In today’s Wall Street Journal I review new Broadway revivals of The Iceman Cometh and Saint Joan. Here’s an excerpt.
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Spring is the season of marathons: First “Angels in America” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” now Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan.” Taken together, these extra-long shows are stretching patience and pocketbooks, and it’s hard to imagine that very many people other than drama critics and well-heeled theater buffs will get to more than one of them. That’s a pity, since “Iceman” and “Saint Joan,” like “Angels” before them, both have much to offer the high-minded audience member…
“Iceman” and “Saint Joan” also have something else in common, which is that they have lately received significant New York revivals, “Iceman” in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2015 transfer of Robert Falls’ Goodman Theatre staging and “Saint Joan” in the stripped-down four-actor off-Broadway version that put Eric Tucker’s Bedlam on the map in 2012. Staging the classics isn’t a competitive sport, but both of the latter productions were standard-setters, and neither of their successors is as effective as I’d hoped.
Absent a big-name star, the discursive “Iceman” (uncut and with intermissions, it runs for a bit less than five hours) is a defiantly uncommercial proposition. The only reason why it’s back on Broadway is that Denzel Washington is playing Hickey, the doomed traveling salesman who shows up at a dirty, disintegrating saloon-flophouse in lower Manhattan, there to keep an appointment with oblivion. I can understand why he took on the challenge, for he’s following in the footsteps of Jason Robards, James Earl Jones, Kevin Spacey, Lee Marvin (on film) and, most recently, Nathan Lane, whose Hickey exploded off the stage like a truckful of fireworks. But Mr. Washington has always been more of a presence than a performer, solid instead of electrifying, and it’s hard to imagine a part less well suited to his sober-sided style than the desperately jaunty Hickey….
In all other aspects, though, this “Iceman” is a production of high distinction. George C. Wolfe has directed it in a stylized, sometimes anti-realistic manner that is lighter in touch than Mr. Falls’ darkly hued staging…
The Manhattan Theatre Club’s “Saint Joan,” directed by Daniel Sullivan, is also a star-driven show, one whose star, while immensely gifted, is as imperfectly cast as is Mr. Washington. Condola Rashad is one of the most charismatic actors on the New York stage—she seems to stand in her own self-powered spotlight—but as she proved in David Leveaux’s 2013 modern-dress Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet,” she is by no means a classical actor. Her voice is neither resonant enough nor sufficiently varied in tonal color to allow her to speak Shaw’s etched dialogue compellingly…
Fortunately, the fact that this revival is being performed on the smallish stage of the 650-seat Samuel J. Friedman Theatre works to her advantage, especially in the climactic scene in which Joan of Arc recants her confession of heresy…
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Read the whole thing here.
A montage of scenes from the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Saint Joan: