Skip to main content
Shop Merch Add a Show Listing
My Shows
News on your favorite shows, specials & more!

A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Welcome Guest. Please Login or Register.

#3

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Was just about to post that one. It's pretty mixed as well. Actually its pretty straight forward, and doesn't express that much opinion and more of just a recap. Im feeling like people just dont GET this play.
#4

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Newsday is Mixed-to-Positive:

"A Naked Girl on the Appian Way" is a throwback to domestic sex comedies that, during the ancient evenings before TV sitcoms, kept Broadway and the dinner-theater circuit in business with naughty-but-nice titillations, identifiable stars and single-set realism.

Indeed, this 100-minute play, which opened last night at the Roundabout Theatre with the cheerfully competent Jill Clayburgh and Richard Thomas, gets opening applause for the scenery. This is a vast and airy house in "some Hampton," according to the program note, designed by John Lee Beatty to make us all wish we lived there. In keeping with the old-school mechanics, the playwright inserts hokey curtain lines between scenes, after which velvet curtains actually descend.

(continues via link)
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/ny-etsecw4456582oct07,0,7832326.story?coll=ny-theater-headlines
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney

Updated On: 10/6/05 at 06:17 PM

#5

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Talkin Broadway is Mixed:

"Soap operas have nothing on the Lapin family. The members of the intrepid Hamptons brood and their neighbors, all at the center of Richard Greenberg's new play, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, must cope with crises and couplings twistier than your average corkscrew, often without the mildly pleasant intoxication that device can help bestow.

But if you find yourself drunk with laughter while watching this play at the American Airlines, know that this binge will only result in a hangover.

(continues via link)
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/AppianWay.html
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney

Updated On: 10/6/05 at 07:08 PM

#6

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Brantley in the Times is Mixed-to-Negative:

"In outline, "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way," which opened last night at the American Airlines Theater, does sound alarmingly like a last-ditch pitch for a comedy series by a writer desperate to make back alimony payments. You want a situation? Well, listen to this: A middle-aged pair of married, free-thinking intellectuals find their liberalism sorely tested when their three adopted, grown-up kids come home to roost in the old empty nest. And get this: Each of the kids is from a different race!

No, I'm not done yet. For the roles of the husband and wife, picture Jill Clayburgh and Richard Thomas. That's right, Ms. "Unmarried Woman" and John Boy Walton themselves, except 30 years or so later. And along the way, there will be some flirting with taboos, like lesbianism. Oh, that's not taboo anymore? Well, how about incest, except a kind of incest that won't really offend a mainstream audience? And to keep things lively, we'll throw in a wacky, semi-senile and completely un-self-censoring old broad.

(continues via link)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/07/theater/reviews/07nake.html?8dpc
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney

Updated On: 10/6/05 at 11:00 PM

#8

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Ah Benny boy...I feel like you got this one right. I couldnt agree more. Although, maybe a bit too many references to Television Sitcoms - the tone and theme of the review is dead on for this rather lifeless work, imho.
#9

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

USA Today gives it Three Stars, but it looks as though only half the review is posted at the moment. There's some comparison to The Goat, but then it just stops -- it's late and the copy people must be busy.


http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2005-10-06-naked-girl_x.htm
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
#11

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Variety is Mixed:

Like a Hamptonite cathedral, the web of endless windows and bleached wooden rafters of John Lee Beatty's imposing set for "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way" could hardly be more light and airy. But Richard GreenbergRichard Greenberg's old-fashioned boulevard comedy in pseudo-provocative clothing is suffocated at every turn by artificiality. It's hard to discern the subject of this toothless play about incest that's not really incest. Maybe the endless capacity of the rich for complacency, denial and rationalization? The functional dysfunction of the happy family? In any case, it seems a flimsy skeleton on which to hang the playwright's erudite wit.
Playing successful cookbook author Bess Lapin, Jill Clayburgh busily plucks from her kitchen herb garden to prepare a salad of 49 ingredients. But the project is neither completed nor served. The same could be said for Greenberg's play. With the writer's usual verbal aplomb, he tosses in one-liners and self-consciously clever observations about the complexities of love, family and relationships. But he neglects to add the fundamental condiment of emotional truth."

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117928437?categoryid=1265&cs=1
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
#12

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

The Bergen Record is Mostly Negative:

"Instead of hiring actors for "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way," the Roundabout Theatre Company should have looked into placing life-sized cardboard cutouts onstage.

With speakers attached, they could have broadcast the endless string of jokey lines that are the sum of Richard Greenberg's sorry play."

The money saved would have been substantial, and since the characters are two-dimensional anyway, nothing would have been lost."

http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxODYmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY3ODcxNzkmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
#13

re: A Naked Girl on the Appian Way REVIEW THREAD

Theatremania is Negative:

"Unfortunately, dysfunction is evident in the play itself, a mind-boggling blunder by a dramatist who was done out of the Pulitzer Prize for his Take Me Out only a few years ago and whose superlative Three Days of Rain will arrive on Broadway later this season with Julia Roberts starring. Although Naked Girl is set in "some Hampton" -- where, if I remember correctly, part of his early effort Eastern Standard took place -- nothing in his previous work will have prepared you for the frequently vulgar and arch exchanges among two-dimensional characters that run through this play like hooligans on a bender.

You might call A Naked Girl on the Appian Way a sitcom, since its premise sounds like the sort of one-paragraph pitch that a boob-tube writer would confidently throw at network executives. (The play even features an Estelle Getty-like character who regularly speaks her mind in potty-mouth style.) But this would be an insult to the best sitcoms that television now offers, such as The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Okay, you might say that Greenberg's unfunny comedy is reminiscent of something that NBC would try out in desperation and then pull after four episodes."



http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/6823
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie [http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/] "The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney

Updated On: 10/7/05 at 02:06 AM

BroadwayWorld TV


Ticket Central
Hot Show
Tickets From $59
Hot Show
Tickets From $70
Hot Show
Tickets From $59
Hot Show
Tickets From $101