A Touch of the Poet Reviews

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."

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Three

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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.