid reasons. Onstage or on screen they shimmer a little brighter than the rest, casting a warm, inviting glow that makes us want to draw nearer, even when they are portraying, say, a murderous Mafia chieftain from New Jersey.
This has become a hard-and-fast rule for Broadway producers. Perhaps anxious that thrifty theatergoers will be shopping only for brand names this spring, they have stuffed the season with famous actors in plays new and old.
It’s almost surprising that the marketing mavens at the Broadway League haven’t come up with some sort of collect-’em-all incentive package. Audiences could be handed something along the lines of baseball cards at the end of performances at celebrity attractions. Avid theatergoers could then impress their friends and acquaintances - well, fellow theater obsessives, maybe - by acquiring a full set.
“Hey, I’ll swap my extra Jane Fonda in ‘33 Variations’ for Jeremy and Joan.”
“No way, man. ‘Impressionism’ could be a collector’s item any day now.”
The asterisk is that virtually all of the celeb-centric plays that have opened on Broadway so far this spring offer little more than shallow diversion. But don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. At a time when semi-apocalyptic news is our daily diet, there is an argument to be made that undemanding pleasures are a useful restorative to frayed nerves. In the interest of clarifying which star vehicles give you the biggest bang for your shrunken buck, I offer a brisk trot through the season’s openings to date, noting the highlights and offering thumbnail assessments - all intended, of course, to supplement more thorough analyses.
Blithe Spirit
THE CONSTELLATION Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole, Rupert Everett, Jayne Atkinson.
THE ACTION Swilling of martinis, exchanging of repartee, raising of ghosts.
THE HIGHLIGHT Ms. Lansbury making like a charmed snake as she goes into her trance.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Assessing how years of glamorous festivity have worn (or not) on Mr. Everett, perhaps the last of the breed of debonair British actors who are spiritual heirs to the Bright Young People of 1920s London.
THE GIST Going to see “Blithe Spirit” is a bit like attending an enticing party that doesn’t turn out to be quite the rip-roarer you imagined it would be. I speak not of this production in particular but of the play itself. Every time it comes around my own spirits lift, as if memories of less than magical productions have been erased. I always seem to leave the theater with both feet firmly on the ground again.
The fact is, it’s not top-drawer Noël Coward. But the cast assembled by the director, Michael Blakemore, makes you forget this indigestible truth intermittently throughout this likable if loose-jointed production. Best of all is the redoubtable Ms. Lansbury, resplendent in crazed-countrywoman garb as Madame Arcati, the medium whose ministrations prove more disastrous than diverting when she is invited to dinner as a postprandial entertainment.
With remarkable finesse Ms. Lansbury contrives inspired madness moment by moment without resorting to shameless showboating. And while Ms. Ebersole doesn’t quite nail the silken Coward style as Mr. Everett and Ms. Atkinson do, she is such a gifted master of her own battiness that it would be churlish to complain.
Exit the King
THE CONSTELLATION Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandon, Andrea Martin, Lauren Ambrose.
THE ACTION The king dying.
THE HIGHLIGHT The king dying.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Extreme relief when the king finally dies.
THE GIST In this vulgarized version of Ionesco’s pitch-dark comedy Mr. Rush, the Oscar-winning star of “Shine,” proves that it’s possible to die of mugging. During the whole first act you could be forgiven for imagining you’re watching an unusually sour British holiday pantomime rather than a potentially chilling dramatic enactment of the scarifying, humiliating, infantilizing confrontation with the unavoidable fact - and the often gruesomely protracted process - of death.
The Australian director Neil Armfield and his ally in the central role of a dying monarch, Mr. Rush, treat this tragic-comic play as an extended Monty Python sketch, stuffing it with shtick that bloats the running time to more than two hours. The first New York production, in 1968, starring Richard Easton and Eva Le Gallienne, came in at about an hour and a half, without intermission. Even then the critic Walter Kerr noted succinctly in The New York Times that the play is not endlessly rich in ideas. “Ionesco establishes and then repeats,” he wrote. “We run out of awe.”
True, but there is more haunting poetry to be extracted from the play than can be discerned through the circuslike antics this time out, hilarious though they often are. (Although I think her performance is as corruptingly heavy as Mr. Rush’s, I still have to admit I adored much of what the industrious Ms. Martin makes of her role as a servant.)
If you are looking for a rigorous-minded approach to Ionesco’s antic but deeply serious comedy, this production offers but a few sharp, searing moments in the second act, when Mr. Rush drops the clown act (if not the makeup). It is not a shattering experience along the lines of Simon McBurney’s brilliant 1998 staging of Ionesco’s play “The Chairs,” still among the most accomplished revivals I’ve seen on Broadway. Still, Mr. Rush makes the king’s long, slow death a great bit of vaudeville.
God of Carnage
THE CONSTELLATION Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden.
THE ACTION Marital sniping, flinging of tulips, consuming of clafouti, tossing of cookies.
THE HIGHLIGHT An aerial assault by Ms. Harden.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Trying to figure out the stage mechanics of Ms. Davis’s character’s sudden attack of nausea.
THE GIST The season’s indispensable ticket for cocktail party chatter, Yasmina Reza’s domestic comedy mixes boilerplate existentialism into the standard formula for plays about marital discord: assemble two apparently happily married couples, add alcohol and watch the fur fly. Consider it a contemporary, higher-brow version of one of those slapsticky “I Love Lucy” episodes in which Fred and Ethel square off against Lucy and Ricky, and then the alliances shift - maybe the one in which they’re all stuck in a snowbound cabin fighting over sandwiches.
But with this potent cast under the incisive direction of Matthew Warchus, Ms. Reza’s regular interpreter in New York and London, the play floats along on merry waves of malice that keep you from registering for long how shallow its attempts at depth are.
Mr. Gandolfini’s adoring audiences are coming out in force, and he acquits himself with impressive ease playing the regular-guy husband somewhat unconvincingly attached to a bleeding-heart wife (Ms. Harden) whose affections are divided equally between the starving in Darfur and the rafts of Rizzoli books on her coffee table. Given that the conceit of the play rests on the idea of adults behaving like children, it also helps that Mr. Gandolfini resembles an overgrown toddler forever nursing a schoolyard grievance.
Impressionism
THE CONSTELLATION Joan Allen, Jeremy Irons.
THE ACTION Muffin eating, muffin discussing, canvas gazing, wistful exchanging of banalities.
THE HIGHLIGHT Marveling at Ms. Allen’s exquisite figure and expensive highlights.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE Getting to say you saw it.
THE GIST This inert production of a play by Michael Jacobs is a curious example of the collective blindness that can afflict talented people when the bright lights of Broadway dazzle. It is hard to fathom how Ms. Allen, Mr. Irons and their estimable director, Jack O’Brien, could have perceived that this play’s sitcom setup and trite characterizations were worthy of their attention.
Set in an art gallery presided over by Ms. Allen’s character, who fastidiously refuses to sell anything on the walls, the play is a watery would-be romance that shifts back in time to reveal still more uninteresting things about its bland central characters, a mismatched pair whose eventual union feels about as natural as a rainbow in an oil by Edvard Munch.
33 Variations
THE CONSTELLATION Jane Fonda, Samantha Mathis, Colin Hanks.
THE ACTION Studying, lecturing, dating, dying.
THE HIGHLIGHT The performance of Diane Walsh - at the piano.
THE GUILTY PLEASURE None.
THE GIST Moisés Kaufman’s glossy but empty mix of musicology and mother-daughter angst is airtight in its middlebrow conception and tasteful execution. It gives Ms. Fonda so little to play that the production marks the saddest waste of an actor in at least a season or two, given that it has been more than four decades since she has appeared on a New York stage. As a chilly music scholar trying to unearth the secret history of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, Ms. Fonda is largely required only to lecture us about her research, act standoffish toward her needy daughter (Ms. Mathis) and then slowly succumb to disease.
She does it all with unexceptionable integrity, but you are left wanting a lot more. Ms. Fonda is as serious a person as you could hope to meet, but let’s hope that next time she braves Broadway - and I sincerely hope she does again, soon - she consents to make a spectacle of herself, or at least a spectacle of her formidable talent.
Source