Butley

[Ter]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 2:06pm

Anyone seen Butley in previews? I'm down here in FL, so don't get the daily dish.

[folkyboy]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 2:12pm

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.cfm?boardname=bway&thread=913537#2557840

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.cfm?boardname=bway&thread=914143#2564419

[SamIAm]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 4:24pm

Opening tonight. First review is out "New York Observer"


http://www.observer.com/20061030/20061030_John_Heilpern_culture_heilperntheatre.asp


Is That Nathan Lane Spewing
Good Old-Fashioned Spleen?
By John Heilpern


Joan Marcus
Nathan Lane in Simon Gray’s Butley.
The excellent revival of Simon Gray’s Butley at the Booth on Broadway proves particularly welcome because Mr. Gray’s hero isn’t nice. The British relish a bit of bitterness and intelligence, and Mr. Gray’s alcoholic, chain-smoking professor of English, Ben Butley, has a talent to abuse. He abuses everyone: his wife, his male lover, his students and fellow teachers—everyone who comes his bewildered, jaundiced way.

That the defeated, whiplash Butley is played by Nathan Lane—an actor who usually likes to be liked—only makes the performance more arresting. Mr. Lane has boldly put himself to the fire in the marathon role made famous by Alan Bates back in 1974, and if I have one or two doubts about his performance, it’s still the best he’s ever given.

Mr. Gray, the literate, dyspeptic British dramatist, author of such fine plays as Otherwise Engaged and The Common Pursuit, just might be the last politically incorrect man on Earth (along with his friend Harold Pinter). To see someone smoking onstage nowadays is to experience instant nostalgia. But a set design that displays a poster of T.S. Eliot must rank as a near-miracle.

Eliot signals a certain literary sophistication, and Butley—which takes place in a university office—is nothing if not articulate. Wordiness might be the only thing it’s got going for it, but it’s one big, energizing thing even so.

Advertisement

The self-destructive anti-hero who’s given up on life is the source of the play’s vitality. Rarely has a man been left by his wife and male lover on the same day. But Mr. Gray’s clever, serio-comic plot device proves enough to hang the play on. Spiraling his way into a drunken coma, Butley is at the center of every scene. He’s visited by everyone in his futile life, as if in a dream play. (John Osborne’s more furiously bilious Inadmissible Evidence, from 1964, has a similar plot and was a healthy influence.) In his fashion, Butley is a truth-teller, and he’s someone who can’t cope with life’s disappointment and its loveless, irredeemable mediocrity. His own first-rate mind is going to seed. Nothing works any more for this man, including the light switches on his desk. His spleen is so witty, however, that it makes his unpleasantness forgivable.

Nicholas Martin’s production, which comes to Broadway via the Huntington Theatre in Boston, is a superior one, with fine contributions from everyone in the ensemble, particularly Julian Ovenden’s restrained Joey, and the cameos of Pamela Gray and the delightful Jessica Stone. (For my taste, Dana Ivey gives too much of a crowd-pleasing turn as Butley’s flustered fellow teacher). But the evening stands or falls on Mr. Lane’s hunched shoulders.

His comic genius and timing are innate, of course, and almost unstoppable. Nathan Lane the performer has successfully reined himself in, though one occasionally senses the effort. He’s on best behavior, as it were, conveying bad behavior. His British accent (and various other accents, from North Country to Scots) is perfect. He’s battened down his broad comedy to suggest the unspecified wound and yearning within Butley, who “turned queer,” as the script puts it. But Mr. Lane is more sorrowfully hapless than consumed by wormy self-disgust and squalor. The star gives an admirable, affecting performance, but he can’t help milking it a bit at the curtain when he breaks down briefly in tears.

Butley ends up alone, all right. But big Brits don’t cry. Simon Gray is no sentimentalist. Butley doesn’t crave our sympathy and he doesn’t expect it. It’s enough that Mr. Gray originally ended the play with his damaged hero trying feebly to turn on his desk lamp three times.

Butley’s light has been snuffed out.

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 4:29pm

It's "superior," yet his "light has been snuffed out"? And obviously she's never heard a British accent in her life if she thinks Nathan's is perfect. He may get all the sounds right, but no way does he sound authentic. I kept getting hints of Stewie from Family Guy.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 4:54pm

FYI -- John Heilpern is British.

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 4:56pm

Wow, how did I totally see "Joan Marcus" and forget she was a photographer? Point taken, Margo, but he didn't sound convincing.

[Heybeenfood]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 5:47pm

I saw the show last night and thought it was great. The only problem was the audience was too eager to laugh and thought that Nathan Lane would pull of a Max Bialystock(sp?). And he didn't.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 6:37pm

The AP is very Positive:

"Yet "Butley" is more than a comedy, so don't go expecting a variation of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple." Simon Gray's fine play, which was superbly revived Wednesday at Broadway's Booth Theatre, is the tragic tale of one man's emotional unraveling. And Lane rises to the play's dramatic heights in this exhausting role which has him on stage for the entire evening — more than two hours.
________________________________________________________________

"Butley," first seen in London and New York in the early 1970s, is a chatty, almost leisurely play. Yet the conversation is literate — well, Butley is fond of nursery rhymes — and the arguments between the characters explosive enough to keep things bubbling along.


Nicholas Martin, who directed Lane in a production of the play three years ago at Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, does the honors again here and he orchestrates the verbal fisticuffs with skill.

Lane, who sports a surprisingly credible English accent, and Ovenden are well-matched. It's not easy to portray nonstop exasperation but Ovenden manages the man's world-weariness at bickering with considerable aplomb.
________________________________________________________________

"Butley" was a tour de force for its original star, Alan Bates, who played the role in London and on Broadway as well as in the fine film version, which features Jessica Tandy in the Ivey role. Yet Lane makes the part his own, finding an affecting way of portraying a man whose entire world has collapsed.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/10/25/entertainment/e143653D28.DTL

[aspiringactress]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 6:47pm

I saw it last week. I LOVED Lane, and hated Ivey. She seemed to be completely self involed while on stage, and did nothing that felt remotely real. I kept wishing she would leave.

Updated On: 10/25/06 at 06:47 PM

[James2]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 9:16pm

Here is TalkinBroadway.com

Nathan Lane can't help but make any bad day better. But while he's enlivened any number of plays and musicals in New York over the last 25 years, you sometimes wish our greatest living clown could once in a while turn off that ability. And when Lane lands in a show like Butley, the revival of which just opened at the Booth, you're reminded of just how necessary that can be.

Written by Simon Gray and first produced in London in 1971, Butley is one of the contemporary stage's richest and most detailed character studies. It focuses on Ben Butley, an English professor at a fictional London university, whose wife has already left him and whose colleague-roommate-former student-boyfriend is about to leave him for another man Ben can't stand. As his life spirals down the drain, and the façades he's erected around himself crumble, what can Ben do but watch helplessly?

What indeed. That's the question on which Butley revolves, and what the actor playing him must reconcile early and reconsider numerous times during the two-hour-plus evening. For Alan Bates, who originated Ben in London, on Broadway in 1972, and in the 1974 film version, the answer was a superhuman determination to glue back together the pieces cracking left and right, in self-aware, futile defiance of encroaching despair.

That kind of strength is not Lane's forte. He excels at the sideways or roundabout approaches that are halfway finished before you even notice they've begun, the ones that are loaded down with laughs even while wearing a (somewhat) straight face. A brilliant comedian who earned Tonys for starring roles in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Producers that required oversized outlandishness, Lane could make this approach work if anyone alive can.

He's had three years since this production's original engagement at Boston's Huntington Theatre Company to work out the kinks. As I didn't see this Butley then, I can't say that Lane hasn't improved. But plenty of kinks, likely of the unironable variety, remain.

The problem is that Lane's grimacing comic sense is of the defense-mechanism variety, the "laugh at yourself before others do" tactic that's long been the favored body armor of youngsters smarter than the bullies terrorizing them. While this has worked for Lane in roles both broad (his Tony winners) and compact (his glass-delicate turn as a children's theatre impresario in last season's Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams), it's a poor fit for Ben: His acid wit and acrid condemnations of everyone from his boyfriend and his wife to his circling students are weapons, the last remaining in a once-impressive arsenal that's been deployed frequently enough to reduce a unique mind to a simpering self-parody.

As Lane plays Ben, you never see his claws draw blood or grasping hold of the rocky clifftop to prevent a 50-foot freefall. Instead, they're perfectly polished display pieces that are brought out for a specific purpose - namely, knocking Gray's choice one-liners to the back of the mezzanine - and then quickly stowed again, as if to encourage the audience to forget their existence. But as Lane makes almost no connection between Butley the comedian and Butley the dissolver, even those jokes tend toward transparency before long.

And once you can see clear through Ben, there's little left to Butley. Though there are six secondary characters, they're essentially animated window dressing existing only to cause Ben to reveal new facets of himself. This isn't to say they're poorly crafted: To succeed at building up - and tearing down - the central character, they must convince, and as written and acted here, they always do.

The closest to a fully realized person on the page is Ben's boyfriend, Joseph, played by Julian Ovenden, who's all but officially declared his independence and now wants to prove that the ebb and flow of his life are not governed by Ben's gravitational pull. But as Ovenden plays him, Joseph shows the tiniest trace of concern and regret beneath his pervading annoyance at Ben's increasingly desperate antics. This gives Joseph a certain air of reality that makes him identifiable as a victim of Ben's crusade who is now trying to recover.

This is enough to trip up Lane, who needs all the help he can get to stay resolutely on Ben's tragic course, but can't with a Joseph who lets him under his skin. The other actors give Lane less to work with, and thus give him more: A particularly persuasive student (Jessica Stone), another, flightier teacher (Dana Ivey), Joseph's new boyfriend and Ben's walking headache (Darren Pettie), and Ben's wife Anne (Pamela Gray) force Lane's Ben to fight to establish and maintain control, and Lane is the better for it.

Ivey's quirky, brittle pathos, which transforms her character into a kind of convoluted performance artist, is a more refined version of what Lane is playing, and succeeds better at conveying the idea of living one's life (or dying one's death) as playing a role. Gray, who starred opposite Lane in Boston, delivers exactly the opposite as Anne, in a clipped, commanding performance that uses Ben's manipulative techniques to further deflate him.

But at this point in Ben's life, no one should be able to conquer him: He's already defeated. While director Nicholas Martin's staging is efficient, and Alexander Dodge's musty, academic-tomb office set is the proper locale for embalming, the proceedings never have the urgency they need to feel like the waning moments of a death watch.

Lane won't let them. While he masterfully prevents even a single joke from slipping by under his radar, he doesn't convey the bitter inner humor that is Ben's last, best hope for salvaging his existence. It's useless, of course, and he knows that - that's what makes Ben so fascinating and frustrating for actors and audiences alike. But for the larger-than-life Lane, a man with no life of his own just isn't much of a playground.

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 10:29pm

A-frickin-men.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 10/25/06 at 10:32pm

With the exceptions of Julian Ovenden and Dana Ivey's performances, the Times is negative.

The New York Times Review:

"In the uneasy revival of Simon Gray’s “Butley” (1971), which opened last night at the Booth Theater, Nathan Lane fires off witticisms as if they were silver bullets with “Made in England” engraved upon their sides."
____________________________________________________

"Mr. Lane being Mr. Lane, one of the best comic marksmen in the theater, he repeatedly hits the bull’s-eye that automatically sets off an audience’s laughter. Somehow, though, the lines seem to exist independent of the character who speaks them. They sparkle and sometimes even sting."
____________________________________________________

"If you happen to be an American Anglophile looking for a night at the theater to confirm your belief that no one quips more elegantly than a witty Brit, then Nicholas Martin’s production may well be the show for you. But if you were expecting a seamless, emotionally stirring marriage between a first-rate actor and a first-rate play, then “Butley” disappoints."
____________________________________________________

"Everyone in the cast, with two prominent exceptions, is plagued by an affliction that might be called the Importance of Sounding British, which causes actors to speak with the corseted plumminess associated with American productions of comedies by Wilde and Coward. This disease plays a large role in preventing the production from achieving the effortless-seeming continuity of a life being lived (and gutted) before our eyes."
____________________________________________________

"And the invaluable Dana Ivey once again turns a nominally small role into a production’s emotional touchstone. Ms. Ivey portrays Edna Shaft, a spinster professor in love with Byron’s poetry and alarmed by the Byronic excesses she sees in her students, who could easily have been a pinched, unsavory cartoon.

Yet when Edna talks about randomly looking through her recently completed book on Byron — with each page summoning a specific memory of what she was doing when she wrote it — Ms. Ivey summons a complete landscape of a lonely life. It says much about the imbalance of this production that this briefly exposed vista of solitude speaks more eloquently and devastatingly of Butley’s future than most of what the play’s title character has to offer."
____________________________________________________

Read on...
Zingers Shoot Forth From Inside a Toxic Fog

Updated On: 10/26/06 at 10:32 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 12:26am

Theatremania is Mixed:

"The line between anger and rage is difficult to pinpoint, but it's a line that Nathan Lane doesn't cross at any time in the acclaimed production of Butley that Nicholas Martin has brought to Broadway from Boston's Huntington Theatre after a three-year delay. The step is crucial, since it's rage -- fury, even -- that drives Simon Gray's play. The white heat of frustrated brilliance and self-loathing is the fuel that moves Butley to the level of shocking character study. If this ingredient is absent, the play impresses as no more than a clever but redundant look at a puzzlingly nasty man. That's nothing to sneeze at, but it's also not a full realization of Gray's intentions.
Lane, who arrives dyspeptic and coughing on Alexander Dodge's version of a university instructor's messy office, has just about every other requirement for the non-stop role. Physically, he fits the bill head to toe. His heavy, drooping figure, swaddled in a suit that looks slept in, immediately suggests surrender. (Did costume designer Ann Roth find his soiled ensemble in a charity bin?) Lane's fleshy face is the flushed red of the alcoholic that Butley decidedly is; he continually pours whiskey for himself and, at one point, throws an empty bottle into a desk drawer only to hear it clank against several other empties.
_______________________________________________________________

Effective as Lane is, he doesn't go far enough. By this point in his award-strewn career, he's honed his on-stage prowess to such a fine finish that he sometimes risks being glib, and that is not what's needed to make Butley consistently riveting. He must be incandescent with discontent. To begin with, other than what's reported in the course of the play, little is revealed about Butley; therefore, the manner in which he's portrayed must prevent understandable requests for a more elaborate explanation of his highly agitated state of mind. Any interpretation of the character should imply inexplicable, chronic wrath. Also, it's a dismal couple of hours for the disgruntled teacher, as both his wife and lover announce they're leaving him. Consequently, Butley's articulate flailing can't be tempered; he must be monumentally mad, and Lane never quite gets there.

Under Martin's thoughtful and unflinching direction, the actors supporting Lane come through smartly enough to earn the high British encomium "well done." Ovenden is a likeable and understandable Joey; Ivey is firm and flustered as Edna Shaft; Pettie is suitably suave; and Stone adroitly plays a student with more on the ball than Butley gives her credit for. Incidentally, a special nod goes to lighting designer David Weiner for so devilishly rigging a couple of unpredictable desks lamps.

In the play's first stage direction, Gray describes the worn condition of a T. S. Eliot photograph that is displayed to reiterate Butley's particular area of expertise. Towards the play's conclusion, Butley collapses into a stuffed chair under this portrait, underlining the wasteland that Butley himself represents. As seen here, the image also unfortunately conjures the opportunity wasted to probe thoroughly the damaged heart and crushed soul of Gray's lacerating work.


http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/9295

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 12:29am

Reuters/Holllywood Reporter is Mixed:

"The play itself doesn't seem to hold up particularly well, seeming rather anemic when compared with such richer Gray works as "The Common Pursuit" and "Quartermaine's Terms." It is essentially a character portrait in which its titular figure suffers a procession of indignities: His marriage is dissolving and his wife (Pamela Gray) has found another man; his officemate and lover Joseph (Julian Ovenden) has engaged in a similar betrayal; and a fellow professor (Dana Ivey) is about to get her book published, while his own, on T.S. Eliot, is languishing. All the while, he's dodging a succession of students desperate for a few minutes of his time.

What makes Butley's travails interesting to watch is his scathing wit, and Lane delivers his verbal put-downs and sarcastic asides with his trademark expert comic timing and vocal bluster. But he uncharacteristically fails to command the stage here, not managing to convey the authority that would make his character's rapid descent moving. It is a fatal flaw if we are to care for this essentially obnoxious, self-involved figure.

The supporting players make vivid impressions in their often fleeting roles, with particularly strong work by Ivey as the deceptively astute professor and Darren Pettie as the romantic rival who violently puts Butley in his place (even here, though, the casting seems off, as Lane is not exactly a formidable physical presence).

Technical elements are excellent; especially striking is Alexander Dodge's set design of a claustrophobic attic office that seems to be closing in on its occupants."


http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=stageNews&storyID=2006-10-25T235554Z_01_N25226152_RTRIDST_0_STAGE-STAGE-BUTLEY-DC.XML

[TomMonster]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 12:35am

Have you seen it yet, Margo?

I saw it as well last week and was disappointed. I still think Lane didn't convey the past sensuality/seductiveness that character needs. Just the comic meanness...

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 1:10am

I think that's true. I saw it last week and without Bates' seductive playfulness and dangerous volatility, it felt like two and half hours of unremitting nihilism. While there were definitely individual moments in Lane's performance that I thought were superb, overall his Butley was too pathetic a figure for the play to work as it should. You could see occasional flashes of the magnetic charm that initially drew people to him, but Lane plays him as such a shell of man that it makes sense that all his wife and boyfriend ultimately feel for him is pity and contempt. You could see those characters were genuinely more than a little afraid of Bates' Butley, but Lane plays him so soft and toothless (and just plain mean for meanness' sake, as you suggest) that the confrontations come off flaccid and without the necessary tension. He also comes off as too much the "sad clown" and as a bit too desperate, too early in the proceedings, without enough bitter -- but still nonchalant -- resignation.

Lane is truly a wonderful actor, but something tells me he has too much of a need to be liked by the audience. He wants our love and our sympathy and that quality undermines this performance here -- especially that bit of crying at the end. Butley is pathologically selfish and self-possessed and has never given a thought to the needs of the people closest to him in his life. Over the course of the play as they leave him, he realizes, for the first time perhaps, the monster that he has become. By play's end, he should greet this as a moment of rueful self-revelation (and perhaps have another drink), not wallow in any woe-is-me tears.

Updated On: 10/26/06 at 01:10 AM

[TomMonster]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 1:31am

Thanks, Margo! I completely agree.

As much as I love Lane, I still think his Butley didn't convey that simple arrogant pathos. As an audience, we need to see his humanity and sensuality. Not just the whiney loser he becomes. Butley is not a loser. Just a "lost-er". He forgot what made him seductive. I never got that from Lane's performance.

The nihilistic approach to his characterisation, did end up softening the blow by the end. I just stopped believing that Nathan's Butley would have had these people in his life as long as he did.

It's curious that the marketing campaign has embraced the "sad clown" aspect of the play.

I never perceived Butley as being just a sad clown. In order to make this play work, as an audience, we have to see him BECOME that sad figure.

Never just the clown.

That lack of tension, is what made it feel so "sexless".

Hence, the lack of shock in this production that must have been such a force in the original.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 1:52am

Variety agrees:

"The passage of 35 years has dulled neither the sting nor the wit of "Butley." The best known of Simon Gray's plays set in the academic world remains a corrosively clever portrait of a brilliant man with a bankrupted soul. But its sharpness is muted in a production without a double-edged performance by the actor in the title role. Nathan Lane is in many ways a formidable Ben Butley, slashing his way through the caustic wordplay like a nimble swordsman. But in a play in which we should constantly peer past the vitriol into the well of despair it hides, Lane really reveals Butley's painful self-entrapment only in the final moments.

While Lane's range is well proven, it's his smart, sour humor that defines him. But his work here suggests "Butley" is shortchanged by an actor whose lead skill is being funny.

The indelible perf of Alan Bates in the role -- in London, on Broadway and later in Harold Pinter's fine American Film Theater screen version -- is often cited as the intimidating reason this 1971 play is so seldom revived. Charismatic yet also visibly going to seed -- whisky, nicotine and bitter cynicism seemed to seep from his every pore -- Bates managed to swim in bile without being entirely unattractive. We could see the wheels of the character's surgically vicious mind turning as he shot poisonous barbs at wife and lover, student and colleague, frequently wincing from his self-inflicted wounds.

Watching the play now in Nicholas Martin's engrossing but undercharged production, one wonders what an actor with a more haunted quality to back up the verbal dexterity -- Ralph Fiennes or Gabriel Byrne, perhaps -- might have brought to the toothsome part.

Lane's success in the role in Martin's 2003 production at Boston's Huntington Theater Company is the reason the play is back on Broadway. But there's a benign aspect to his Butley. He's too neat and tidy, both physically and psychologically, to fully inhabit the role. Like so many American actors who tackle black-as-tar British humor but are stymied by wanting to stay on the audience's good side, Lane hesitates to fully embrace the savagery of it.

Adopting a generic plummy accent and an air of weary self-deprecation, he's inappropriately cuddly and charming -- a mischievous, clowning sad sack rather than a self-loathing dyspeptic. Where Bates shrugged off the laughs with angry indifference, Lane the showman fishes for them.
________________________________________________________________

Butley famously enters scene one with a lump of cotton wool stuck to a fresh shaving cut on his cheek. His inability to staunch the flow of blood as his life unravels should make the play as devastating as it is acerbically amusing. But in this disappointing production, the pathos surfaces too late to make the wound a deep one. "

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931961.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

Updated On: 10/26/06 at 01:52 AM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 2:59am

Newark Star-Ledger is Mixed-To-Positive:

"Now Lane interprets yet another of Gray's academic wretches in "Butley." Opening yesterday at the Booth Theatre, this revival of Gray's dark comedy from 1972 provides Lane with the juicy character of a troubled British college don whose little world implodes. The late Alan Bates nabbed a Tony Award for originating the complex title role.

Gray's well-written, 1970s-era story unfolds during an especially bad day for Ben Butley, a middle-aged literature professor. Rumpled, hung-over, Butley oozes into his messy office. Wincing at the fluorescent lights and dabbing at a razor cut on his chin, he's a seedy figure who looks incapable of ordering lunch, let alone coping with major personal crises.
_______________________________________________________________

Lane provides a thoughtful, subdued interpretation that soft-pedals the man's bitterly comic edge in favor of pathos. His bleary, chain-smoking, bisexual Butley, however, scarcely manifests whatever personal magnetism seduced his wife and boyfriend in the first place. That's a crucial shortcoming, since some viewers won't find Butley too appealing either. More than anything, Lane's performance believably details the spiteful nature of a soul poisoned by self-disgust. "

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/ledger/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/1161842002208600.xml&coll=1

[DG]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 3:01am

"Lane's performance believably details the spiteful nature of a soul poisoned by self-disgust."

That's quite a statement - but it really wouldn't make me run out and buy a ticket.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 3:32am

NY Sun is Mixed-to-Positive:

Cuddly misanthropy can be a tough sell, especially if you're focusing on the "misanthropy"half of the equation. Focusing on the puckish side can pay dividends; professional curmudgeons like Walter Matthau and Burgess Meredith wouldn't have had careers otherwise. But leavening deep-seated dyspepsia with a winsome streak, as Nathan Lane does a few too many times in the otherwise sturdy revival of "Butley," can quickly read as pandering.

Luckily, Mr. Lane — taking on the titular rotter in Simon Gray's 1971 dark comedy — and director Nicholas Martin succumb to these defanging instincts only now and then. Once they get an early bit of protracted silent comedy out of the way and shift the focus to Benjamin Butley's toxic interpersonal relationships, Messrs. Lane and Martin create a memorably curdled wreck.This prickly, droll, faintly tragic character may make for unpleasant company at times, but he is a tonic for those who, while enjoying Mr. Lane's recent successes as a larger-than-life clown, have pined for the subtler blend of mirth and melancholy he achieved with playwright Terrence McNally in the 1990s.
_____________________________________________________________

Messrs.Martin and Lane, who collaborated on "Butley" in 2003 at Boston's Huntington Theatre, are at their best charting Butley's drunken Act II slide into disinhibited rancor. Mr. Lane's heavy-lidded eyes glaze over with a mixture of malevolence and selfloathing, and the building fog is plausible each step of the way — which makes it all the more disappointing when Mr. Lane pulls back for his final tirade toward Reg, relying too heavily on his comedic instincts. Through either simple miscalculation or a fear of losing his audience, this timidity deprives the scene of its crucial tinge of menace.
______________________________________________________________

Sadly, Messrs. Martin and Lane aim for a little too much redemption and not quite enough hatred in the autumn's tale being told here.The unsparing wit of Butley and of "Butley" quickly earns the audience's respect. Aiming for its affection as well, as Mr. Lane does here, is pushing it."


http://www.nysun.com/article/42319

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 3:38am

The Philadelphia Inquirer is Positive:

"Ben Butley, an exhausted and shambolic English professor at a London college, has more quotable lines than any character since Earnest - and we all know how important he is. But despite the Wildean wit, Butley, Simon Gray's 1971 hit play now having an excellent Broadway revival, is not a comedy. Butley is a drama about a man whose life and psyche are disintegrating.

Near the end of Act 2, after yet another bit of crushing news, Butley's best friend says, "I would have waited." Butley, using an old-geezer professorial voice, replies: "Which shows you have no sense of classical form... . The use of messengers has been quite skillful." As has Simon Gray's; Butley moves forward as messenger after messenger arrives and departs through the office door.

Enter Butley, coughing. Nathan Lane, in the title role, first goes through a lot of business with two desk lamps. And a banana (albeit not a banana peel, but close). This is the kind of vaudevillian shtick that we know Lane, with his sad-sack face, can do brilliantly. (Consider his famous comic turns in The Producers and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.)

But Lane can also, surprisingly, portray a deeply literary man who is spiraling into misery as one relationship after another crashes and burns in the course of this awful day. And not only can Lane do the necessary London accent, he can whip out a Leeds accent and a Scottish accent as well. And there's a tiny moment when he uses his own voice as Butley imitates an American."


http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/weekend/15849329.htm

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 7:34am

The 3 nobodies on Broadway.com hated it....but they all know Nathan Lane from The Birdcage and Mouse Hunt....oh, and one chick knows him from Guys and Dolls, so that explains it.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 7:41am

The 3 nobodies on Broadway.com hated it....but they all know Nathan Lane from The Birdcage and Mouse Hunt....oh, and one chick knows him from Guys and Dolls, so that explains it.

Sad.

[James2]

Posted: 10/26/06 at 7:55am

Clive Barnes of The New York Post gave it three stars

As the curtain falls, Nathan Lane is slumped in a shabby armchair in a cluttered office. Only the Gothic arches of his eyebrows provide any solace for his collapsed features.

Nathan Lane has had it - or rather Ben Butley, the eponymous anti-hero of Simon Gray's highly amusing "Butley," has had it.

It's a tribute to Lane that by the end of the play, which opened last night at the Booth Theatre, actor and character appear totally fused. Which is just as well.

For there's little more to "Butley" than Butley himself. The play simply runs in concentric circles around this oddly passive, peculiarly self-absorbed man - a character that tends to stick in the mind.

A professor of English at London University, he's a nominal specialist in T.S. Eliot, and, less nominally, of the English nursery writers.

We first glimpse him in his bleak university office, a clump of cotton-wool on his cheek as evidence of his troubled shaving, a half-eaten breakfast banana tumbling from his briefcase as evidence of his troubled eating.

Butley's day is starting badly and, with slowly gathering momentum, keeps getting worse.

His young live-in partner, Joey (Julian Ovenden), a junior lecturer who occupies half of their shared office - much tidier than Butley's own - arrives after a long weekend with another lover, Reg (Darren Pettie), whom Butley presumes is merely a gay fling.

In slow succession, Butley loses his estranged wife, Anne (Pamela Gray), and then his flatmate and sometime lover. Or at least he discovers that he's lost them both, in one awful day.

Butley, whose acidic wit could corrode stainless steel, is a wonderful creation - thanks not just to Simon Gray, but to the late Alan Bates, who played Butley in London, on Broadway and in the movie.

The role is imbued with Bates' crumpled persona, the tone of his deeply amused voice (a sort of gentrified Cockney Oxbridge), and the whole mode and manner of his indelible characterization.

Lane has all but channeled this into his own performance. In the first act, he seemed to be impersonating Sir Alan himself. Only after intermission did he make it more of an homage, while making the play his own.

It's a lovely performance, and Lane, who struck his own first mark in Gray's off-Broadway play "The Common Pursuit," swivels round the play's vicious twists and turns like the master actor he is. He has the idiom and the touch.

The rest of the cast - with the exception of Dana Ivey's gently embittered turn as a female academic who knows more about Byron than life - is less sure, though Ovenden and Pettie have their moments.

Harold Pinter staged the play first, and this new production, directed by Nicholas Martin, lacks something of Pinter's mastery of the significant pause and meaningful period.

No matter. Audiences - some of whom might find the Anglicisms tricky - have come largely to bask in Lane. They will not be disappointed.