Saw it on the first night but didn't have Internet access:
The audience was a bit annoyingly squealy in the beginning, the entrance applause lasted way too long, and one jackass took a flash photo early on, but the play is somber stuff and the exuberance quickly died down. (I fully admit I was in a Grinchy mood that night.)
Anyway, as far as the play goes, without its stars I would have been shocked if it caught someone's eye as a potential Broadway transfer. It's not bad, but it's not amazing, either. Then again, the far worse
Coram Boy came in from London, so what do I know. I really don't get why this play, of all things, caught Craig's eye, but what the hell. *shrug* Maybe because it's such an actors' showcase - a two-character one-act with a set that consists of nothing but two chairs and a backdrop. Craig and Jackman have to hold the audience with pretty much nothing but their voices for 90 minutes, and they succeed admirably.
The events the two characters are recalling throughout are hugely melodramatic, and I think it's the alternating-monologues format that keeps the play from entering
Titus Adronicus horribleness territory. But the format is also a limitation that Huff runs up against a few times when he makes Joey and Denny use somewhat poetic descriptive language. Those characters would never talk that way, and with virtually no set, that can make it tough for the playwright to paint a picture in the minds of the audience. But he still should have stayed within characters' voices.
I wish I'd been sitting closer than I was so I could catch more of Craig's performance - my eyesight just isn't up to catching finer facial expressions from the mezzanine, and the part of Joey is the quieter one of the two. The casting is the reverse of what you'd expect, as everyone's been saying, but both actors find their ways into their characters anyway. The material they're working with isn't the best, but they really are good theatrical craftsmen, and that's a pleasure to see.
Jackman's accent wandered a bit, but when it did he went into a flat American newscaster's accent, not an Australian one, so it wasn't too bad. And he never suffered from the strangled, affectless intonation that strikes so many actors who use so much of their headspace on maintaining an accent they don't have resources to spare for actual acting. He had some great acting moments that pretty much consisted of just a change in vocal timbre. Craig had a greater tendency to get mumbly enough for me to have a hard time making out the words, but his accent was almost totally consistent.
Both actors did some fantastic body acting - Jackman can convey a world of hostility and rage just by standing still and wordless on the side of the stage, and Craig did a good job seeming physically cowed by him when necessary.
I think their chemistry is going to get better with time, but even now they had an easy finish-each-other's-sentences rapport that occasionally rose to make them more than the sum of their parts. Their comedy timing together is solid. And the reversed casting isn't really that much of a hindrance - Jackman's tremendous underlying charm and charisma might be the only thing that can keep the audience from turning on his utter bastard of a character. He plays Denny completely unapologetically and counts on it to work, and it does. Joey's bastardry sneaks up on you more. :P
What frustrated me a bit about this play is that underneath there, the skeleton of the show is very solid. The changing relationship between Joey and Denny is an interesting one, and they're interesting characters. The writing just isn't...quite there. (See, this is why I failed as an English major.) But you can see why Joey would follow Denny so far down his path of self-destruction, and how Denny self-immolates over the course of a summer.
Anyway, if you don't like to hear about bad things happening to children, don't get anywhere near this play. The audience was gasping in shock multiple times, and by the end there was a palpable sense of dread as everyone wondered what awful thing was going to befall Joey and Denny next. But thankfully, that also stopped the squealing and picture-taking cold so the evening was about the play and the acting, not the leading men's chests. Which you don't get to see, unfortunately - the most skin they show is their forearms. :)
Updated On: 9/12/09 at 06:09 PM
