In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of Lombardi, a play by Eric Simonson about the famous major-league football coach. Very much to my surprise, I liked it enormously. Here’s an excerpt.
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The question in the minds of just about everybody who’s written about Eric Simonson’s “Lombardi” to date is this: Who’s going to go see a play about a football coach who died 40 years ago? If memory serves, the last sports-themed play to do really well on Broadway was Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” whose protagonist, a center fielder, is not only gay but biracial to boot. Somehow I doubt there’s much of an overlap between the audience for “Take Me Out” and the target market for “Lombardi,” whose title character, the Jesuit-schooled, fanatically competitive Vince Lombardi, was one of the straightest arrows ever to come out of the quiver (though he had a gay brother and was by all accounts tolerant of closeted football players). All this notwithstanding, the National Football League has put its marketing muscle behind “Lombardi” in return for a piece of the action, presumably operating on the assumption that there are plenty of men out there who don’t usually go to Broadway shows (O.K., maybe they liked “Jersey Boys”) but might be willing to make an exception for this one.
And why should you care? Because instead of cranking out a “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry”-type exercise in feel-good historical hagiography, Mr. Simonson has given us an extremely well-crafted piece of intelligent middlebrow theater, a regular-guy equivalent of “Frost/Nixon.” Such plays rarely make it to Broadway nowadays–the last one I saw there was “A Steady Rain,” Keith Huff’s two-man play about a pair of crooked Chicago cops–and this one, like “A Steady Rain” before it, is both tasty and filling. I know nothing about football and less about the Green Bay Packers, but “Lombardi” held my attention from start to finish, and when it was over, I went home feeling properly entertained….
Dan Lauria, whom TV viewers will remember from “The Wonder Years,” knows a dream part when he sees one, and makes the most of this one. He plays Lombardi like a warmer but equally tough version of George C. Scott’s Patton, and lurking beneath the buzzsaw bluster of his win-or-else tirades is a stealthy note of Pattonesque desperation, the fear that he’ll blow his last chance to make it as a head coach….
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Read the whole thing here.

“There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what untrained eyes consider abominable.”
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, journal entry, Feb. 17, 1859

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Nov. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CLEVELAND:

• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• An Ideal Husband (comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

“Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?”
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Dmitri Shostakovich plays an excerpt from the finale of his First Piano Concerto, filmed circa 1940:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays the slow movement of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto in 1982, accompanied by Sergiu Celibidache and the London Symphony:

“You can still get all A’s and flunk life.”
Walker Percy, The Second Coming