The Highs and Lows of Four Departing Shows

So many shows, so little time.  And since the traditional January post-holiday reaping is now here, they’re closing faster than I can write about them. 

Some of those closings—like the recently departed Dead Accounts—were earlier than expected but other shows are simply finishing up their planned, or even extended, runs.  So I’m going to squeeze in a brief farewell to four that are departing this weekend with a nod to the highlights and lowlights of each:

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS: There’s no question why producers anted up for this revival of David Mamet’s classic play about scheming real estate salesman: Al Pacino wanted to do it.  And people clearly wanted to see him do it, paying up to $360 for premium seats. 

Highlight:  Getting to see Pacino on stage.  Now, 72, he still takes such obvious delight in being onstage that it’s a treat to watch him there, even when, as in this case, he just seems to be playing Pacino.

Lowlight: Director Daniel Sullivan’s apparent inability to control his actors.  The result is that each member of the seven-man cast performs as though he’s in some hammy old opera production in which each one gets to stand center stage deliver his aria and then smugly wait for approbation.   

GOLDEN BOY: Sixty years have passed since Clifford Odets’ melodrama about an immigrant kid torn between careers as a violinist and a boxer last played on Broadway. So it was great to have the chance to see Lincoln Center Theater’s elegant revival at the Belasco Theatre, the same place where the original Group Theatre production opened in 1937.

Highlight: Tony Shalhoub’s nuanced performance as the boy’s father and Yvonne Strahovski’s career-making turn as the woman he loves.

Lowlight: The belabored Neew Yawk accents everyone affected that sounded as authentic as a ham sandwich at a kosher dairy restaurant.

  

 THE PIANO LESSON:  Signature Theatre gave August Wilson’s meditation about the physical and spiritual legacies of slavery a lovely, crowd—and critic—pleasing production.

Highlight: the stirring chain-gang song the male members of the cast perform that almost stops the show.

Lowlight: As good as the production was, I wish it hadn’t so closely echoed the 1990 original.

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE: Playwright Christopher Durang and a starry cast that includes Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce update and poke affectionate fun at Chekhov in this amiable new comedy at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse theater.

Highlight: Billy Magnussen's scene-stealing performance as Weaver’s blithefully dim-witted boy toy.

The lowlight:  Two acts seem to stretch the jokes further than they need to go.

Tuning into "Talk Radio"

The evening my friend Bill and I went to see the new revival of Talk Radio didn’t get off to a great start. Or maybe, given the pugnacious nature of the show, it did. Bill, one of the gentlest and most gracious people you’ll ever want to meet, got into a fight about our reservation with the manager at La Masseria, which had become one of our favorite places to eat in the theater district. By the time I got there Bill was standing outside fuming. We went around the corner to have dinner but later we watched Talk Radio's star Liev Schreiber fume for most of the 100 or so intermission-less minutes he was on stage at the Longacre Theatre. I didn’t see the original production of Eric Bogosian’s drama about a night in the life of an acerbic talk radio show host when it played at the Public Theater in 1987. And I didn’t much like Oliver Stone’s film version that came out in 1988. But I was looking forward to this Broadway production because I love Liev Schreiber.

I had just seen Schreiber’s younger half-brother Pablo in Dying City and I was beginning to feel as though I were practically part of the family. And who wouldn't want to be part of such an extremely talented family. No one else today dominates a stage the way Liev does. Although there are other actors onstage (and off, giving voice to the callers) Talk Radio has always been primarily a one-man show but Schreiber stood out even in the magnificent ensemble of actors who appeared in the 2005 revival of Glengarry Glen Ross and he won a Tony for it.

In the old days, there were actors like Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Helen Hayes and Robert Preston, who did occasional screen work but made their names as stage stars, Broadway stars. The movies and later TV never seemed able to project the full radiance of their performances. Schreiber has worked on both sides of the camera, acting in the remake of the Manchurian Candidate alongside Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, co-starring in The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts (with whom Schreiber is now expecting a child), producing and directing the film version of the comic novel Everything is Illuminated and even doing a recent four-part turn on the hit CBS crime series CSI. But he always seems most at home on stage.

I didn’t like this production of Talk Radio any more than I liked the movie. But watching Schreiber made the evening worthwhile. Like Jennifer Ehle and Brian F. O’Byrne, currently onstage in Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy, Schreiber is a true Broadway star and seeing him in his element is for me always time well spent.