FROST/NIXON Reviews

Mostly a rave from the LA Times:

"NEW YORK — Scrutinized by the mass media and skewered by "Saturday Night Live," modern American presidents cry out to be impersonated. Some demand more finesse than others (George H.W. Bush's accent is harder than Jimmy Carter's). But when it comes to Richard Nixon, it seems as though everyone's a Rich Little. All it takes is three ordinary words — "my fellow Americans" — to get the party started. Throw in a victory salute and you're ready to book yourself on "The Tonight Show."

What Frank Langella offers in "Frost/Nixon," the new drama by the hot British screenwriter Peter Morgan ("The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland"), is beyond your standard-issue mimicry. The play, which had its Broadway opening Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, does ask him to morph into the Nixon we all know — a hunched, tremulous mass of perspiring insecurity and shrewd, defensive intellect, with a rumbling voice that often seems in danger of retreating down his esophagus...."

http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/la-et-frost23apr23,0,2667170.story?coll=cl-stage-features"%20target="

Updated On: 4/22/07 at 06:08 PM

I wouldn't be so sure about Langella getting all raves. I bet most critics will rave, but a couple will note that his performance is a brilliant impersonation of Richard Nixon. Nothing particularly groundbreaking.

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Linda Winer (Newsday and syndicated to AM NY) is Negative:

""Frost/Nixon," which opened Sunday night at the Jacobs Theatre after a celebrated run in London, attempts to show the Nixon story as media docudrama and intellectual chess game. Instead, Peter Morgan's facile script and Michael Grandage's slick production have the oversimplified distortions of a historical coloring book and the phony significance of a high-toned "Rocky" movie.
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Frank Langella, in a wildly praised performance, imagines our nation's most over-imitated enigma as a lumbering simian, an almost sympathetic misfit with a quick self-deprecating wit, a mere suggestion of a drinking problem and no hint of the casual anti-Semitism that drove so much of his taped conversations. Shoulders stooped into a steep curve, hair plastered into the familiar widow's peak and a gruff marble in his throat, Langella succeeds in losing all semblance of his youth as Broadway's most dashing Dracula. This is a performance of internal logic and engaging, even folksy charm. But Nixon? Even if we buy Langella's caricature, we don't believe that Morgan knows what to do with it.

Morgan's idea of Frost as lightweight media star is even less flattering than the one of the President who undermined the U.S. Constitution. Michael Sheen, so blissfully complicated as Tony Blair in "The Queen," has nailed the portrait of a pigeon who believes himself a peacock. With his shirts too tight (costumes by Christopher Oram) and his smile too delighted with itself, this Frost is a splendid study in cheeseball hustler. What we do not get is the power and competence necessary to have propelled a career to international prominence.

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Nixon's fictional late-night phone call can be excused as dramatic license. But someone should have corrected such foreign blunders as putting the word "Hills" in the name of the Beverly Hilton and having people drive up to San Clemente from L.A. The real Frost has said that, despite his "delight" in the play's success, he would have preferred it to be accurate. Same here."


http://www.amny.com/entertainment/am-frost0423,0,3158429.story?coll=am-politics-headlines

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<< Langella’s performance is less an impersonation than a spiritual approximation: He doesn’t look or sound especially like Nixon, but always convinces and frequently stuns as someone forever trying to escape the curse of the mortality he brought upon himself. His downfall was his fault and his alone, and as Langella’s Nixon progresses from cagey manipulator to caged animal, you understand that he realizes it as well. It’s an immensely powerful portrayal that makes a much-maligned figure into someone heartbreakingly real; Langella’s work is unmatched by that of any other actor in a Broadway show this season.
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Totally agree with this. Honestly, watching his performance, I never felt like Langella was trying to impersonate Nixon- He was trying to capture his spirit, and portray it on stage. If you read the Playbill article on Langella, he says that the LAST thing he wanted to do was impersonate Nixon.

I respect Linda Winer and think shes a critic who takes her job seriously and writes well, I just seldom agree with her. Come on BB - give Langella the money review he deserves here. The play is problematic, we all know that - but Langella is beyond brilliant.

Theatremania is Mixed-to-Positive:

"The no-frills title could lead anyone to assume that Frost/Nixon is strictly going to showcase top-billed Frank Langella and Michael Sheen, as former president Richard Nixon and talk show host David Frost, doing little but recreating excerpts from the famous 1977 Frost-Nixon television interviews, in which the disgraced President finally admitted his complicity in the Watergate cover-up that led to his resignation. Impersonations are certainly all I expected when I saw the play at London's Donmar Warehouse some months ago. No way was I prepared for a Shakespearean work about the repercussions of hunger for lost power. But that -- not to mention the best play of the year -- is what I got.

First-time playwright Peter Morgan -- author of the Oscar-winning films The Queen and The Last King of Scotland -- has offered an astonished and astonishing gaze at what transpires when two driven men fight a championship verbal bout where only one man can prevail. If the Broadway production is somewhat less electrifying than it was in London, it's because the small Donmar Warehouse lent the 105-minute intermissionless piece an immediacy it doesn't quite have at the Jacobs, where the larger surroundings and proscenium staging seems to have slightly flattened the drama.
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While neither Langella nor Sheen bears a strong resemblance to the actual men they portray, to call their performances bravura is only to hint at the acting heights they scale. Langella not only has the Nixon mannerisms under complete control; he very impressively suggests Nixon's in-and-out sense of humor -- the jokes that land, the ones that don't. When Nixon finally cracks, Langella's body language and face, particularly larger-than-life on those television monitors, is a virtual poem of craggy defeat. For his part, Sheen has assimilated Frost's inflections and behavior, but he's never a walking caricature......... What Frost/Nixon brilliantly delivers is a figurative battle of heavyweights -- without a jab too many or a hook too few."



http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/10567

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"Most of the credit for this victory belongs to a truly titanic performance from the man playing the famously sweaty victim of a cool medium. That’s Frank Langella, whose portrayal of Nixon is one of those made-for-the-stage studies in controlled excess in which larger-than-life seems truer-to-life than merely life-size ever could."

"Like Helen Mirren’s understated Elizabeth II in “The Queen,” this overstated Nixon seems destined forever to blend into and enrich the perceptions of its prototype for anyone who sees it."

AND THE TONY AWARD FOR LEAD ACTOR IN A PLAY GOES TO...FRANK LANGELLA! No if, ands, or buts about it! He was BRILLIANT!

Thanks Brantley for getting this one right.

Updated On: 4/22/07 at 10:41 PM

USA Today gives it Three-and-a-half stars:

"What follows — expertly guided by Michael Grandage, artistic director of London's Donmar Warehouse, Frost/Nixon's original home — is the development of an unlikely rapport based on ambition, grudging respect and, finally, empathy.

That's not to say this play offers profound psychological or political revelations. Supporting characters such as Nixon's chief aide, played as an aggressive square peg by Corey Johnson, and Frost adviser Jim Reston, earnestly played by Stephen Kunken, serve up what can seem out of context, like prosaic play-by-play commentary.

As supremely entertaining theater, though, Frost/Nixon is an undisputed winner."


http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2007-04-22-frost-nixon_N.htm

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NY Sun is Mixed-to-Positive:

"History has condemned President Nixon to a rousing defeat at the hands of David Frost. On the evidence of "Frost/Nixon," though, a recount may be in order.

Peter Morgan's superficial but diverting gloss on the 1977 interviews between these two men takes its share of liberties with the facts, but the central story remains intact. Here and in real life, Mr. Frost paid the disgraced former president handsomely for the privilege of slaughtering him afresh on national television — an event that made global news and cemented Mr. Frost's reputation.

But by handing the role of Nixon to Frank Langella, an actor who has found the hypnotic allure in everyone from Dracula to a talking lizard, Mr. Morgan and director Michael Grandage have all but upended the outcome. Due in part to Mr. Morgan's conception and in part to a calcified performance by Michael Sheen, Frost doesn't have a prayer this time out. Nixon broods near the end of "Frost/Nixon" that he erred in choosing a career that hinged on being liked. He may remain defiantly, perversely unlovable in Mr. Langella's masterful hands; he is, however, a source of awe and almost unbearable pathos."

http://www.nysun.com/article/53031

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Very positive ***1/2 star review from Barnes at the POST:

THERE is nothing in the theater quite like a prize fight - the ancient Greek protagonist/ antago nist, winner-take-all with, as Richard Milhous Nixon jocularly threatened David Frost just before their historic TV interviews, "no holds barred."

The ring is Peter Morgan's play "Frost/Nixon," which opened yesterday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, and the urbane but deadly combatants are, on our left, Michael Sheen (Frost) and, on our right, Frank Langella (Nixon).


...Michael Sheen (best remembered for his effusive Tony Blair in "The Queen" and perhaps his bouncy Mozart in Broadway's "Amadeus") has caught precisely Frost's blazingly evasive smile sliding off his face, his shrewd camaraderie, and his battened-down insecurities.

The great Langella looks rather more like a wasted Ed Sullivan than Nixon, but he has the voice down to a gravelly insinuation of just the right Nixon gravitas, and, as much as Sheen, he is a virtuoso of body language.



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He calls it "a difinitive Broadway experience" which is a quote that will probably find its way onto the marquee and into the show's ads.

I really want to see this show...

<, The great Langella looks rather more like a wasted Ed Sullivan >>

LOVE this line !!! He does ! :))

The Record in North Jersey gave a very negative review. It seemed however that they were mostly put-off because a brit wrote it and they were going to hate it already.

Margo,

I loved this show.

I sat through all three of Tom Stoppard's plays this season.

I went to see "Blackbird," in previews. I adored it.

I saw "Rock and Roll" in London. Which I loved.

However, I think Frost/Nixon is the play of the season.

As you know, I'm not a Tony voter. But I did see all of these plays.

And Frost/Nixon? Killed me. I'm just saying.

Updated On: 4/24/07 at 02:58 AM