ELLING Previews — Page 2

If anyone has an extra comp, feel free to PM me!

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Updated On: 11/4/10 at 05:22 AM

> Very quirky and has an appeal to a small fraction of theater goers

Pammy: can you elaborate a bit -- quirky how? which fraction of theater-goers?

thanks!

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I, too, have a comp for this Sunday. I'm just looking forward to seeing Jennifer Coolidge on stage.

Looks like they're papering the crap out of this show.

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Quirky in the sense it's basically about two nutjobs and how they handle life outside of the asylum. Also the Norwegian aspect of it is just odd......middle America will not go for it.....us crazy New Yorkers might but not Ma and Pa from Kansas.

I saw Elling on Thursday from the first row side center and I had an absolute blast. I was giggling the whole evening.

Denis O'Hare's role is akin to some of his other recent Broadway roles in Assassins, Sweet Charity & Take Me Out in that he is sometimes quiet and very awkward but he gets excited and turns wordy with excitement, and its a character type hes fantastic at.

Jennifer Coolidge I thought was under used, shes a mish mash of the females in the show but still it didn't give her enough material to shine.

Brendan Fraser was really who I was excited for, love him! He was a slobby, sex obsessed virgin with his own quirks and I thought he did a great job especially having only been his 3rd(?) performance in his broadway debut. He spends some time up on stage in boxers and tight whities too. *blush*

Richard Easton & Jeremy Shamos put in some fine performances in supporting roles too.

I've been to Norway a few times so maybe I'm not the best judge of whether or not its culturally accessible? I didn't sit there thinking this is SO foreign tho. Aside from the pre-show and intermission announcements and some music, there isn't much else to indicate it has Norwegian roots. It has to be set somewhere, why not Oslo? Lunatics having to readjust to life outside the nut house is not an experience exclusive to the crazies kept in Norway. It was a bit like the idea behind the Odd Couple, what happens when you throw two people so polar opposite together? Its funny!

RippedMan: I don't know if/when they're doing another promotion, but if you're on facebook, join the Elling page. The other day they had a thing where they just asked people to tag themselves in a video & they chose a free ticket winner out of those who participated.
Elling Facebook Page

Saw it last night.

in short, Jennifer Coolidge was a friggin' hoot!, but was not on stage very often. (She didn't even appear until about 20 min. into the play.

This was my first time seeing O'hare live, and he was wonderful. Despite the (sometimes) weak writing, he does his best with it and runs away with the show.

I wish I could say the same for Fraser, who wasn't strectching very much from the previous bufoons he's played over the past too many years. He was grating, and not very funny at all. I realized he was going for an insane asylum patient, but where O'Hare's characterization was filled with humanity and subtext, Fraser's "insane" character just came off as mildly retarded, kind of an afterthough to his George of the Jungle character.

Richard Easton was also great, but didn't have much at all to do.


The play itself was fine. Nothing magnificent, and I was not laughing NEARLY as much as everyone around me, but I thought it was a very interesting character study, and was entertained (mostly) for 2 hours.

Thank God for O'Hare- if it wasn't for him, I know I wouldn't have liked it as much.

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I found it quirky, with some laughs, but even in its shortened version, it's repetitive, and went on too long. As absurdist fare goes, it's fairly tepid. Unfortunately, it fails to hold one's attention throughout. I thought both both leads were good.

Here's the thing about ELLING. You have this show that began in an 80 seat theater in Hammersmith then transferred to one of the under-400 seat Trafalgar Studios spaces in the West End. Now, it's playing a theater that has more seating in the orchestra than it did in both the Bush and Trafalgar Studios combined.

But those are the least of the problems of ELLING, a mindless comedy with a staging by Doug Hughes that lets the piece get swallowed up whole in the Barrymore, and a cast of 5 that give the script more than it deserves.

Brendan Fraser and Denis O'Hare are very endearing as a pair of socially awkward and unadjusted individuals who meet in a government-run mental institution and are sent to live with one another as they readjust to the outside world.

That Fraser takes the description of Kjell, "simple," and chooses to make th character brain damaged, is Hughes' fault. But so is the fact that the production is far too naturalistic than it should be, and what could be a very fast-moving farce just lands with a complete thud.

Nobody does socially awkward better than O'Hare, and even though he's giving the exact same performance he's been giving since TAKE ME OUT, he really does shine.

The supporting players - Jennifer Coolidge, Richard Easton and Jeremy Shamos - all mine their roles for more than I think are actually there, and Coolidge, especially, finds well-deserved laughs in even the merest of gestures.

Cathy Zuber's costumes are delightful, though Scott Pask's "room-suspended-in-time" unit set is the wrong choice for a multi-set piece.

I understand that the original production ran over 2.5 hours, and I'd be interested in finding out what was cut. Maybe it was story.

I saw the show and really enjoyed it. I knew little about it going into it. I did wonder why it was on a Broadway stage at first - you really had to jump in with both feet or you were left out. It was such a culture shock, but as the show went on, I really grew to love the characters and their challenges. Jennifer Coolidge has little to do in this show, but the story is intriguing. I also made an odd couple connection... very similar. Some of the lines were absolutely hilarious.

I think it will have a problem being a commercial hit (though only two people walked out), but I did not think it was horrid by any means.

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