OLD ACQUAINTANCE Reviews

I guess I'll be the de facto review poster, now that Margo's gone.

The nobodys on Broadway.com seemed to enjoy the show. The video doesn't seem to be working, but the less of actually seeing the people, the better.

"There were plenty of laughs. It was quickly written and the dialogue was really smart and funny. It was really natural," said Phyllis, 46, the "domestic goddess."

"Margaret Colin was great. She's very pretty and a very good actress," said Phil, 73, the retired cop.

And Audrey, 63, the nurse raves, "Harriet Harris, who plays Millie, was really very, very funny."



http://www.broadway.com/gen/general.aspx?ci=550073

Can't believe they brought Word of Mouth back this season. Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn DAMN!!!!!!!!

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Updated On: 7/4/07 at 07:43 PM

Although I enjoyed the show overall, I'm not surprised the reviews aren't glowing, because the play has not aged well. The actresses are deserving of the praise, however.

My biggest problem with the show was that the daughter character was so obnoxious to me that I could not have cared less how her romantic entaglements--such a central part of the plot--worked themselves out.

Brantley's up. Mixed to negative, I'd say. He was much more complimentary of the play than others and adored Colin, but he thought Harris' campiness threw off the balance too much.

Two very different roads to the past are being traveled by two very different actresses in the Roundabout Theater Company’s mildly entertaining, maddeningly disjunctive revival of “Old Acquaintance,” John Van Druten’s 1940 comedy of high-heeled and round-heeled sexual mores in literary Manhattan.

Ms. Colin comfortably inhabits the era in which the play is set; she makes the decades fall away. Ms. Harris presents the same world through the perspective of a contemporary comedian who has watched a lot of old movies; she makes a distant age look even more distant. Fans of fine-grained acting will admire Ms. Colin, while fans of diva-spoofing drag queens may well adore Ms. Harris.

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As she demonstrated in her disarming portrait of a monster movie star in “Sweet Bird of Youth” at Williamstown last summer, Ms. Colin is a virtuoso of textures of ambivalence. She presents characters who act one way, think another and feel, deep down, another way altogether.

Ms. Harris has become a droll and stylish caricaturist in musicals like “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (for which she won a Tony) and “Mame” (at the Kennedy Center). And the vain, self-dramatizing Milly brings out her archest comic excesses. Hysteria, drunkenness, spitefulness all come with exaggerated punctuation.

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If only everyone could stay on the same page. “Old Acquaintance” has the potential to be a tasty slice of summer chick lit, with its sumptuous sets (by Alexander Dodge) and expensive-looking costumes (David C. Woolard).

But it’s all too revealing that the scene for which the movie is most famous almost passes beneath the radar here. That’s when Kit, having finally had enough of Milly’s selfishness, takes her by the shoulders and shakes her. It is hard, of course, for a moment of physical contact to have much impact when you feel that the participants have been spliced together from mismatched celluloid strips.


Full review

Updated On: 6/28/07 at 11:09 PM

Brantley's review is predictable.

It's interesting to go back and read the Times review of the original production that opened in 1940 (there's a link to it on the page of this Times review).

I agree most with Murray's sentiments.

Brantley has his favorites, that no matter what they do, he will *gush* with praise for them. Colin is one of those performers. Not that her performance here, in my opinion, isn't worthy of praise, but he does the same thing here that he did with his review for DEFIANCE. He sacrifices the entire production leaving Colin's performance as the only redeeming factor. I'm tired of his stalker love letters. I'm also tired of his making reviews for the theatre about movies -- comparisons to movies, if it's as good as the movie, the performances in the movie, if the scenes that made the movie so great are lived up to in this production of the play. First off, the movie of OLD ACQUAINTANCE was an adaptation of the original play. Second, this is a singular production of the original play. It stands on its own. Shut up about the damn movies. Brantley should move to Hollywood and become a film critic, where he can write stalk letters as a side gig. I'm so tired of reading pages detailing how the third eyelash on Kristin Chenoweth's left eye is the only hope left for American theatre.

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A perfect example as to why I loathe Foster.

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Foster, I'm with you here. I've grown weary of the Brantley stalking since he sold us the overly sophisticated, less than raucous Murphy Ruth in WT -- fighting words at this board, but I stand by them. His narrow recommendations are increasing limited to the diva du jour whose underplayed performance deconstructs a role. Often, underplaying means desaturated -- emptied of brighter colors.

Here, the Colin performance is perfectly adequate, and she's a lovely actress. But her Kit is hardly the sort of intricately worked out characterization that magically transports us back to a bygone era, as he claims. All of the layering -- the amvibalence -- Brantley finds in her interpretation mystifies me. She gives intelligent line readings -- often of some pretty ordinary lines. But when she's off stage -- as she is for a lot of act two -- she's not missed. And when she's dueling with Harris, why can't her brilliant underplaying make us care or even watch her? We don't. As directed by Wilson, she's not a very compelling center for a production that needs a luminous presence with a comic edge to hold it together.

That puts too much pressure on her sparring partner...

Yes, Harris is over the top in places, but she also injects the proceedings with the sort of comic zest that drives us through the creaking and unsatisfying plot twists. What Brantley ignores is how little the low-key Colin Kit serves the play's machinery. She's almost entirely reactive, at times flat.

On a day when we're reeling at the YOUNG F. ticket prices, might I rant vis a vis ACQUANTAINCE: Brantley's remarks about it possibly being passable chick lit are of course in a vacuum. A man who never buys his own theater tickets fails to take into account that $86 bucks isa helluva price tag for passable chick lit. Commerical venue is a powerful context. If this were at the Berkshire fest or Williamstown, we'd enjoy its creakiness far more. But on 42nd street, with these prices? In 2007 , if a broadway production is created around an old chestnut, it better be damned tasty chestnut.

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Updated On: 6/29/07 at 10:24 AM