"Can anyone explain to me exactly why they didn't enjoy Adam's performance?"
Oh, quite easily. I thought he was not the least bit guilty, I felt he didn't use the anger of the character as a way to hide his own feelings. I never, not even for a moment, felt like he has just been through rehab, that his girlfriend had died from AIDS, that HE had AIDS, and that ANY of this was bothering him.
I think Roger needs to be extremely guilty, and he needs to have a lot of fire and anger, but we also need to know that it's coming from a place of pain. From a fear of connecting with another person with AIDS because he might suffer the pain of losing ANOTHER person to the disease. From a fear of being sucked back into the world of drugs.
And I think that fear needs to almost shut him down, so at the beginning of the story he's alive but barely living. His mind is so caught in the negative, he can't find the positive things in life. And we NEED to see him go through this huge transformation in the end to being a loving person who has learned in his heart the value of life, even when things seem bad. It's through Roger that we learn the most important message of the show.
So, to me, Pascal did not show any of that. He was just...there. Was he natural? Yes. I never really felt he was being flat out phony, but there's far more to acting than simply being natural. It's doing your job in order to enhance the effectiveness of the entire piece, and with Roger especially, that's incredibly important.
He was fabulous in the Original Broadway Cast. Fabulous. Raw, passionate, and he captured something very tortured about Roger. Despite some lack of specifity and refinement, he certainly was onto something very powerful.
In the film, I felt opposite. I felt he did just fine with being natural and specific. He was much less "I'm ANGRY *yells*", but the rest of it? Not even remotely there. I'd rather have that raw passion than a static, boring character.
Updated On: 1/15/06 at 07:27 PM