"Three Days of Rain" Reviews - Julia "Industrial Lamppost" Roberts'
-
anonymous1980
- Laureate
- Posts: 6390
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 10:03 pm
- Location: Manila
- Contact:
Yeah, I suppose it belongs in Theater Off-Topic, anonymous. Since the emphasis is so much on Julia, I felt this thread was just as appropriate. Moderators, please feel free to shift this topic to another thread.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Julia, stick to taking care of your twins and leave the stage acting to someone with talent.
From imdb.com
Roberts' Broadway Outing Fails To Impress Critics
Hollywood superstar Julia Roberts' New York theater debut has failed to impress critics, who have labeled her performance "stiff with self-consciousness" and "ill at ease." After a two-year hiatus from acting to raise her young twins Phinnaeus Walter and Hazel Patricia, Roberts is making her Broadway debut alongside Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper in Joe Mantello's production of Three Days Of Rain, which opened on Wednesday night. In the first act, Roberts plays Rudd's on-stage sister Nan, before taking on the character's mother Lina in the second act. The New York Times critic writes, "She's stiff with self-consciousness, only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second." The New York Post says, "In the first act, she looked long-faced, long-nosed and almost ordinary. How come? In her movies, do they use magic cameras on her or something?" The New York Sun is particularly scathing, saying, "Ms. Roberts's Nan may have been awkward, but her Lina borders on embarrassing. Drifting in and out of Lina's Southern accent, grasping at any 'playable' sign of mental illness, Ms Roberts works her way around the stage with the self-consciousness of a homecoming queen being forced to stand up and play Blanche DuBois in English class." While the New York Daily News adds, "As mesmerizing as she is onscreen, she has surprisingly little stage presence." The Washington Post writes, "Roberts looks ill at ease in the play's first moments... But her Nan is withdrawn, too remote to be read by the audience, and so interest in the character is lost." The Chicago Tribune explains, "Roberts' orbit here feels so limited in range - and so lacking in oomph, projection and the necessary vocal support - that one has to repress an urge to jump up on stage, get close to that famous, wide-mouthed visage, and see precisely what she's doing."
***********************************************
Enough Said About 'Three Days of Rain.' Let's Talk Julia Roberts!
Article Tools Sponsored By
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 20, 2006
In Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain," the existential enigmas and conundrums of faith that always pepper this playwright's work assume a tantalizingly dichotomous form that. ... Excuse me, I was talking. What? How is she? How's who? Oh, her. O.K., if you must know, she's stiff with self-consciousness (especially in the first act), only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays and so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don't want to let her out of your sight. Now can we go back to discussing Mr. Greenberg's play?
Fat chance. One of the three stars of the Broadway revival of "Three Days of Rain," which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, is Julia Roberts, who is making her big-time theatrical debut. And though Ms. Roberts gives a genuinely humble performance, there is no way that this show is not going to be all about Julia.
Ms. Roberts is the sole reason this limited-run revival, which ends on June 18, has become the most coveted ticket in town. Mr. Greenberg's slender, elegant play from 1997 about familial disconnectedness and the loneliness of intimacy has certainly never known — and probably will never know again — such fame and fortune. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to discern its artistic virtues from this wooden and splintered interpretation, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring (poor, luckless lunkheads) Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper.
The only emotion that this production generates arises not from any interaction onstage, but from the relationship between Ms. Roberts and her fans. And before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars — and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930's — to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades.
Lord knows, she isn't a versatile film actress in the style of her rivals from abroad, Nicole and Kate and Cate. Her range onscreen runs from feisty but vulnerable ("Pretty Woman," "Erin Brockovich") to vulnerable but feisty ("Sleeping With the Enemy," "Closer"). Her strength, as far as her public is concerned, is in her sameness, which magnifies everyday human traits to a level of radioactive intensity, and a feral beauty that is too unusual to be called pretty.
Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.
This probably accounts for my feeling so nervous when I arrived at the theater, as if a relative or a close friend were about to do something foolish in public. I don't think I was the only one who felt that way in the audience, which had the highest proportion of young women (from teenagers to those in their early 40's) of any show I've attended. There was a precurtain tension in the house that had little of the schadenfreude commonly evoked by big celebrities testing their stage legs. We all wanted our Julia to do well.
That she does not do well — at least not by any conventional standards of theatrical art — is unlikely to lose Ms. Roberts any fans, though it definitely won't win her any new ones among drama snobs. Your heart goes out to her when she makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost, as if to move too much might invite falling.
Sometimes she plants one hand on a hip, then varies the pose by doing the same on the other side. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second.
Unfortunately it's in the second act that Ms. Roberts plays the character who is always on the verge of a breakdown, and in this part she's comparatively relaxed, perhaps because she has a slipping Southern accent to hide behind. In the first act she's supposed to be the normal one.
I suppose I had better give you some plot here. (Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.) In the first act of "Three Days of Rain," set in 1995, the hopelessly neurotic ne'er-do-well, Walker (Mr. Rudd); his disapproving and domestic sister, Nan (Ms. Roberts); and their longtime friend, Pip (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy actor, come together for the reading of the will of Walker and Nan's father, an architect of legendary status whose partner was the now long-deceased father of Pip.
In the second act, which takes place in 1960, the same performers play the parents of their first-act characters: Ned (Mr. Rudd), the quiet one (and father-to-be to Nan and Walker), and Lina (Ms. Roberts), a mad and madcap Zelda Fitzgerald type, who when we meet her is going out with Theo (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy architect. Both acts are set in a loft in downtown Manhattan, the apartment shared in 1960 by Theo and Ned. (Santo Loquasto's set, enhanced by a nifty stage-wetting rainstorm, has spot-on authenticity; his costumes for Ms. Roberts don't really match her roles, but then neither does she.)
All the characters in "Three Days of Rain" are analytical, acutely literary types, given to academic name-dropping and the sort of lyrical, brittle and purely theatrical speech that is Mr. Greenberg's signature. For the play to cast its spell (and having seen it in 1997 at the Manhattan Theater Club, I know that it can cast a spell), the language must flow like music: sometimes like nervous jazz, sometimes like Puccini-esque rhapsody. Sad to say, this production never lifts its voice in song.
Mr. Rudd, who has the most stage experience of the ensemble ("Bash," "Twelfth Night"), comes closest to making music, but in a dispassionate, generic, drama-school-trained way. Mr. Cooper (of the television series "Alias" and "Kitchen Confidential") is alternately perky and indignant in the manner of a sitcom actor doing testy and aggrieved. And Ms. Roberts often gives the impression that she is parsing her lines, leaving lots of dead air between fragments.
And yet, and yet. I found myself fascinated by the way her facial structure (ah, those cheekbones!) seems to change according to how the light hits her. In repose, her face seems impossibly, hauntingly eloquent. She has a scene — all right, a few seconds — of flirtation with Mr. Rudd in the second act that is absolutely charming. And on the few occasions when she smiles, it's with a sunniness that could dispel even 40 days and 40 nights of rain. None of this, for the record, in any way illuminates her characters or Mr. Greenberg's play.
It's a shame, in a way, that this play and this theater were chosen as the vehicle for Ms. Roberts's Broadway debut. In a smaller, Off Broadway house, she wouldn't have to worry about projecting and could perhaps relax a bit. (She never seems to know what to do with her body.) And she really should be playing a romantic heroine, of the imperiled or comic variety. Her parts in "Three Days of Rain" are essentially character parts, and Ms. Roberts is not a character actress.
In his opening soliloquy Mr. Rudd's Walker speaks of a famous house designed by his father, immortalized by a photograph in Life magazine. "People have sometimes declined my invitation to see the real place for fear of ruining the experience of the photograph," he says. Some movie fans may have the same fear about seeing Ms. Roberts in the flesh. They shouldn't. She looks every inch the magnetic (if theatrically challenged) movie star. Fans of Mr. Greenberg, on the other hand, should definitely stay home.
Three Days of Rain
By Richard Greenberg; directed by Joe Mantello; sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Paul Gallo; original music and sound by David Van Tieghem; rain, Jauchem & Meeh; hair design, Lyndell Quiyou; production stage manager, William Joseph Barnes; production management, Aurora Productions; general management, Stuart Thompson Productions/James Triner. Presented by Marc Platt, David Stone and the Shubert Organization. At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, 242 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. Through June 18. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.
WITH: Julia Roberts (Nan and Lina), Paul Rudd (Walker and Ned) and Bradley Cooper (Pip and Theo).
From imdb.com
Roberts' Broadway Outing Fails To Impress Critics
Hollywood superstar Julia Roberts' New York theater debut has failed to impress critics, who have labeled her performance "stiff with self-consciousness" and "ill at ease." After a two-year hiatus from acting to raise her young twins Phinnaeus Walter and Hazel Patricia, Roberts is making her Broadway debut alongside Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper in Joe Mantello's production of Three Days Of Rain, which opened on Wednesday night. In the first act, Roberts plays Rudd's on-stage sister Nan, before taking on the character's mother Lina in the second act. The New York Times critic writes, "She's stiff with self-consciousness, only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second." The New York Post says, "In the first act, she looked long-faced, long-nosed and almost ordinary. How come? In her movies, do they use magic cameras on her or something?" The New York Sun is particularly scathing, saying, "Ms. Roberts's Nan may have been awkward, but her Lina borders on embarrassing. Drifting in and out of Lina's Southern accent, grasping at any 'playable' sign of mental illness, Ms Roberts works her way around the stage with the self-consciousness of a homecoming queen being forced to stand up and play Blanche DuBois in English class." While the New York Daily News adds, "As mesmerizing as she is onscreen, she has surprisingly little stage presence." The Washington Post writes, "Roberts looks ill at ease in the play's first moments... But her Nan is withdrawn, too remote to be read by the audience, and so interest in the character is lost." The Chicago Tribune explains, "Roberts' orbit here feels so limited in range - and so lacking in oomph, projection and the necessary vocal support - that one has to repress an urge to jump up on stage, get close to that famous, wide-mouthed visage, and see precisely what she's doing."
***********************************************
Enough Said About 'Three Days of Rain.' Let's Talk Julia Roberts!
Article Tools Sponsored By
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 20, 2006
In Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain," the existential enigmas and conundrums of faith that always pepper this playwright's work assume a tantalizingly dichotomous form that. ... Excuse me, I was talking. What? How is she? How's who? Oh, her. O.K., if you must know, she's stiff with self-consciousness (especially in the first act), only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays and so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don't want to let her out of your sight. Now can we go back to discussing Mr. Greenberg's play?
Fat chance. One of the three stars of the Broadway revival of "Three Days of Rain," which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, is Julia Roberts, who is making her big-time theatrical debut. And though Ms. Roberts gives a genuinely humble performance, there is no way that this show is not going to be all about Julia.
Ms. Roberts is the sole reason this limited-run revival, which ends on June 18, has become the most coveted ticket in town. Mr. Greenberg's slender, elegant play from 1997 about familial disconnectedness and the loneliness of intimacy has certainly never known — and probably will never know again — such fame and fortune. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to discern its artistic virtues from this wooden and splintered interpretation, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring (poor, luckless lunkheads) Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper.
The only emotion that this production generates arises not from any interaction onstage, but from the relationship between Ms. Roberts and her fans. And before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars — and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930's — to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades.
Lord knows, she isn't a versatile film actress in the style of her rivals from abroad, Nicole and Kate and Cate. Her range onscreen runs from feisty but vulnerable ("Pretty Woman," "Erin Brockovich") to vulnerable but feisty ("Sleeping With the Enemy," "Closer"). Her strength, as far as her public is concerned, is in her sameness, which magnifies everyday human traits to a level of radioactive intensity, and a feral beauty that is too unusual to be called pretty.
Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.
This probably accounts for my feeling so nervous when I arrived at the theater, as if a relative or a close friend were about to do something foolish in public. I don't think I was the only one who felt that way in the audience, which had the highest proportion of young women (from teenagers to those in their early 40's) of any show I've attended. There was a precurtain tension in the house that had little of the schadenfreude commonly evoked by big celebrities testing their stage legs. We all wanted our Julia to do well.
That she does not do well — at least not by any conventional standards of theatrical art — is unlikely to lose Ms. Roberts any fans, though it definitely won't win her any new ones among drama snobs. Your heart goes out to her when she makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost, as if to move too much might invite falling.
Sometimes she plants one hand on a hip, then varies the pose by doing the same on the other side. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second.
Unfortunately it's in the second act that Ms. Roberts plays the character who is always on the verge of a breakdown, and in this part she's comparatively relaxed, perhaps because she has a slipping Southern accent to hide behind. In the first act she's supposed to be the normal one.
I suppose I had better give you some plot here. (Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.) In the first act of "Three Days of Rain," set in 1995, the hopelessly neurotic ne'er-do-well, Walker (Mr. Rudd); his disapproving and domestic sister, Nan (Ms. Roberts); and their longtime friend, Pip (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy actor, come together for the reading of the will of Walker and Nan's father, an architect of legendary status whose partner was the now long-deceased father of Pip.
In the second act, which takes place in 1960, the same performers play the parents of their first-act characters: Ned (Mr. Rudd), the quiet one (and father-to-be to Nan and Walker), and Lina (Ms. Roberts), a mad and madcap Zelda Fitzgerald type, who when we meet her is going out with Theo (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy architect. Both acts are set in a loft in downtown Manhattan, the apartment shared in 1960 by Theo and Ned. (Santo Loquasto's set, enhanced by a nifty stage-wetting rainstorm, has spot-on authenticity; his costumes for Ms. Roberts don't really match her roles, but then neither does she.)
All the characters in "Three Days of Rain" are analytical, acutely literary types, given to academic name-dropping and the sort of lyrical, brittle and purely theatrical speech that is Mr. Greenberg's signature. For the play to cast its spell (and having seen it in 1997 at the Manhattan Theater Club, I know that it can cast a spell), the language must flow like music: sometimes like nervous jazz, sometimes like Puccini-esque rhapsody. Sad to say, this production never lifts its voice in song.
Mr. Rudd, who has the most stage experience of the ensemble ("Bash," "Twelfth Night"), comes closest to making music, but in a dispassionate, generic, drama-school-trained way. Mr. Cooper (of the television series "Alias" and "Kitchen Confidential") is alternately perky and indignant in the manner of a sitcom actor doing testy and aggrieved. And Ms. Roberts often gives the impression that she is parsing her lines, leaving lots of dead air between fragments.
And yet, and yet. I found myself fascinated by the way her facial structure (ah, those cheekbones!) seems to change according to how the light hits her. In repose, her face seems impossibly, hauntingly eloquent. She has a scene — all right, a few seconds — of flirtation with Mr. Rudd in the second act that is absolutely charming. And on the few occasions when she smiles, it's with a sunniness that could dispel even 40 days and 40 nights of rain. None of this, for the record, in any way illuminates her characters or Mr. Greenberg's play.
It's a shame, in a way, that this play and this theater were chosen as the vehicle for Ms. Roberts's Broadway debut. In a smaller, Off Broadway house, she wouldn't have to worry about projecting and could perhaps relax a bit. (She never seems to know what to do with her body.) And she really should be playing a romantic heroine, of the imperiled or comic variety. Her parts in "Three Days of Rain" are essentially character parts, and Ms. Roberts is not a character actress.
In his opening soliloquy Mr. Rudd's Walker speaks of a famous house designed by his father, immortalized by a photograph in Life magazine. "People have sometimes declined my invitation to see the real place for fear of ruining the experience of the photograph," he says. Some movie fans may have the same fear about seeing Ms. Roberts in the flesh. They shouldn't. She looks every inch the magnetic (if theatrically challenged) movie star. Fans of Mr. Greenberg, on the other hand, should definitely stay home.
Three Days of Rain
By Richard Greenberg; directed by Joe Mantello; sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Paul Gallo; original music and sound by David Van Tieghem; rain, Jauchem & Meeh; hair design, Lyndell Quiyou; production stage manager, William Joseph Barnes; production management, Aurora Productions; general management, Stuart Thompson Productions/James Triner. Presented by Marc Platt, David Stone and the Shubert Organization. At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, 242 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200. Through June 18. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.
WITH: Julia Roberts (Nan and Lina), Paul Rudd (Walker and Ned) and Bradley Cooper (Pip and Theo).
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell