Breakfast At Tiffany's Reviews

Posted: 3/20/13 at 7:40pm

Post 'em here!

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 7:50pm

AMNY is 1.5 Stars.

"very little excitement to be found in this drab and dragging stage adaptation"
AMNY

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 7:53pm

Financial Times is 2 out of 5:

Clarke is affected but not affecting, and a Breakfast without a fetching Holly isn’t much of a meal. Her strongest moment comes when she sings a plaintive ballad (no, not “Moon River”).
FT

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 7:56pm

AP is pretty negative:

Clarke gamely tries hard but tends to overact and sometimes seems to have picked the wrong Hepburn – Katharine, not Audrey – to model her accent. She says "darling" too much, appears nude in a completely unnecessary bathtub scene and plays guitar while singing in another, but that drags on so long it undercuts its poignancy. She is ultimately believable as a vulnerable woman hiding behind a sophisticated facade but is undone by a lackluster story and overly fancy direction.
AP on HuffingtonPost

[egghumor]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 7:59pm

BACKSTAGE - negative

Playwright Richard Greenberg has adapted Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” for the theater with remarkable fidelity—and that’s the problem. Capote’s wispy memory tale, told principally in carefully carved prose, may be hypnotic on the page, but it’s dull onstage, with too much narration and not enough drama. Greenberg and director Sean Mathias haven’t rethought it in theatrical terms. Add to that a game but awfully artificial performance by Emilia Clarke as Holly Golightly, and it’s enough to give you a case of the mean reds.
BACKSTAGE

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 8:01pm

Deleted b/c simultaneous post of same review.



Updated On: 3/20/13 at 08:01 PM

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 8:09pm

Chicago Tribune is fairly negative:

... Clarke gets trapped in that famous Golightly accent, wearing herself out with a series of plumy, repetitive speech patterns that squelch most of her truth and seem to prevent her from revealing much at all — beyond what slips out in a bathtub in a ill-conceived bit of self-conscious sensuality that is about as subtle as a hit job.

The other problem with Mathias' show, which features a set designed by Derek McLane, is that it misses the exuberance of the "Breakfast at Tiffany's" novella, a book with a dark soul, sure, but also a satirical celebration of aspiration that was very good for at least one jeweler's image.

Chicago Tribune

[NewYorkTheater]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 8:59pm

Emilia Clarke is no Audrey Hepburn; she doesn’t have Hepburn’s electricity (who does?). In her debut on Broadway (this is in fact her first time on any professional stage), Clarke (who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO series “Game of Thrones”) exudes charm, she wears costume designer Colleen Atwood’s elegant wardrobe well, she is great to look at — but she is not so interesting to watch. This is not entirely her fault. More than half a century later, decades into the reign of Madonna and the ubiquity of amoral “reality stars,” is anything Holly does really so riveting or outrageous anymore?
Breakfast At Tiffany's Broadway Review: Capote without Audrey Hepburn or Moon River

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:04pm

This is getting bad reviews? I'm shocked.

SHOCKED, I say.

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:05pm

Not looking good....

[Kad]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:08pm

Can't help but feel bad for Cory Michael Smith, who's a really sweet guy.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:11pm

But really, who ever thought this would end well?

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:18pm

I hope this lasts long enough for me to catch it.

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:57pm

Hollywood Reporter is negative:

Ultimately, this translation is an inert substitute for both the written and filmed versions, its central characters distant and lacking in warmth. For all her elusiveness, Holly’s sorrow is that she learns who she is, where she belongs and what matters to her only when those certainties are taken away. Those realizations are stated here but never shown persuasively enough to make us care.
Hollywood Reporter

[chanel]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 9:59pm

Villagevoice.com:

"Rather than Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe, Emilia Clarke comes off like Norah Jones."

LOL

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/2013/03/breakfast_at_ti.php

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:00pm

EW is a C-.

Richard Greenberg's new stage adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's is a meandering misfire lacking the charm and oomph of either Capote's 1958 novella or the 1961 movie that cemented Audrey Hepburn's reputation as the height of sophisticated urbanity.


EW

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:05pm

Theatermania is mixed.

[W]hat ends up on stage is a sometimes plodding, sometimes diverting work that succeeds far more in having us invest in what happens to our narrator — due in large measure to Smith's sensational Broadway debut — than the aptly named Miss Golightly.
TM

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:09pm

NY Times (Brantley) is pretty negative.

Holly Golightly does not. Go lightly, that is. The new stage adaptation of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Truman Capote’s beloved portrait of a glamorous waif in 1940s New York, moves with a distinctly leaden step....

There are a couple of party scenes that throb with the unease of people working overtime to make you believe they’re having fun. The star of the first of these is a big orange tabby....

That cat exuded an enviable air of devil-may-care independence as it zipped off the stage. Maybe it should have played Holly. In any case I knew I wanted to go wherever that cat was going.


NYT Updated On: 3/20/13 at 10:09 PM

[Dollypop]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:22pm

Oh my! It seems that Benedict Arnold got better reviews for betraying his country!

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:24pm

New York is fairly negative:

Capote obviously could have been snarky if he’d felt like it, but he must have known how it would unbalance the story. Because of his tonal control, he was able to keep what might have been a lurid tale lovely, a tragic one golden and sad. If he was onto his characters (Holly’s varicolored hair, in the novella, is “somewhat self-induced”), he was not over them. And without that love, Breakfast at Tiffany’s gets dreary pretty fast. It’s more like Breakfast at Woolworth’s: grittier perhaps, but hardly aspirational. Can’t a girl be left to her dreams?
New York

[SporkGoddess]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:30pm

I feel bad for Emilia Clarke. I love her on Game of Thrones.

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:31pm

Bloomberg is 2 out of 5:

But Sean Mathias’s underpopulated and somewhat epicene staging drains the life from the story. We’re left with a simulacrum: It looks like a play and acts like a play, but there’s no center of gravity. As quickly as it unfolds, the evening evaporates into the ether.
Bloomberg

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 10:35pm

Variety is mixed to negative:

But while Clarke is physically seductive, her mannered Holly is more calculating than charismatic. Which makes it tough for all the men who are infatuated with her to express their adoration with conviction.

Variety

[Tom-497]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 11:08pm

Newsday is negative:

This newest adaptation, which stars Emilia Clarke, is by the formidable and amusing playwright Richard Greenberg. No one can complain that he has not been faithful to the original. In fact, this is practically a line-by-line transcription of Capote's wartime story. It translates awkwardly to the stage as endless exposition, standard-issue New York projected skylines on screens and mushy mumbles by a largely charmless populace of should-be fascinating people.
Newsday

[goldenboy]

Posted: 3/20/13 at 11:28pm

These are better reviews than I predicted but pretty bleak nonetheless.