33 VARIATIONS Reviews- Page 2

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:01pm

Backstage is NEGATIVE:

""The art of variation is transforming something into its better self," explains Jane Fonda as Dr. Katherine Brandt, the musicologist at the center of Moisés Kaufman's muddled play 33 Variations. Kaufman, who also directs, attempts to transform a subject of academic interest -- Beethoven's obsession with a simple waltz, upon which he based the titular project -- into a theatrical event. But he layers the story of the elderly genius with the melodrama of Dr. Brandt, and the result is like Amadeus meets Lifetime TV.

Kaufman has turned a potentially engrossing drama into a banal soap opera. Dr. Brandt is gradually succumbing to a debilitating disease as she researches the topic and reconnects with her estranged daughter, Clara. Parallels are drawn between scholar and subject as they lose their health. Meanwhile, a romance develops between Clara and Mike, a nurse treating her mother. Somehow they all wind up in Bonn, Germany, where the Beethoven archives are located, and form a temporary family along with Gertie, the head archivist, whose frosty Teutonic exterior soon melts."

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003949583

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:10pm

What an odd review.

Ben Brantley is... MIXED? MIXED-TO-POSITIVE? KIND-OF GENERAL AND AMATEUR AND JUST OUT-THERE ODD?:

I'm going with MIXED:

"It’s a fine line between brittle and breakable. Jane Fonda blurs that distinction to memorable effect in “33 Variations,” the new drama written and directed by Moisés Kaufman that opened on Monday night at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. Playing a sharp-witted, terminally ill musicologist confronting the betrayal of her body, Ms. Fonda exudes an aura of beleaguered briskness that flirts poignantly with the ghost of her spiky, confrontational screen presence as a young woman.

Ms. Fonda’s layered crispness is, I regret to add, a contrast to Mr. Kaufman’s often soggy play, which sends her character on a quest to unlock, with a mortal deadline looming before her, a musical mystery about the Beethoven composition of the title. Still, I’m willing to forgive a fair amount in a production that returns Ms. Fonda with such gallantry to the Broadway stage after an absence of 46 years...

...in examining rare sketches and conversation books by Beethoven, Ms. Fonda’s Katherine seems more polite than passionate. This is one instance in which the cinematic restraint of Ms. Fonda’s performance works against her. It’s hard to credit the words Katherine remembers her 7-year-old daughter saying to her: “When you listen to music, Mom, you look like you’re talking to God.”"

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/theater/reviews/10thir.html?hp

Updated On: 3/9/09 at 10:10 PM

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:16pm

There's nothing odd about it. He liked Fonda's performance and thought the others were appealing, he thought the play lacked originality. He saw the same things in AMADEUS and ARCADIA, but Kaufman isn't as strong a dramatist as Peter Shaffer or Tom Stoppard.

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:31pm

I guess it just turns me off, in a way, to see a New York Times review with the words: "The play isn't that great, but it brings Jane Fonda back, so I'm willing to overlook most of that (although her performance isn't great, either)."

Updated On: 3/9/09 at 10:31 PM

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:33pm

Where the hell does it say that? It's a love letter to her.

ETA: The review reads

"Ms. Fonda’s layered crispness is, I regret to add, a contrast to Mr. Kaufman’s often soggy play, which sends her character on a quest to unlock, with a mortal deadline looming before her, a musical mystery about the Beethoven composition of the title. Still, I’m willing to forgive a fair amount in a production that returns Ms. Fonda with such gallantry to the Broadway stage after an absence of 46 years."

That's hardly "The play isn't that great, but it brings Jane Fonda back, so I'm willing to overlook most of that (although her performance isn't great, either)."
Updated On: 3/9/09 at 10:33 PM

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:47pm

"...in examining rare sketches and conversation books by Beethoven, Ms. Fonda’s Katherine seems more polite than passionate. This is one instance in which the cinematic restraint of Ms. Fonda’s performance works against her."

Shouldn't Fonda seem passionate? In a play about the similarities between her and Beethoven, in terms of passion, shouldn't it be a major criticism that Fonda doesn't seem passionate?

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 10:52pm

Not to the old gray lady.

[TulitaPepsi]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 11:04pm

Ben does love his "star ladies". It's no surprise that he creamed over her (I thought she was fine). If Sutton or Kristin had starred in the play, Ben would was been just as moist.

Ben says "I’m willing to forgive a fair amount in a production that returns Ms. Fonda with such gallantry to the Broadway stage after an absence of 46 years.".

Except he doesn't.

"Given the resonance of its star’s presence — and a plot that sets a fraught mother-daughter relationship to late music by Beethoven — “33 Variations” should be more moving as a whole than it is."

"But here Mr. Kaufman lacks the brazen theatrical flair of Mr. Shaffer and the cerebral deftness of Mr. Stoppard, offering instead much canned sentimental dialogue about self-knowledge and self-acceptance. For a show about transcendence through music, “33 Variations” can often feel oddly tone-deaf."

"Mr. Kaufman’s script impressively and unobtrusively makes musicology accessible to the uninitiated without professorial condescension. Intellectually, the parallels between past and present — as well as the parallel courses of Katherine’s academic and personal paths to knowledge — make sense. But you only rarely feel the essential organic connection among these elements."

"Part of the problem is that for someone who has supposedly spent years in deep study of Beethoven, Katherine comes across as a rather unsophisticated scholar. (“I didn’t know he loved soup,” she says to Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger, the woman who oversees the Beethoven archives, played with appealing robustness by Susan Kellermann.)"

"The script is particularly grating in portraying the emotional thawing of Katherine and her daughter, Clara (Samantha Mathis), who has serious commitment issues, both professionally and personally....And the sequences showing the courtship of Clara by Mike Clark (the charming Colin Hanks) are as stale as 1950s B-movie romance."

"While Mr. Kaufman is to be commended for holding back on the schmaltz in his use of Beethoven’s music, there are remarkably few cases of that music’s stirring your heart here."

"You're just fabulous, Jane! But your play is kinda lousy."

Updated On: 3/9/09 at 11:04 PM

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 11:09pm

It's not so much that, Tulita: Brantley has a responsibility to say what he honestly thinks of the play.

What really bothers me, as I said before, was that his love for Fonda seemed to blind him to the fact that maybe the fact that her performance isn't passionate enough is a bit damaging to a play about passion.

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 11:20pm

John Simon is MIXED-TO-NEGATIVE:

"Derek McLane has provided piquant scenery: movable walls covered with sometimes fluttering sheet music displaying Beethoven’s hand, or else endless rows of shallow shelves laden with boxes containing manuscripts. David Lander’s inventive lighting sometimes spookily seeps out from behind these boxes. As his own director, Kaufman maintains near-constant bustle, however contrived.

Through it all, Fonda gives a sterling performance, never milking the pathos, and gets condign support from Samantha Mathis (Clara), Zach Grenier (Beethoven), Don Amendolia (Diabelli), Susan Kellermann (Gertie), Erik Steele (Schindler) and even Colin Hanks (Mike), though somewhat lacking father Tom’s charm.

Ending in a laughable pseudo-epiphany, “33 Variations” is really a charade in three parts: one part “Amadeus,” one part Cliffs Notes, and one part “Lifetime Movie of the Week.”"

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601098&sid=aucncfQtSIGI&refer=movie

[Bobby Maler]

Posted: 3/9/09 at 11:54pm

Wow. I kinda expected the comparisons to Amadeus, but didn't think there would be so many Lifetime TV references. The play's problem is that there have been other plays that essayed the same subject matter much better than 33 Variations. No critic is providing an out and out rave....

[blaxx]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 12:47am

At least my beloved Matthew didn't pee on it:

...it's to the credit of everyone involved with 33 Variations that they can create an absorbing symphony from combinations of notes you've heard countless times before.

http://talkinbroadway.com/world/index.html

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 1:39am

I think Fonda was just so one note, but the whole play seemed one note to me.

[broadwayman17]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 1:49am

Entertainment Weekly: Positive, B+
"Kaufman makes a convincing case for the genius of emotional variation in each of us, whether we're Beethoven or not. The set is a shuffle of historical eras (present-day New York crashes up against 18th-century Bonn and Vienna), a sliding of panels and props, with pages from the composer's sketchbooks projected on screens. The music (performed by Diane Walsh) is sublime. In her latest creative variation, Fonda is a little tremulous, a little taut. But she adds con brio to the music"
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20264100,00.html

[mallardo]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 5:00am

For me Brantley's review was eclipsed by the stunning production photo that accompanies it. Talk about a picture worth a thousand words.

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 8:37am

The New York Post is mixed with two stars:

"...Mostly, however, there's talk, talk and more talk, with occasional snatches of music. The author of fact-based works like "The Laramie Project" and "I Am My Own Wife," Kaufman regurgitates his considerable research in artless chunks. And it often feels as if he didn't trust his premise's innate pull: The friction between Katherine and her daughter, for instance, seems little more than a forced attempt to create more drama.

The piece is quite effective when Kaufman-the-director takes over for Kaufman-the-writer: when Fonda shows a glimpse of fear as Katherine submits to strobe-like X-rays, or when Mathis silently suggests apprehension and sorrow, arms folded and shoulders hunched. Derek McLane's library boxes, stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, also make a powerful statement, simultaneously suggesting claustrophobia and the joy of discovery...."
Full Review

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 8:41am

TheaterMania is mixed to positive:

"...Kaufman juggles these elements in ways that are sometimes rewarding and convincing -- particularly in the mother-daughter reconciliation that slowly unfolds -- and sometimes not. For example, Kaufman's depiction of Beethoven can be excessively along what-a-bombastic-cuss-he-was lines. Moreover, Kaufman not only equates to the point of incipient dyspepsia the composer's eventual deafness with Brandt's illness; but in a couple sequences, the characters in the present and those in the past mouth the same sentiments in unison (or shall we say in variations). It's a theatrical conceit that cheapens rather than enriches the work.

Although he stumbles in the writing, Kaufman makes no noticeable slips in a stunning production that's designed by Derek McLane to include archive stacks on casters and is enhanced by Jeff Sugg's projections of sheet music with replicas of Beethoven's writings. As for the cast, Fonda -- in her first Broadway appearance in over 45 years -- does a reputable job of growing progressively infirm; Grenier is the Beethoven that Kaufman wants; and Mathis and Hanks fall sweetly in love. Indeed, the entire ensemble sees to it that verbal music is made with the literal music. "
Full Review

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 10:25am

I liked 33 Variations, and sadly these aren't the reviews that will help sell the show. They really needed to receive raves with all the competing plays that will be starting previews in the next month.

I still wish Fonda and company the best.

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 10:38am

I liked it too. Didn't love it but I liked it. These reviews are pretty accurate though...if a little too harsh.

Is GOD OF CARNAGE considered a new play? I'm assuming so.

[Roscoe]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 11:01am

Interesting, these are about the reviews I thought the show would get. No real raves here, and the overall tone is pretty respectful. Too respectful, I'd say, for a play this bad.

[Bettyboy72]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 11:16am

It really bugs me when shows with female protagonists get written off as "Lifetime Movie" material. That is so dismissive, sexist and ignorant.

Jane's character is an intellectual, a scientist, a researcher, so she is not going to do cartwheels or jump up and down over manuscripts, she is too busy "in her head" trying to make sense of things. It is the very reason she did not connect to her daughter-she was stuck in her head, the very place she ends up when her body fails. The sudience was into the show when I saw it and there was audible crying.

Critics were hard on "Rabbit Hole" as well, but audiences loved it and Cynthia Nixon won the Tony. I think critics have issue with grief, loss, and disconnection in general.

If any failed plays were "Hallmark" or "Lifetime" potential it was "The Story of My Life" which was about two men.

[Roscoe]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 11:32am

Bettyboy, that's an interesting point you make about the Lifetime Movie label. I don't entirely disagree, but I can't agree completely either, especially when talking about a play as really facile and frankly just plain dreadful as 33 VARIATIONS is.

Yeah, Fonda's character is an intellectual, etc., and no, she doesn't have to do cartwheels or get all CarrieBradshawesquely giddy over manuscripts. But I would have appreciated some sign of life from her character, some effort to make me give a damn about her at all. And the characters around her were completely cliched and by the book. I didn't feel any life or humor or even plain simple interest in the two plus hours of that play. That little scene with the daughter and the male nurse at the concert, I mean really, it just felt like something out of a first year playwrighting class. Add to that the Teutonic nurse whose chill facade of Germanic reserve begins ever so predictably to melt into friendship and you've got, well, sorry, a Lifetime Movie Of The Week.

Not that there's anything wrong with Lifetime Movies of the Week. But at Broadway prices, and coming from artists of this caliber it is more than a bit disappointing.

[Bettyboy72]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 11:45am

Roscoe, I respect and totally get your points about some of the formulaic aspects of the show. One of the things that I tend to like about some plays, that many others seem to not, is when I struggle to care about a character.

I like the parallel process that I as an audience experienced with Mathis. I have never subscribed to the idea that I needed to "care" necessarily about a character, but I need to be engaged. Jane engaged me in many ways. Also, psychologically speaking, many audience members may have had similar issues with their own primary care givers, so they don't necessarily get touched by caring about Fonda, but just seeing a story that they can relate to, thus feeling less alone.

I loved the show, but respect those that didn't. There is so much intangible that impacts how someone likes a show, most of the reasons very personal psychological ones, including the audience member's own history.

I love how Jeanne Tresori put it, saying that it all comes down to an audience member's "emotional temperature", as to whether or not a show resonates for them.

Also, having loved people with terminal illness, there is a tendency to shut down and I think Jane's character was doing that from the very moment we meet her.

Updated On: 3/10/09 at 11:45 AM

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 11:54am

NY1 is positive :

"The mark of a great play is its ability to transport us, our hearts and minds, to places we couldn't possibly imagine, without ever being aware of how we got there. On that front, Moises Kaufmann's new play "33 Variations" is half successful. It does take us to wonderful new places, but we are fully aware of the journey.

For all its lofty ambitions, it doesn't rise to the level of great theater. Still, it's an engaging work centering on a classical music mystery; and Jane Fonda's performance is a high note.

....

There is much to admire in this play, and even with its weaknesses, "33 Variations" strikes a resonant chord."


Full Review with VIDEO Updated On: 3/10/09 at 11:54 AM

[BustopherPhantom]

Posted: 3/10/09 at 12:49pm

The Bergen Record is NEGATIVE:

"...That time-sharing idea activates an observer's comparison gene: How does what's happening on stage measure up against Tom Stoppard's dazzling 1993 play "Arcadia," the gold standard in present-past drama?

The urge to compare is encouraged by the fact that "33 Variations," which opened Monday night at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, goes back to the same era as "Arcadia," and has the same basic plot as the earlier play: a modern-day scholar attempts to solve a historical mystery.

Kaufman's effort has its distinctive, and even lovely, moments, but, overall, it doesn't stack up very well against Stoppard's play. In fact, it demonstrates how hard it is to find the right style, among other elements, to pull off such a bravura scheme."

http://www.northjersey.com/entertainment/stage/Beethoven_piece_drives_mystery.html?c=y&page=1


The New York Daily News gives the show 3 STARS OUT OF 5:

"The Oscar winner brings everything to this role that's made her an iconic film star: Pure enthusiasm, toughness tempered by vulnerability, and that distinctive voice which makes every line fascinating.

Too bad this handsomely designed but unconvincing drama isn't as big an event as Fonda's return. Writer-director Moises Kaufman ("Gross Indecency," "The Laramie Project") is known for visually inventive works that blend fact and fiction.

He delivers both in this play, seen earlier in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. But what begins as an exciting journey of discovery, with hints of "Amadeus," sinks into a conventional Lifetime momand-daughter reconciliation."

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/arts/2009/03/10/2009-03-10_jane_fonda_back_on_broadway_for_33_varia.html


New York Magazine is POSITIVE:

"In Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, Jane Fonda plays an American musicologist—a Beethoven specialist—who decides to go ahead with a research trip to Bonn, Germany, even though she's just been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). It's a grim prognosis for her, but maybe it's worse for us: Nothing can kill a night of pleasure at the theater faster than a play about death, life, and the meaning of art, the kind of thing in which characters exist only as mouthpieces for disembodied ideas.

But 33 Variations isn't, blessedly, that sort of play: Kaufman, who also directed this production, clearly wants to keep our nerve endings alive, not deaden them..."

http://nymag.com/arts/theater/reviews/55276/


Newsday is VERY NEGATIVE:

"Jane Fonda is lanky and wry, with a great chin and a flat, deep voice that, more than once in her return to Broadway, may make you think about her late father, Henry. By opening last night at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in an ambitious new work - rather than in a brand-name vehicle or a star-driven fluff ball - she is also very brave.

This does not make "33 Variations" a good play or suggest that the actress, 71, has bounced back onto the stage with all the easygoing confidence of someone who hadn't left it 46 years ago for other worldly adventures."

http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/partii/ny-etfonda106062128mar10a,0,4210117.story

Updated On: 3/10/09 at 12:49 PM