FROST/NIXON Reviews

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:08pm

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

[Testing1232]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:11pm

My guess is that the show will get mostly positive reviews.

If Langella gets anything but raves, I will be shocked !

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:14pm

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.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:34pm

The AP is Positive:

"Playwright Peter Morgan and director Michael Grandage have more than nostalgia on their minds in "Frost/Nixon," a slick, showy docudrama about the historic television interviews between David Frost and the 37th president of the United States.

The play, which opened Sunday at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, is an entertaining if sketchy look at the media and power, specifically presidential power and the possibility of overreaching — something that hasn't lost its relevance today.
_______________________________________________________________

That's where the play really comes alive — juxtaposing the live confrontations with the images projected above the audience. Watching what television devastatingly does to the unraveling former president, particularly in the final interview, neatly underscores the main point "Frost/Nixon" is making. The power of TV creates pretty potent images."



http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/04/22/arts/NA-A-E-STG-US-Theater-Frost-Nixon.php

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:39pm

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.
________________________________________________________________

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.

________________________________________________________________


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

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:45pm

Talkin Broadway is Mixed:

" Though the first three of Frost’s programs were roundabout games of softball, it was in the fourth that history was made when Nixon admitted his guilt in the Watergate scandal and revealed the all-consuming repentance he’d long kept hid.

Though this is the most excitingly realized moment in Michael Grandage’s otherwise cruelly contemplative production, the implosion of contemporary history is overshadowed by the men whose jobs are merely to present it. As Frost and Nixon respectively, Michael Sheen and Frank Langella break through the bonds of expectation to discover dimensions to the story that the two men themselves’ might well be surprised about.
________________________________________________________________

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.

Sheen, not forced to compete with history, doesn’t find similar depths in Frost. In his earlier scenes, he seems to channel the same frustrated ineffectuality that he so successfully brought to Tony Blair in last year’s film The Queen - for his Frost, who places his very financial existence on the line to get and keep Nixon, the stakes seldom seem high enough. But he comes into his own once the interviews escalate into the gladiatorial combat, seizing his adversary with the deceptively deadly charm he spent most of the evening cultivating; it’s a daring turnaround that jolts the play’s second half to life.

That life, though, is in otherwise short supply."


http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/FrostNixon.html

[Testing1232]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 6:53pm

<< 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.
>>

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.

[jv92]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 8:42pm

Not what I expected from Linda Winer, but she can surprise us.

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 8:47pm

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.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 8:48pm

Variety is Mixed-to-Positive:

"If someone described a play dealing with the incestuous intertwining of politics and show business, checkbook journalism, accountability in government and a U.S. president obstinately out of touch with the world and dialoguing with himself, you might guess the timeframe is now. Guess again. Examining the machinations behind British talkshow host David Frost's 1977 TV interviews with Richard Nixon, Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon" knowingly amplifies the episode through a contemporary prism. A hit in London, Michael Grandage's lucid production burnishes the play's merits as stage writing, but there's no question about the potency of Frank Langella and Michael Sheen's blazing performances.

In films like "The Queen," "The Last King of Scotland" and "Longford," Morgan has carved a niche for himself by getting personal with power, creating smart entertainment by exploring the vulnerable human characters behind public figures. His first stage play turns the potentially dry docudrama of a disgraced former president's unexpected public apology into lively sociopolitical reflection.

If it feels like a two-character piece padded into a multirole play with too much expository direct address from twin narrators (one in each camp), the rich shadings given to those two characters are no small compensation. The complexity of the portraits of two adversaries equally hungry for public redemption and the potential for further development of background and supporting players suggest the material might benefit from the more intimately detailed canvas of the bigscreen. (Universal acquired rights to the play in September, with Morgan scheduled to adapt for director Ron Howard.)"


http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117933399.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

Updated On: 4/22/07 at 08:48 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 8:57pm

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.
________________________________________________________________

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

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 10:25pm

Positive from Mr. B:


"Television mows down a titan in “Frost/Nixon,” the briskly entertaining new play by Peter Morgan about the 1977 face-off between its title characters, the British talk show host (as in David) and the former American president (as in Richard M.). But let it be proclaimed, with drums and fanfare, that theater decisively trumps television in the production that opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.

Seeking the Nixon Behind the Caricature (April 20, 2007)
A West End Name, a Broadway Debut (April 15, 2007) 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."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/theater/reviews/23fros.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 10:41pm

"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

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 11:00pm

Ugh, I hate when he talks about and compares performances and writing to that of movies. I don't care if it's the same author, structure, or story. You're reviewing theatre. Shut up about the freakin' movies.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/22/07 at 11:35pm

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

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 1:38am

John Simon is Positive:

"Frank Langella makes Nixon clever without glorification, Tricky Dick without repulsiveness, unsparing in the growls without stressing the jowls. From Michael Sheen, Frost gets charm without lovableness, smartness not without stumbles; morally he is at best a fascinating, off-white knight.

Morgan and his gifted director, Michael Grandage, have filled the stage with as much movement as possible. Every distracting detail of the TV studio is exploited for maximum color and suspense. Even transoceanic flight is dramatically enlivened by interruptions from a solicitous stewardess and the captain's hortatory messages.

Throughout, we get the eponymous debate both on stage and on a vast overhead grid of screens that magnifies all-important TV advantages and disadvantages -- not least the final flummoxed face of the cornered Nixon in stop-motion. The designer, Christopher Orum, provides an elegantly uncluttered unit set and evocative costumes; there are electrifying sights and highly suggestive noises from the lighting and sound designers.

``Frost/Nixon' is as good as a play can get without being great. Nowadays, that is much more than enough."


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aKb4gcMEp1DI&refer=muse

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 1:46am

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

[gymdudeva]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 11:25am

Mostly positive in Washington Post, with raves for Sheen and Langella:


Wash. Post review of

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 1:45pm

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.



-----------------------------------

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...

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 1:46pm

NY POST: "Nail to the Chief" Updated On: 4/23/07 at 01:46 PM

[Testing1232]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 1:49pm

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

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

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 1:49pm

Mixed responses from the nobodies...
WORD OF MOUTH: Frost/Nixon

[Boq101]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 3:19pm

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.

[hushpuppy]

Posted: 4/23/07 at 7:22pm

Wow, that really was a pan in the Record. Since Nixon lived in Saddle River, NJ at one point, maybe the critic felt a sort of kinship with him. Beats me. I, for one, thought the show was amazing, and I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate.
Bergen Record Review

[VeuveClicquot]

Posted: 4/24/07 at 2:58am

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