DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS Reviews

I saw it and loved it. I fell in love with Carla Cugino's performance. I guess we never got to see that side of her really on screen. I hope this show does well.

I saw this production yesterday. It was so intense and I wanted to offer Carla a shot afterwards. I don't know how she does it. She is a lovely person as well. It was Pablo Schreiber's birthday yesterday, so happy birthday :)

Great show & the best acting in it is by Gugino

She deserves the Tony.

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When (if) I start working professionally, I'm going to make sure to get my reviews up by midnight just for you, Limelight Mike, so you'll actually have reason to post these threads over twelve hours too early.

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The Associated Press is Very Positive.

"The production from Chicago's Goodman Theatre is big and booming, almost operatic in its intensity and expansiveness. And it's stocked with oversized yet effective performances that hold their own against a gargantuan setting of rocks and a giant farmhouse that literally hangs in the air for much of the evening. That forbidding structure is the centerpiece of designer Walt Spangler's grandiose set design.

"Desire Under the Elms" is a challenge for any director and cast. Fortunately, director Robert Falls and a terrific cast headed by Brian Dennehy, Carla Gugino and Pablo Schreiber are at the top of their game....

"Desire Under the Elms" may not be of such high rank as "Long Day's Journey" or "Iceman," but Falls' startling, enormously imaginative reinvention makes a strong case of it. In other words, this revival is a must for any serious theatergoer."

http://www.nj.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-1/1240874579315330.xml&storylist=entertainment

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amNY is Mixed-to-Positive with a 2.5 star rating.

"In spite of the over-the-top emotions, what really keep this production grounded are the cast?s convincing performances Carla Gugino oozes with a Maggie the Cat sexuality that is eventually tempered by guilt and desperateness. Paolo Schreiber erupts with an overreaching anger ready to erupt. Their accents are occasionally difficult to understand. Brian Dennehy is commanding as the proud and stubborn patriarch.

Robert Falls? direction is unnecessarily conceptual. Instead of pastoral elms, the set consists of a huge rock quarry, obviously meant to symbolize how the play?s characters feel trapped. The family?s house is a massive set piece that ascends and descends from above....

But regardless of the cast and director, ?Desire Under the Elms? is the kind of play that will be appreciated by some and booed by others. Try and think of it as watching a soap opera set on a 19th century New England farm."

http://weblogs.amny.com/entertainment/stage/blog/2009/04/theater_review_of_desire_under_1.html

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The New York Times (Isherwood) is a Rave.

"A lust for sex and a lust for real estate are familiar passions to many, notwithstanding the plummeting co-op market and those libido-dampening Dow numbers. But these primal drives take on an eerie, entrancing strangeness in the gutsy revival of Eugene O?Neill?s ?Desire Under the Elms? that opened Monday night at the St. James Theater. Portraying a stepmother and stepson doomed to enact a feverish, erotic dance that will ultimately destroy them, Carla Gugino and Pablo Schreiber fight like tigers in a cage over a legacy of land, even as their bodies cleave violently together, aflame with urgent need.

First seen at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where it was the centerpiece of a winter festival devoted to O?Neill, this visually spectacular production wraps his powerful but problematic 1924 play in a big bear hug, making no attempt to throw a blanket of soft naturalism over its sometimes glaring flaws. On the contrary, the director Robert Falls, who led the last Broadway revival of ?Long Day?s Journey Into Night,? honors O?Neill?s ambition to transplant Greek tragedy to American soil by mounting the play on an epic scale, even adding a few expressionist touches of his own. (A recording by Bob Dylan is unexpectedly heard.)"

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/theater/reviews/28desi.html

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Entertainment Weekly gives the show a B+:

"When the Oedipal affair takes the inevitable appalling turn, Abbie goes from madly in love to just plain mad ? an area that's turning out to be Gugino's forte. Recall her 2004 Broadway debut, an ill-conceived revival of Arthur Miller's After the Fall, in which she sparkled as a suicidal Marilyn Monroe-esque singer; then in 2006, she livened up Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer as a fresh-from-the-looney-bin lobotomy candidate. She goes crazy very convincingly. Schreiber, however, simply isn't up to the immense challenges of the mother-loving Eben: The boy despises Ephraim for working his mom to death and stealing her farm, he lusts after Abbie, he resents Abbie for taking his mom's place ? there's a fine line between love and hate, but it's nowhere to be found on Schreiber's face or in his voice. He just seems angry all the time. And if Dennehy's slight Irish brogue seems more apropos for Long Day's Journey Into Night or A Touch of the Poet, he's completely in command, every inch the rock-like Ephraim that Elms requires; 'his face is as hard as if it were hewn out of a boulder,' wrote O'Neill of the character.

And speaking of rocks...they essentially take the place of elms in this production. Enormous, back-breakingly heavy boulders are stacked everywhere on Walt Spangler's stunningly expressionistic set, suggesting that all that's growing on this land is rage, sin, and duplicity. The farmhouse, suspended in mid-air for much of the play, seems as if it could crush the Cabots at any moment. Actually, that set could crush a lot of Broadway actors. But not Dennehy. And certainly not the marvelous Gugino."

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20275025,00.html

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TheaterMania is Mixed to Negative??

Again, an odd review from TM. No real comments on the show itself, just complaints that the actors scream their lines.

"In an introduction to Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, the celebrated chronicler of shattered illusions notes about those titular trees that "there is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption?.They brood oppressively over the house." Taking such care --and imposing prose -- to describe the elms, O'Neill obviously considers their presence of no little importance. But in the only intermittently effective revival of the 1924 bodice-ripping gloom-and-doomer, which has transferred to Broadway's St. James Theatre from Chicago's Goodman Theatre, director Robert Falls waves the elms off and has set designer Walt Spangler replace them with stones the size of boulders.
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The misguided emphasis on volume takes its toll on the performances by these five clearly accomplished actors. Gugino, who gets to flash her breathtaking legs, and Schreiber, who has a body ripe for the cover of Men's Health, may circle and grope each other like animals in heat, but the unchanging decibel level precludes much sense of their interior lives. Dennehy has the same problem, although his abrupt aging at the denouement is impressive. Still, this is a rocky production in every sense of the word. "

http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/reviews/04-2009/desire-under-the-elms_18796.html

Updated On: 4/27/09 at 10:52 PM

Jeez. When even one of the better reviews includes this line, "The writing can be repetitive and painfully overexplicit, the attempts at poetry blunt and strained," how do you decide whether it's worth going? I can't say that I'm especially tempted to see this when everyone seems focused on how problematic the play itself is. But I still have that nagging feeling that I SHOULD.

I don't know why anyone's surprised about the positive reviews. It got positive reviews in Chicago and it's the same here.

I have to say, of the quotes shown in this thread, the Hollywood Reporter's are the ones I most agree with... and yet, I did enjoy the play, overall. As people have said, I think it's an overly conscious reworking of a not-that-fantastic play, featuring some really great performances. However, I didn't spend any money to see it, and I don't know that I'd recommend that anyone else see it at traditionally Broadway-priced tickets.

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The rave from the NY TIMES will no doubt gets butts in seats, but does anyone else wonder if these schizophrenic reviews are really going to do much one way or the other?