ENRON Reviews

Today is Tuesday, April 27, marking the official opening of the acclaimed London production of Lucy Prebble's Enron, "a docudrama that uses song, movement, projections, video, masks — and naturalistic workplace scenes — to tell the real-life American corporate crime story," at the Broadhurst. Previews began April 8, under the direction of Rupert Goold.

For the U.S. incarnation, Tony Award winner Norbert Leo Butz plays CEO Jeffrey Skilling, Tony nominee Gregory Itzin plays Kenneth Lay, Drama League nominee Stephen Kunken plays CFO Andy Fastow, and Tony nominee Marin Mazzie plays vice president Claudia Roe (her character is a composite of several real people); the four principal wrongdoers at the top of the Enron foodchain in Houston.

The corporate crime shocked the nation in 2001. The play's action "takes place in Houston, Texas, between 1992 and the present day."

The rest of the Enron cast includes turns from Noah Weisberg, Rightor Doyle ), Ian Kahn, Mary Stewart Sullivan, Madisyn Shipman, January LaVoy, Jordan Ballard, Brandon J. Dirden, Anthony Holds, Ty Jones, Tom Nelis, Jeff Skowron, Lusia Strus, Ben Hartley and Ellyn Marie Marsh.

Best to all involved!

Bottom Line: Stylized theatrical depiction of the notorious energy company's rise and fall doesn't provide a satisfying return on the audience's investment.
The Hollywood Reporter

Financial Times: Enron is long, obvious and riddled with redundancy.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/85c24bce-521a-11df-8b09-00144feab49a.html

Is this tragic story dramatic and stage-worthy? The answer is a resounding yes. It's all in the way you tell it, and the telling at the Broadhurst Theatre is riveting.
NY1

Ugh...Roma Torre is so damn corny! I cringe whenever I see or read any of her reviews. Someone please buy this woman a thesaurus and a book on metaphors & axioms, stat!

Chicago Tribune is POSITIVE

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AP is Negative/mixed

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=10493194

Critics see a show in the performances leading up to opening night and their reviews are made public on opening night

All major critics attend final preview performances, write their reviews, which are then published the morning after the play's opening.

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Oh, I haven't read my favorite clueless-flop excuse in a while!

"It can't flop because the night I saw it there was a lot of people and they all clapped very hard!" Loves it.

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I love Roma Torre.

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L.A. Times excerpt:

...the synergy between Prebble’s play and Goold’s staging creates something that could only occur in the theater — a three-dimensional distillation of the greed, fraud and self-serving genius that spelled not just the demise of a company but the emergence of a form of casino capitalism that would by the decade’s end lead to the worst recession since the Great Depression. “Enron,” which had its official opening Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theatre, concentrates on a handful of top executives and ends up hauling in the zeitgeist.

Would you believe that that show often looks and behaves like a musical? Consummate song-and-dance man Norbert Leo Butz (a Tony winner for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) stars as Jeffrey Skilling, the nerdy Harvard-educated numbers guy who brought to Enron the concept of “mark to market,” which allows future income, valued at current market prices, to be written down as earnings as soon as deals are signed. Now this wouldn’t seem like the kind of thing to inspire much razzmatazz, but when the company’s stock price starts soaring, all that adrenaline-fueled avarice has a way of putting even socially awkward Skilling in a campy Hugh Jackman mood.

Goold, who directed the strikingly modern “Macbeth” with Patrick Stewart on Broadway in 2008, magnificently orchestrates this layered multimedia extravaganza on a set by Anthony Ward that’s like a mix between a smart phone and a corporate meeting room....

Does someone have full access to Newsday? Not being a subscriber, this is as far as I could get:

Funny money gets devalued in 'Enron'
April 27, 2010 By LINDA WINER linda.winer@newsday.com

For "Enron" to be any more timely, the financial satire with music would have to be happening in the offices of Goldman Sachs' lawyers. If Rupert Goold's fanciful multimedia staging of Lucy Prebble's London hit were any livelier, the actors wearing voracious debt-eating raptors masks on their heads would be dashing up the theater aisles gobbling credit-card receipts from our wallets.

In other...