LUCKY GUY: Consensus

I don't know if I hold any sort of consensus but it was good, maybe very good -- but not fabulous, or even close to it. The biggest flaw, to me is the style in which the story is framed. Some fabulous individual performances. I thought Courtney B. Vance was, BY FAR, the best thing about the show. It was one of the Tony Nominations I was most happy about.

However, the show is presentational and involves a LOT of yelling. It was exhausting. I do not think that Hanks performance holds a candle to Tracey Letts' in Virginial Woolf. More's the pity that Hanks will likely win.

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Updated On: 5/19/13 at 02:25 AM

dramamama611, I totally agree. It was an ok play, the cast is the only thing great about it, with Courtney B. Vance the standout. Tom Hanks, well, is Tom Hanks, a natural who buries himself in a role, played a fine Mike McAlary. But the selling point for this play is the cast.

Also agree, Tracey Letts' performance should win over Hanks.

LimelightMike, if you are a huge fan of the cast or Mike McAlary, then it may be worth it, otherwise I would think twice about it.

I thought it was bad.

I thought the play was okay, but I was hoping for more. It's very much in a style of "and then this happened." I didn't find McAlary to be so compelling that I thought it was necessary to write a 2+ hour play about him, and I frankly felt I knew very little about his being (rather than his accomplishments) at the end.

Hanks is good but not great. He is a bit miscast age-wise (McAlary was 41 when he died and in his 20s in the beginning; Hanks looks over 50 the whole time). But he doesn't have much of a character to play. He is probably going to win the Tony but both Letts and Lane deserve it more.

I was surprised by the 6 Tony noms. It only got one Drama Desk nod (for Hanks) and 2 OCC noms (for Hanks and Best Play). It was not a factor at all in the NY Critics Circle voting (it didn't get any votes at all in the first round).

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Bump.

I wrote this in my journal while the play was in previews. Obviously I was wrong, the play is incredibly successful financially, and maybe even artistically by some standards. The reviews I read were extremely tactful and sort of danced around the flaws of the script:

I love Nora Ephron and her work with all my heart. In the weeks following her unexpected death last summer, I really felt like I was mourning the loss of a friend, and certainly a mentor. I have such a strong desire to write and direct for stage and screen, but I also have a strong inclination to be an essayist, and she did it all with great success.

I fear, however, that Lucky Guy, her final work, will not be such a success. I could be wrong, but I predict unfavorable notices from critics when it opens, due mostly to the writing (in terms of concept and structure). Tom Hanks and Maura Tierney and the rest of the cast do all they can with the material, and of course George C. Wolfe's direction brings the text as close to life as possible. Apparently, though, in writing a play about journalism and reporting, Nora felt the need to have the story "reported" to the audience rather than shown to the audience.

The first things we were taught in introductory playwriting were the benefits of showing vs. telling, and while I'm all for breaking rules, I'm all for breaking rules when it's innovative and it works. Unfortunately Nora's not here to see that it doesn't work. There are one or two brief moments when the concept is effective, when we're given the same kernel of a fact from different angles by different reporters, demonstrating the power of the journalist to spin a story, but having an overwhelming majority of the action told to us was colossally boring, even with an actor as great as Tom Hanks onstage.

It really breaks my heart to write this. I really, really wanted to love this play for Nora, and maybe some people will thinks it's genius, but from what I could hear of audience members leaving the theater, there was a general dislike of the play itself.

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