A Touch of the Poet Reviews

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 6:30pm

Broadway.com is Mostly Postive:

"Director Doug Hughes' rock-ribbed new production is frequently as bracing as a late-night nip, though its deepest pleasures are more slow-blooming--more subtle mist than blarney stone.

At first blush this seems a blatant star turn by Byrne, an actor with a Mount Rushmore face and the sort of darkly radiant presence that can focus attention on the smallest, stillest moment even as his character is blowing full steam.
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Scenes that might flow from reverie to revelation, particularly in the drawn-out second act, are instead prone to wobble. And certainly the play's final, transfiguring turn is more satisfying conceptually than emotionally. A Touch of the Poet may best be enjoyed as a sort of landlocked sea shanty--a well-told tall tale about a tarnished hero and the women who loved him too much.

Updated On: 12/8/05 at 06:30 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 7:30pm

Talkin Broadway is Mixed-to-Positive:

"The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, which just opened at Studio 54, is a first-rate example of how to present a second-rate not-quite-masterpiece to today's audiences.

The formula: Hire a role-appropriate star primarily renowned for his film work (Gabriel Byrne). Hire a hot-hot-hot director (Tony winner Doug Hughes) to stage it. Find a terrific supporting cast and a group of top designers to bring the world to life. Then - this is crucial - pray it all works out.

Well, it all does. And it all doesn't.

Theatrical chemical reactions are difficult to prevent when all the elements are right, but the tiniest spark won't always give way to a roaring flame, which is the case here. For what it is, the Roundabout production could scarcely be better. But greatness eludes both Hughes's highly efficient mounting and the work itself, which is deservedly never mentioned in the same breath with O'Neill's more epic masterpieces."

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 7:33pm

Totally agree

We really enjoyed it. We are on a roll as we agree also in that we also liked In My Life.

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 8:11pm

Seeing it on Sunday. The play is actually one of my favorites by O'Neill. Byrne and Molloy are two of the most talented performers I have ever witnessed on a stage, as well.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 8:18pm

Bryne should get the Tony that he did not get for Moon. A very underrated actor

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 10:37pm

Theatremania is Mostly Positive:

"There are some boors whom you'll put up with on stage but wouldn't allow five minutes of your time in real life. One such blowhard is Cornelius Melody in Eugene O'Neill's insinuating A Touch of the Poet, a work from which busy-busy director Doug Hughes is eliciting some but not enough poetry in the current Broadway revival. The overbearing Melody, played here by Gabriel Byrne, insists on being called Major whether or not he ever held the rank. He is the anti-hero of what was intended to be the first play in the Nobel-winning O'Neill's famously unfinished cycle about the Irish in America.
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To some extent, A Touch of the Poet is about what constitutes a man's figurative size. Byrne proved a first-rate O'Neill interpreter in 2000 when he played a soulful, world-weary James Tyrone Jr. in the Broadway revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, but he's less effective as the now abruptly accusatory, now abruptly apologetic Melody. The character is meant to be someone who's putting on insufferable airs -- yet, for much of the play, Byrne is more like an actor attempting to put on a character's elusive airs. Only in the final minutes of the play is he convincingly fiery, and these are the moments when the Melody has shrunk in his own estimation.

For the most part, the supporting players fare better.

http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/7276

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 10:41pm

NY Times is Mixed:

"And then all at once there is fire. The conflagration occurs midway through what until then has been at best a lukewarm revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Touch of the Poet." Much of the cast of the play has appeared to be under the impression that this is a saggy comedy of manners, not a portrait of a family in hell. And the show's ideally cast star, Gabriel Byrne, playing one of O'Neill's self-dramatizing monster fathers, has barely shaken hands with the Olympian contradictions of his character, much less embraced them. Yet as soon as the second half begins, you can sense the embers stirring within Mr. Byrne's Cornelius Melody, a grandly deluded Irish innkeeper in early-19th-century Massachusetts. Doug Hughes's production, a much-tightened version of the original script, begins with atmospheric promise. Santo Loquasto's bleak, cavernous set is an appropriate battlefield for O'Neill's titans of domestic discontent. Yet when the cast members arrive, they seem dwarfed by their surroundings. As glorious as Mr. Byrne is, a great Con - or to be exact, half a great Con - does not a great "Poet" make."
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/theater/reviews/09poet.html?8dpc&oref=login

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 10:43pm

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter is Positive:

"Again stepping into the theatrical shoes of the late Jason Robards, Gabriel Byrne delivers a sterling performance in this Roundabout Theater Company revival of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece, unseen on Broadway for nearly 30 years.

As he did with "Moon for the Misbegotten," another play with which Robards was famously associated, Byrne demonstrates that he has become a peerless interpreter of O'Neill, beautifully conveying the combination of swagger, brutality and vulnerability that marks so many of the playwright's characters. Although "A Touch of the Poet" might be a bit heavy-going for the tourist crowd, Roundabout subscribers and discerning theatergoers will not want to miss this limited engagement."


http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=reviewsNews&storyID=2005-12-09T015059Z_01_KNE906654_RTRIDST_0_REVIEW-STAGE-POET-DC.XML

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 10:47pm

Newsday is Mixed:

"Lightning struck a dozen years ago when Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson set fire to the aging rhetorical brush of Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie" at the Roundabout Theatre. Now the Roundabout has reached back into the lesser O'Neill canon for "A Touch of the Poet," which opened Thursday night at Studio 54 with Gabriel Byrne in a performance of dark, intense intelligence.

But the drama -- completed in 1942 but not staged until five years after the great playwright's death in 1953 -- is less a discovery than a long day's journey in a long hairshirt of a script.

Despite Doug Hughes' conscientious and handsome production, we can feel the hard work from the start.
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The play lasts almost three hours, far longer than it takes us to understand the conflicting reflections in the mirror, and in the bog Irish he treats with such contempt.

The result is majestic and annoying, fascinating and boring. As directed by Hughes ("Doubt"), Byrne flipflops from bluster to confession, from insult to apology, from sentence to sentence, even from subject to predicate. We feel a bit as if we had been tossed into the warring internal monologues of "Strange Interlude," but in that early experiment, O'Neill at least delineates the public person vs. the psyche. Here, Con just seems like a madman."

http://www.nynewsday.com/entertainment/nyc-etpoet1209,0,2795077.story

[Madame X]

Posted: 12/8/05 at 10:55pm

USA Today is positive:

Living selfishly can be good for the body, if not the soul. This is not the case, however, for Cornelius Melody, the preening, booze-guzzling narcissist at the center of A Touch of the Poet. This being a Eugene O'Neill play, of course, Cornelius is as much a poignant figure as a ridiculous one. As played by Gabriel Byrne in the Roundabout Theatre Company's bracing new production of Poet (* * * ;½ out of four), which opened Thursday at Studio 54, he may tickle your funny bone, but he'll ultimately break your heart.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2005-12-08-touch-of-the-poet_x.htm

[Rathnait62]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 12:38am

I really thought Brantley would go for this one - and what he says about Molloy is absolutely baffling, and opposite to every other review, though he is spot-on regarding Bergl and Byrne.

I just returned from the opening night - had a wonderful time, despite the incredible number of cell phones going off and late LATEcomers.

Updated On: 12/9/05 at 12:38 AM

[Rathnait62]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:34am

Variety is a rave:

Self-deception proves a cruelly corrosive state of mind in Gabriel Byrne's haunting interpretation of Cornelius Melody in "A Touch of the Poet." By the time Eugene O'Neill's slow-burning drama about the troubled union of the old world with the new has played out, the dreams of this deluded romantic have dissolved, reducing the prideful man to a ghoulish clown. While it feels initially as stodgy as the rhetoric-spouting, alcoholic windbag driving the action, this distinguished production builds into a commandingly theatrical experience as director Doug Hughes and his cast patiently uncover the play's majestic mournfulness.
Variety

[rclocalz]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:39am

Hmmm, I really want to see this.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:07pm

A few more reviews:

NY Post is Positive:

A wild flash of acting and we're off to the races with a magnificent Gabriel Byrne very much in the saddle in Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet," which opened last night at Studio 54.

This vivid Roundabout Theatre revival, directed by Doug Hughes and designed by Santo Loquasto, is strongly touched up by the charismatic Byrne, an elegantly intense, Dublin-trained actor best known here for his movies.

O'Neill's reputation as one of the 20th-century's finest playwrights rests on just a fistful of timeless plays written toward the end of his life, all possessing a dauntless passionate power.

They seem hewn out with wild-eyed desperation from O'Neill's own soul, with his characters clumsily daubed with his own blood. There is rough-cast grandeur here, and a violently dramatic voice like none other.

Yet that voice at times degenerates into an almost incomprehensible Irish-style doggerel — so you might feel as if you're hearing "Hamlet" in Sanskrit.
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From his first posturing and preening, all given the shrewd distancing of an alcoholic glaze, through to his final, bloody and vainglorious defeat, Byrne never puts a note in the wrong place, or casts a glance in the wrong direction.

This is superb acting that represents Broadway at its rarely exalted best.

http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/59256.htm
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Daily News is Positive:

"A Touch of the Poet" is that rare Eugene O'Neill play that ends happily - a muted happiness to be sure, but given the dour mood of most of O'Neill's work, that's pretty remarkable.

Director Doug Hughes has led a splendid cast, headed by Gabriel Byrne, in a revival that makes the seldom-revived "Poet" seem one of O'Neill's richest and most satisfying plays.
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Byrne does an astonishing job of conveying Melody's vainglory without sacrificing our sympathy for him. There's something pitiable in the way he struts about the stage imagining himself a nobleman.

Nor does Byrne flinch from showing us Melody's ugliness as he flails about in drunken impotence. But the final reconciliation with his daughter, powerfully played by Emily Bergl, is deeply touching


http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/372983p-317183c.html

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Hartford Courant is Positive:

Ranging from melodramatic to mad, from dashing to drunken, from self-aggrandizement to self-hatred, Gabriel Byrne fills ex-Maj. Cornelius Melody with much more than "A Touch of the Poet."

His preening, absurd, actorish representation of a Byron-spouting, whiskey-belting male peacock sheds new light on the late Eugene O'Neill study of the long war between old New England Yankees and the more recently arrived Irish. Doug Hughes' finely considered, intelligently dramatized production, which opened Thursday night at the Roundabout Theatre Company's refurbished Studio 54, comes across as a native American variation on O'Casey and Synge.

http://www.ctnow.com/stage/reviews/hce-poetrev.artdec09,0,1251195.story?coll=hce-headlines-theaterreviews

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:11pm

Wow. Nice reviews. How many stars did the Post give it?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:12pm

Three

[zelda]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:15pm

although i cant say with any certainty, but i would hazzard to say that Con Meloday is based on O'Neills father James O'Neill . the parallell of the Major being the count of monte cirsto, which trapped James for years after he played it...and may never have let go.i believe EO felt that his father had held them hostage his entire life. i saw the show now 3 times. it is a great piece of work and acting is solid. for those looking for the bright lite moments of musicals..this is not for you. this is very real, very earthy..the way o'neill wanted it. i believe this production would have made him very happy unlike the LDJ of a few seasons back

[zelda]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:43pm

I must also point out...for some reason reviewers are mistakenly writing and saying "O'Neill is one america's foremost playwrights.
until this year it has been commonly thought and agreed by critics and scholars that O'Neill is the father of american playwrighting. just so's ya know.

[Rathnait62]

Posted: 12/9/05 at 2:45pm

Isn't he known as the first American playwright?