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PLAYBILL.COM'S THEATRE WEEK IN REVIEW, Sept. 26-Oct. 2: Cops and Donuts
By Robert Simonson
02 Oct 2009
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Kate Buddeke and Michael McKean in Superior Donuts
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| photo by Robert J. Saferstein | Broadway had two openings this week — A Steady Rain and Superior Donuts.
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For a long time there, Tracy Letts was the quintessential Off-Broadway playwright, a Chicago guy who wrote stuff so edgy — like Killer Joe (nudity, profane acts with fried chicken) and Bug (nudity, creepy paranoia) — it could only be staged downtown.
Now, it seems, he's Mr. Broadway. Hot on the heels of his Tony-winning smash August: Osage County (no nudity, but just about everything else, from drug use to pedophilia to incest), which managed to do boffo box office despite its nearly four-hour length and dry, term-paper-like title, he's back in Times Square with Superior Donuts, an intimate drama about a Chicago doughnut shop owner and his assistant. With the show's biggest star being Michael McKean, and the subject matter not exactly the stuff of headlines, the main reason this play is on Broadway is Letts' rising profile as a critically lauded and bankable author. Most Broadway playwrights, you see, are either one or the other, rarely both.
The show opened on Oct. 1 at the Music Box. Critics said the play had improved much since its Chicago premiere, and was now "tighter, sharper, and funnier." Though not as daring as August, they found the play warmer and full of audience-satisfying humanity. There you go: the man's versatile.
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The flip side of why plays get to Broadway can be seen in the week's other Broadway opening.
When A Steady Rain was announced for Broadway a while back, the focus of attention was on its studly, movie-star cast of Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, rather than the first-time, and rather less studly, Broadway playwright, Keith Huff.
That will probably continue to be the case given the reviews of the opening. Critics on the whole found Huff's play, about two Chicago cops, a predictable, workmanlike, though effective piece of writing that was primarily enlivened and justified by an excellent production (directed by John Crowley) and two magnetic performances. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman provide "a textbook lesson in how movie-star charisma can elevate mediocre material." And the New York Times opined, considerably more snidely, that the play "is probably best regarded as a small, wobbly pedestal on which two gods of the screen may stand in order to be worshipped."
And worshipped they will be. The play is the hottest ticket of the fall and will certainly recoup its costs. At this point, Jackman could turn a revival of No Exit into a sold-off phenom.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz
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| photo by Armin Bardel |
The Public Theater production of Othello, which opened this week, also had two stars: John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman. But critics didn't say they saved a mediocre play. More like they ruined a great one.
To be fair, most reviews laid the blame on director Peter Sellars, the experimental rapscallion who, it can be said, is, for better or worse, unquestionably in charge of any production he directs. It was "exasperatingly misconceived," "a lengthy psycho-political exercise," a "scrambled-egghead production [of] self-defeating gestures" that "offends Shakespeare, common sense and decency." By week's end, word was that mass audience departures had become a problem.
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Elsewhere Off-Broadway, the Atlantic Theater Company unveiled its pairing of David Mamet one-acts, which was billed, with unusual honesty, as Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet: Keep Your Pantheon and School.
Reviews found the plays to be as advertised — and less. They noted that, beyond the reputation of the author, little in the slight works justified their mounting. Wrote one critic, "Just the title of the new double bill at the Atlantic Theater Company strains credibility practically to the snapping point." Variety called the evening "an amuse-bouche that goes down easily enough but leaves little aftertaste." The most caustic Daily News noted, "Both works amount to the kind of flimflam the author used to write about."
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The Pearl Theatre Company has moved up in the world.
The small troupe, long home in the streets below 42nd Street, made its midtown debut with J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, which began performances at New York City Center Stage II Oct. 2.
The Off-Broadway company, under the guidance of new artistic director J.R. Sullivan, has made the move uptown following 25 years in residence at 80 St. Marks in the East Village. Before that, it occupied a small black box in the Chelsea area for several years.
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