Inishmore Reviews
Inishmore Reviews
Broadway Legend Joined: 3/20/04
Inishmore Reviews#0
Posted: 5/3/06 at 7:15pm
http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=525540
Very unoriginal....they even refer to Kerry Condon.
Broadway Legend Joined: 12/9/04
re: Inishmore Reviews#1
Posted: 5/3/06 at 8:20pm
did you see this disclaimer on the top?
"The following is a reprint of Rob Kendt's review of the off-Broadway production of "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" at the Atlantic Theater, originally published on February 27, 2006. Alison Pill has now joined the company."
re: Inishmore Reviews#2
Posted: 5/3/06 at 8:36pmI sort of wonder what would happen if instead of that questionnaire that pops up a reading comp test came up. What would the average score be?
Broadway Legend Joined: 3/20/04
re: Inishmore Reviews#3
Posted: 5/3/06 at 8:38pmYes, I did see the disclaimer on top and thought it was extremely unprofessional. Critics are critics for a reason. It's their job to review the material as they see fit. Reviewing an actress who isn't in the production, no matter what they say, shows how they aren't doing their job.
re: Inishmore Reviews#4
Posted: 5/3/06 at 10:07pm
Talkin Broadway is up, and it's a rave
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/
Painting the town red continues to take on a delicious double meaning with The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Martin McDonagh's play remains an exquisitely entertaining evening at the theater, which ruthlessly drenches its actors, its set, and its props in the blood of any number of characters. It's also one of the most biting, incisive deconstructions of political events to hit New York stages in years. And on top of it all, it's almost fatally hilarious.
These seemingly disparate qualities are hardly coincidental. The play, which has just reopened at the Lyceum after a successful Off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater Company, succeeds where so many of today's topical plays fail: It's not afraid to use real humor and the audience's reaction to it, instead of partisan brutalizing, to make its points. Without the laughter and the underlying absurdity that so shamelessly evokes it, this would be little more than a turgid, ponderous screed.
Not that McDonagh could easily write such a thing. The author of The Pillowman (last season's gruesomely electric entry, which in comparison to this one seems like a literal walk in the park) and The Beauty Queen of Leenane knows that the best way to transmit important messages is to allow laughs to occupy the surface while the messages sneak through underneath.
His writing here, among his sharpest, must then logically begin with a central conflict that at first seems like much ado about nothing. So the cherished cat of Padraic (David Wilmot), the militant leader of an Irish Republican Army splinter group, is killed, and someone has to answer for it - be it Padraic's father and the cat's current caretaker, his next door neighbor, or the splinter group's splinter group. If no one does, or especially if they do, well, expect blood to be spilled and spattered as far as the eye can see.
In other words, there's nothing too small to incite primal vengeance, but when it comes to killing dozens or bombing fish-and-chip shops, who cares? (Lest you worry that Padraic has no other sensitive side, he does string up a man, played by Jeff Binder, for selling pot to schoolchildren.) It's a vicious indictment of the culture of violence and the terrorist mindset, both as unfortunately familiar to us in the United States (at least these days) as to the Ireland island McDonagh depicts; and it's all made viciously funny by director Wilson Milam's intensely balanced examination of all sides of the story.
Padraic's father and neighbor (Peter Gerety and Domhnall Gleeson) fearing Padraic's wrath when they discover the dead cat, Wee Thomas, and do all they can to remedy things (covering an orange tabby with shoe polish is one preferred solution). The splinter group's splinters (Andrew Connolly, Dashiell Eaves, and Brian d'Arcy James) discuss action against Padraic even as they argue attribution of certain quotes to Karl Marx or the Jesuits. And the face of the future is hauntingly represented by Mairead (Alison Pill, the sole new Broadway cast member), who's been training her whole life to free Ireland by Padraic's side.
They're all given equal attention, and are enacted with a cunningly consistent conviction that makes them one of the most excitingly unified ensemble casts of the year. If anything, everyone - including the flawless Pill - does an even better job uptown of communicating the story and delivering the waves of first-act exposition that set up the side-splitting (in more ways than one) Act Two horrors that are to follow. But with the possible exception of a shade of intimacy (which, when the blood starts flying, might not be a negative), nothing has been lost between the Atlantic and the Lyceum.
One vital thing has even been gained: a larger audience. When events take increasingly sharp turns toward the strange, the gales of laughter pulsing through the house can't help but rock you to your soul; even if you've seen the show before, be prepared to be swept along for the ride yet again. But when the ringing laughs die down, don't be shocked if McDonagh's intimations toward tolerance and pacificism resonate even more strongly.
re: Inishmore Reviews#5
Posted: 5/3/06 at 10:11pm
TheatreMania is a rave as well
http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/8175
Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore has transferred to Broadway with every bright facet intact. What was true of the comedy-drama Off-Broadway still goes -- perhaps even more so. Is it possible that it has become even funnier and more trenchant? Is this one of those works with so much going on in it that, every time it's seen, it yields more rewards? That could well be.
The only change in the production as seen at the Atlantic Theatre Company earlier this year is that spike-haired Alison Pill is now playing the rifle-toting, sexually ready 16-year-old Mairead -- the only female role in the piece. (Kerry Condon, who played the part at the Atlantic, had to return to Europe to film the HBO series Rome). Pill's performance is just dandy and will be even dandier when she learns not to rush and therefore garble some of her lines.
One could call Inishmore a black comedy, but with all the fresh blood that's spilled before final fade-out, it might better be termed a bright-red comedy. You could also call it a post-Jacobean tragicomedy and get somewhere near to suggesting the humor and gravity in which it's awash. You can definitely call it uproariously funny -- although not every ticket buyer will be amused by McDonagh's idea of a hearty laugh. The London-born playwright with Ireland coursing through his imagination doesn't know from polite boulevard fare. With him, it's shanties and shabeens and the grisly things that transpire in them.
Except for his brilliant, surreal drama The Pillowman, he has to date devoted his playwriting efforts to two sets of trilogies: The Leenane Trilogy, which includes the award-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, and A Skull in Connemara; and The Aran Trilogy, which includes this play along with The Cripple of Inishmaan (seen here some years ago in a misguided production) and The Banshees of Inisheer (still unproduced in New York). Much of what distinguishes McDonagh's work is his ability to execute a theatrical trick that few others can: treating a serious subject with sobriety and sending it up at the same time.
The hilarity and the tragedy of The Lieutenant of Inishmore revolve around the Irish troubles. The volatile -- okay, ballistic -- protagonist here is Padraic (David Wilmot), who's been part of an IRA splinter group call Davey and Donny know that they'll be in a pickle when the short-fused Padraic arrives to find a dead Wee Thomas. So the dimwits contrive to shoe-polish a tabby cat belonging to Davey's sister, Mairead, who can shoot out a cow's eyes from 60 paces. For her part, Mairead isn't shaking in her Army boots at the prospect of Padraic's return; in fact, she's waiting to join him in whatever splinter group he decides to embed himself. Also waiting for Padraic, with murder in their eyes, are three men whose IRA interests seethe in them: Christy (Andrew Connolly), Joey (Dashiell Eaves), and Brendan (Brian d'Arcy James).
McDonagh deploys his characters like ingredients in an Irish stew -- and this cluster is stewing, all right. They go after each other with pistols and rifles at the ready as the playwright makes his points about the futility of the fight for a free Ireland, a country that is in a quiet period now but wasn't when the play was written.
Directors like Wilson Milam, who helms this production, must celebrate McDonagh's comic vision because it gives them so much workable material -- and Milam misses no chance to exploit the quirks of this play. Neither does the extraordinary ensemble of actors, who are clad smartly by Theresa Squires. (We should also salute Anthony Giordano for the special effects he provides during the final explosive scenes.) Square of jaw and twinkling of eye, Wilmot offers a Padraic who's tough as bullets but also, well, a ****-cat, whereas Gleeson's Davey is an appropriately sustained whine. The American newcomers do just as well; Gerety's Donny is an appropriately sustained bleat; Connolly, Eaves, and James have the right mealy menace; and Jeff Binder as the upside-down drug dealer plays his one scene with unexpected vigor.
McDonagh's genius is that, while making us double over with laughter, he sincerely laments a divided Ireland. Indisputably, this playwright has the goods, and he flaunts them again in The Lieutenant of Inishmore.
re: Inishmore Reviews#6
Posted: 5/3/06 at 10:13pmHooray for the good reviews! Let's hope the other reviews will be positive.
"I'm not in Bambi and I'm not blonde!" - Idina Menzel
re: Inishmore Reviews#7
Posted: 5/3/06 at 10:16pmAllison Pill was PHENOMENAL in Dear Wendy
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/20/05
re: Inishmore Reviews#8
Posted: 5/3/06 at 11:22pm
Just a request for the people posting excerpts...
PLEASE do your best to exclude segments with spoilers. Some of us haven't had a chance to see the show yet, and and I (at least) don't want the ending spoiled until I can either see the show or get my hands on the script.
Thank you in advance.
re: Inishmore Reviews#9
Posted: 5/3/06 at 11:39pm
The Times simply reprinted Brantley's rave for the Off-Broadway production. Here's an excerpt:
"Blood winds up on pretty much every surface in "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," Martin McDonagh's gleeful, gruesome play about political terrorism in rural Ireland, which won the Olivier Award (the British equivalent of the Tony) for best comedy. The red stuff is splashed, spattered and smeared over walls, floors, furniture, clothes, skin and cat's fur. The fur is the main thing. For it is a mutilated cat that sets off the Euripidean cycle of murderous revenge that occupies two fast hours of hit-and-run traffic on the stage.
Theatergoers familiar with Mr. McDonagh's work (which includes the Tony-nominated "Pillowman" and "Beauty Queen of Leenane") are by now used to the acts of torture, humiliation and interfamilial skull bashing that figure in his work. But with "Lieutenant," directed with a steady gaze and acute theatrical instinct by Wilson Milam, Mr. McDonagh raises the carnage factor to a level that rivals Quentin Tarantino's.
Unlike Mr. Tarantino, Mr. McDonagh isn't trying to elicit the poetry in surreally stylized violence or the aesthetic content in shades of red. There's nothing pretty about the gruesome mess in which these gun- and razor-toting characters, members of splintered splinter groups of the Irish Republican Army, find themselves. And they seem to regard as merely mundane the abominations they commit in the name of causes they can't always remember.
But they might as well face it, they're addicted to blood. So, this play suggests with devilish obliqueness, are we."
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/theater/reviews/28inis.html
Broadway Star Joined: 9/20/05
re: Inishmore Reviews#10
Posted: 5/3/06 at 11:42pmSo will the show now sell well because of the great reviews even though they are old?
re: Inishmore Reviews#11
Posted: 5/3/06 at 11:42pm
The AP is a Rave:
"The bloody mayhem that envelops Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" explodes as effectively on Broadway as it did off-Broadway.
In fact, McDonagh's dark, dangerous satire on Irish terrorism plays even sharper, surer and funnier in the larger confines of Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, where the comedy reopened Wednesday after a successful run at the small Atlantic Theater Company.
McDonagh, London-born but with roots in Ireland, is a natural storyteller with an idiosyncratic way with a phrase. He's got that great Irish gift of gab, conversations that a strong cast, under the astute direction of Wilson Milam, deliver with remarkable finesse."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/artandlife/1404AP_Theater_Inishmore_Revisited.html
Broadway Legend Joined: 2/15/05
re: Inishmore Reviews#12
Posted: 5/4/06 at 12:10amDid the production not change at all from off to Broadway? Like a new set design? etc.
re: Inishmore Reviews#13
Posted: 5/4/06 at 12:13amEverything's the same except one actress had to leave and go back to work on the HBO series Rome, and she was replaced by Allison Pill, who's very good here. That's why some publications are just reprinting their reviews from when the show opened at The Atlantic a few months ago.
re: Inishmore Reviews#14
Posted: 5/4/06 at 12:19am
USA Today gives it 4 out of 4 Stars:
"I can't elaborate too much without revealing a late, delicious plot twist. And it would be criminal to dampen any of the surprise in this play from McDonagh's Aran Islands trilogy, the smartest, funniest new work to land on Broadway since ... well, since McDonagh's last offering, 2005's The Pillowman.
Though not as deeply or intricately disturbing as Pillowman, Inishmore is a lot gorier. Cat lovers and the generally squeamish should be advised that feline blood — fake, of course — is spilled, though not in nearly as great abundance as fake human blood.
But however extreme the violence and collateral damage in this very, very dark comedy, there's nothing gratuitous about it. The action in Inishmore is, like the dialogue, stunningly taut and efficient. At a time when irony is being given a bad name, in theater and elsewhere, by writers who aren't nearly as clever as they think they are, McDonagh's fierce, unpretentious wit is a treasure.
Better still, there's a message in his madness. The deadpan and slapstick brutality in Inishmore reinforces the hopelessness and banality of its lost, raging characters, played by actors whom Wilson Milam directs to brisk perfection."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2006-05-03-inishmore_x.htm
Broadway Legend Joined: 2/15/05
re: Inishmore Reviews#15
Posted: 5/4/06 at 12:44amOh okay. Cause it seems like some shows like "Well" changed from off to Broadway.
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