ENRON Reviews — Page 2

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...

B- from Entertainment Weekly:

One understands the desire to goose material that is both potentially dry and well past its sell-by date. (In the wake of AIG and Bernie Madoff and Lehman Brothers' own collapse, doesn't the Enron scandal seem so 2001?) But subtlety gets lost in the process: At one point, Butz's Skilling literally stomps his foot like a petulant 2-year-old when Lay sides with Roe in a corporate dispute — an over-the-top gesture that undercuts any effort by the production to make its characters more than cardboard stand-ins for American Big Business excess and immaturity. Goold further muddles the satire with kitchen-sink showmanship, employing everything from a barbershop quartet of traders to a mini-ballet by lightsaber-wielding execs. He even creates anthropomorphized 'raptors' to represent the shady debt-laden shell companies that led to Enron's ultimate unraveling. We see Fastow and Skilling kill the raptors at the end, but there's no real-world explanation of what they're doing; Goold is too caught up in his theatrical conceit to serve the fact-based story he's trying to tell. Too often, in fact, Enron plays like 60 Minutes on acid

Stage Review Enron Reviewed by Thom Geier

NY Times is up. Upon rereading, I'd say it's Negative, though he has good things about some of the cast, particularly Stephen Kunken.

"Yet even with a well-drilled cast that includes bright Broadway headliners like Norbert Leo Butz and Marin Mazzie, the realization sets in early that this British-born exploration of smoke-and-mirror financial practices isn’t much more than smoke and mirrors itself. “Enron” is fast-paced, flamboyant and, despite the head-clogging intricacy of its business mathematics, lucid to the point of simple-mindedness. But as was true of the company of this play’s title, the energy generated here often feels factitious, all show (or show and tell) and little substance."



Titans of Tangled Finances Kick Up Their Heels Again

Updated On: 4/27/10 at 10:33 PM

I am so happy Kunken is getting great reviews. I think he will be a serious contender for the Tony.

Well, the Brantley review was the one that needed to be positive, of course. So, we'll see...

I don't think the marketing for this has been very good. Or even apparent.

Having not seen the show yet, I can't comment on whether the reviews are on target, but it seems to me that many of the critics are uninformed about the facts of Enron, which discredits the reviews, to me at least.

Whether or not the critics know about Enron has nothing to do with the fact that the quality of the writing is mediocre at best. The dialogue is so terribly contrived that the subject matter, which is already heavy, actively hurts your brain.

Updated On: 4/27/10 at 11:31 PM

not surprised by these reviews. people in the US don't care about the Enron era anymore. much like the point of view that is portrayed in American Idiot. They both just seem dated like a few years ago when everyone was wearing flared jeans...again.

I think it's between that and Time Stands Still at this point. While I would hope for Next Fall, I would be happy either way. And i guess this makes Time Stands Still the best reviewed new play of the season (along with Vibrator Play and Superior Donuts, one of which could take a nomination spot from Enron now).

I may be all wet on this, but didn't Brantly rave about ENRON in London last year?

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For whatever its worth, there is no pull quote from Brantley review of Enron when it was in London. I feel like if he raved about it, they would quote it on their site. But I could easily be mistaken.

Also in regards to the Best Play discussion, what about Red? It got very strong reviews as well. I feel like it could potentially take the Tony as well.

"Having not seen the show yet, I can't comment on whether the reviews are on target, but it seems to me that many of the critics are uninformed about the facts of Enron, which discredits the reviews, to me at least. "

Don't need to know the intracacies of Enron to know if the play is good or not. Plus, isn't the play a complete separation from the actual facts on Enron (and finance in general)? The people I know who have seen it - and who most definitely know the exact facts of Enron - didn't like the play in part because of all the poetic license (at best) or complete break from reality (at worst).

So if a reviewer didn't know the specifics of Enron, wouldn't that only help the reviews?

NY Post is very POSITIVE, 3.5 of 4 stars

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/joy_ride_amid_fast_cash_and_cooked_NQ2MT1kCQRngnL5nqTTTyO