My thoughts on ENRON

The accents of the London cast were pretty grating in London, I dread to think what they would have sounded like to a New Yorker - and to be honest, I think that the original cast opening the show in New York would have made people even more likely to question why a bunch of Brits were telling Americans their own story (if you see what I mean).

I do think Goold is a wonderful director with a quite incredible imagination, but I do think that it's backfired a little here - unlike his productions of plays by Shakespeare or other great writers, all that his brilliant ideas end up doing here is showing up the lack of brilliant ideas in Prebble's text.

Updated On: 5/8/10 at 07:57 PM

Check out this thread and click on the links the posts. Some interesting stuff.

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.php?boardid=1&boardname=bway&thread=1015527#4010606

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I am just glad Stephen Kunken received his well-deserved Tony nomination.

I am just glad Stephen Kunken received his well-deserved Tony nomination.

Oh me too!

If Enron had in fact been written by an American author, and been directed and designed by an American team, does anyone think it would have then been a hit?

For my money, Enron failed because it wasn't very good, not because of any resentment about it's English creative team.

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I saw Stephen Schwartz and Duncan Shiek there the other night.

I was there that night too! Stephen Flaherty and Kim Grigsby were also in the audience.

"I also saw Enron this afternoon. Without a question, the most unique theatrical experience I have yet had the pleasure to attend. It was nothing short of breathtaking from start to finish. The show was polished, inventive, witty, bitingly satirical, and carried out with the greatest degree of care and professionalism.

This is not a show to be soon forgotten. In my opinion, this is the Assassins of our generation. Hopefully one day it will be fully appreciated in the states. I am so glad I jumped at seeing this."

Midnight Radio, I agree with you 200%. I was also there at the matinee- I got the last Enron logo T-shirt :P

I'm going to post all my thoughts in a vlog tomorrow night when I come home from New York. If you hated the show, you won't like my vlog.

Also: Schwartz and Sheik were there Friday? F*CK me! I wish I saw them...but then again, I might've freaked out. Are they planning on working on anything? I'd like to hear THAT score :)

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I saw it this afternoon as well, and also loved it. Though I can't imagine paying around 120 bucks to see it!

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I'm still on the fence about the show, having seen it last night... I wasn't bored at any time, but I was never completely enthralled. Since I work in design, though, I had enough to look at to keep me interested when the text got too didactic.

I'm going to go out on a limb, though, and say that this show will bring in some Tony hardware, since it's the only play nominated with an extensive sound design (Cork's work on Red was serviceable, and I forgot there was a sound designer for A View from the Bridge midway through the second act [Admittedly, Scott Lerher does some brilliant work with musicals, but VftB was so subtle it practically wasn't there]).

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"As for its success or failure, I think the biggest problem is it opened here two years too late. By now, America has moved past the Enron collapse- there's a new administration in the White House, people have moved on to new scandals, etc. "

That's not entirely true. If it is fantastic, the subject matter of Enron and its collapse would bounce back into people's minds. Two years after a collapse like that and what it did isn't too late. If they did a show about Madoff five years from now and it was fantastic or not, people will know who Bernie Madoff is. Sure, the original hype of what happened with Enron may have fizzled, but the event itself is still recent history and people remember it very very well.

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I think there is a large potential audience for this kind of play as many men who avoid the theater perk up when the subject is money and business.

Friends with good taste in theater were about equally split on this play; many really liked it.

The British are often moralistic and judgemental about Americans, and when I saw this tone in "Enron" I knew it would have trouble.

...a few thoughts of my own

The real problem, for me, was the play, whose message was as subtle as a sledgehammer. I found the parade of easy metaphors tiring, sophomoric and just so literal: blind mice as willfully blind board members, velociraptors as formulas that consume debt, blind justice represented by a blindfolded person holding a scale. Much was made of the cleverness of the Lehman Brothers being portrayed as a pair of conjoined twins. What point did that make? If there were actually any Lehman brothers around during Enron's rise (there weren't, by the way, no Lehman family members have been involved with the company since 1969 [thanks 5 seconds on Google!]) what is the joke behind their being joined? Any individual company usually operates as a single unit. Now, if several different financial institutions were portrayed as being in lock-step together (maybe a chorus line of them tied at the ankles), that's a joke I get.

The funny thing is, I thought the HBO documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" was more entertaining. Prebble and Goold clearly studied "The Smartest..." very closely--there is a scene in the film where stock prices are superimposed on Skilling's face, an effect used over and over in the play. The film is filled with clips offering wry commentary on the narrative: a scene about Enron creating profits out of thin air, is intercut with 5 seconds of old black and white footage of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat: an unexpected and funny blip of commentary to lubricate the dry facts. Goold and Prebble have similarly intercut the play with bits like their light saber and traders dances, the line dance and the commodities chorale. The problem is many of the "numbers" are not a part of the tale being told--most don't even really comment on the action. And they tended to be too long. I can imagine a draft of the play including: "The action will now stop, and traders will sing jargon and numbers related to trading aluminum, gold and pork bellies." When this particular number ended, the afternoon I saw the show, there was a long pause, followed by a smattering of confused applause when the audience realized that it was over and no real point had been made. (The general audience reaction to the play that day was abysmal. I felt terrible for the cast.)

Many critics found the design and effects in the show to be remarkable and innovative. To me, the show looked kind of cheap for 5 million dollars. I saw the de rigueur projections, constant use of the age-old transparent scrim and ten seconds of pyrotechnics. Some beautiful tube-shaped hanging lights and lighted floor panels created some nice pictures, however.

What I did appreciate was a very talented cast and crew giving it their all to make a flawed piece of theater work. That made my ticket price worth paying and always will.