Pillowman Reviews

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 6:15pm

Broadway.com is Positive:

"By a strange coincidence, the two strongest plays on Broadway this year address the dangers of recognizing and dealing with child predators. Just 10 days after Doubt tackled these questions, Martin McDonagh blasts back onto the theatrical scene with The Pillowman, a hall-of-mirrors look at life profanely imitating art and vice versa. But the relentless logic of John Patrick Shanley's parable gives way here to something much messier, much nastier and only a little less gratifying."

"McDonagh has given these characters, particularly Katurian, far fewer defining quirks than he has in his past work. (Unfortunately, Crudup often fills this gap with tics that spotlight technique rather than actual emotion.) And the play's tales within tales and crimes within crimes, for all their gruesome allure, have a distancing quality. The same holds true for the two investigators' Mutt-and-Jeff antics, even though Ivanek finds grace notes in his crusading-cop role and Goldblum is even more successful shading his usual off-kilter cadences with an absurdist menace.

All four of the characters were damaged by their parents as children, and the specifics of Katurian's and Michal's childhood are so hideous, so baroque in their deprivations and symmetrical in their resolutions, that the whole play feels on some level like a big Katurian story. Complicated, virtuosic and powerfully acted, especially by Stuhlbarg and Goldblum, The Pillowman is tough to shake out of your head afterward. By conjuring a potent mixture of shivers, laughs and gasps, it helps reclaim Broadway as a receptive home for uncomfortable ideas."


http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=509953

[ButtonstheClown]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 6:18pm

When my friend and I saw RENT, his parents went to see Pillowman.

They said it was VERY good.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 6:32pm

Talking Broadway is a Rave:

"When a story is good, it's irresistible: How easy is it even for adults to turn up their noses at a children's tale if it's charmingly written and engagingly presented? And don't children love to be scared? And don't many people count on just about anything new and different to give them the satisfaction that coarsely manufactured, run-of-the-mill entertainment so seldom provides?

If you've been feeling that way about much of the current Broadway season, the cure you need might have arrived at the Booth. The play that just opened there, Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, addresses not only the terrifying and redemptive power of stories and the hold they can exert on us, but spins a spellbinding yarn of its own along the way."
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"McDonagh is no less brilliant, and his control over the proceedings is equally absolute, and welcome. To be guided through the distressing corridors of a play like this one by a guide of McDonagh's skill and subtlety is welcome in a theatrical year where the tendency has been to hit audiences over the head with more and more about less and less. You may be disturbed or you may be unsettled by The Pillowman, but even if you experience a sleepless night or two, it's worth it for this heady dream of a show."


http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/Pillowman.html

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 6:34pm

Sure not too much Crudup love in the Bway.com review. Actually, except for a few bits here and there, he hardly mentions the acting.
Updated On: 4/10/05 at 06:34 PM

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 8:49pm

bump

[QueenMuppet]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 8:53pm

That sounds very promising so far. I really hope they get the raves they deserve.

Waiting....

QM

[TGIF]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 8:54pm

mef, you beat me too it. Anymore? I checkd the NY Times website and its not up there yet.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 9:45pm

Kuchwara of The AP is a rave:

"Yet the play's most accomplished writing occurs in a scene when Katurian and his childlike brother, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, are placed together in the same cell. There is a sweet-tempered give-and-take between the two siblings. It's the storyteller and an eager, appealing audience of one in perfect harmony -- before the unexpected happens.

Stuhlbarg, a lumpish, baby-faced man, gives one of those extraordinary performances that seems so astonishingly real that you can't quite believe it is acting. And Crudup serves as a gracious straightman to the histrionics of the less fortunate brother.

The London-born McDonagh has a wicked, often unnerving sense of what is funny, much of it involving pain. Consider what happens to that gorgon of a mother in "Beauty Queen," a woman who meets an untimely end, and the Cain-and-Abel mayhem between two brothers in "The Lonesome West," one of McDonagh's more underappreciated plays.

In "The Pillowman," violence arrives in the telling of those stories. The play's title, by the way, is also the name of one of Katurian's short stories. At the center of the tale is a 9-foot creature, made up entirely of fluffy pink pillows. He's an obliging fellow whose job is to get children to kill themselves -- before they have a chance to live a disappointing life.

It's a fearful image -- one that haunts the play and one which lingers long after the curtain has come down. You will see this "Pillowman" in your dreams."

AP Review

[QueenMuppet]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 9:47pm

You know, I always thought that Stuhlbarg was the real star of this show, I'm so happy he's recognized for his performance.

QM

[BwayTheatre11]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:01pm

I am so happy this season is full of excellent plays.

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:05pm

With all of these pretty nice reviews so far, the thing that intruiges me the most is how little Crudup is mentioned. Oh this play could have been sooooo much better with a more commanding actor in that role.

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:07pm

Talkin' Broadway and AP both gave Crudup a rave.

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:07pm

This year, we have some tough competition:
MUSICAL- Spelling Bee, DRS, or Spamalot?
PLAY- Pillowman or Doubt?
ACTRESS (MUSICAL)-Clark or Foster?
ACTOR (MUSICAL)- NLB or Tim Curry?
Score- LITP, Spamalot, or Bee?

and those are just off the top of my head.

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:11pm

Wicked...

I agree the compition is fierce this season, but I really dont think there is much between Curry & Butz. Butz has this one in the bag.

And for score, Im sorry but the DRS score is far far superior to the boring Piaza, and 100times better than SPAMALOTS sub-par score.

And eventhough The Pillowman is getting good online notices thus far, Brantly will have the final word, so we shall see (along with THE POST & NEWS) - I do believe DOUBT has the slight edge and the power to win. Updated On: 4/10/05 at 10:11 PM

[Matt_G]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:12pm

SPAMALOT had a score?

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:12pm

I'd say score is between DRS and BEE.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:14pm

The only mentions of Crudup in the entire AP review:

"The antsy Katurian, portrayed by a credibly agitated Billy Crudup,"

and

"And Crudup serves as a gracious straightman to the histrionics of the less fortunate brother."

How is that a rave for Crudup?

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:17pm

Now that I re-read that, I can see that it is not a rave. Maybe it's time for a new prescription...

[Razz77]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:23pm

I'm so glad to see this show getting raves already and am keeping my fingers crossed for the NY Times and NY Post to love it just as much...

I saw this show not knowing or expecting much of anything and left being one of its biggest fans...

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:24pm

LOL - MEF- Im starting to like you more and more! :)

being "serviceable" to anything isn't that great! He was just miscast, and in my eyes the play suffers because of it.

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 10:25pm

Razz-Brantley gave it a rave when he reviewed the London production two years ago. I suspect that he will follow suit here.

[Princeton78]

Posted: 4/10/05 at 11:54pm

AP seems to be a rave..
Nada from The Times yet though...

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/11/05 at 12:01am

USA Today gives it Three-and-a-half stars and calls it the Best Play of the season:

"The first thought I had after seeing Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman at London's National Theatre last year, once I had dried my eyes and regained my breath, was that the play would never make it to Broadway. Call me a skeptic, but I couldn't fathom how a drama dealing graphically with the torture and murder of children (and adults) might be viewed as manna for matinee crowds.

Luckily, I was wrong. The production of Pillowman (* * * ½ out of four) that opened Sunday at the Booth Theatre won't likely challenge, say, Mamma Mia! at the box office. But those who skip it will miss the best play of the season — a season that has included stellar efforts from the likes of August Wilson, John Patrick Shanley and Michael Frayn."


http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2005-04-10-pillowman_x.htm

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 4/11/05 at 12:02am

Sunday night openings always suck on the internet. No Times, Post, or News and its midnight (lord, this is almost like waiting for the next days paper - imagine!:)

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/11/05 at 12:34am

Variety is Mixed-to-Positive:

"Anyone who saw "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" might have suspected that Martin McDonagh has parent issues. But the conniving hag of a mother in that savage slice of Irish bog-gothic is June Cleaver compared with the monstrous ma and pa figures in "The Pillowman." While its themes include bad parenting, damaged children and the creation and protection of art in a restrictive climate, this claustrophobic horror show is concerned less with provocative reflection than with spinning a hypnoticHypnotic yarn. The prodigiously talented playwright has honored his own mandate -- "The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story" -- with a mordant, unsettling and vividly cinematic play that echoes Polanski as much as Pinter.

Departing from the murky, mythic Ireland of the mind that is the setting of the Leenane trilogy, "The Pillowman" inhabits a far more abstract unreality, an imaginary totalitarian state in an unnamed, vaguely East European-sounding country. Freed from rusticity, the precision honed, sardonic lyricism of McDonagh's writing seems right at home in a fictional landscape that harnesses the macabre spirit of Edward Gorey, the dreamworld of Borges and the sinister enchantment of the Brothers Grimm, shot through with a profane nastiness that makes it entirely contemporary.

The second Broadway incarnation of a National Theater production this season after "Democracy," the Anglo-Irish playwright's work fares considerably better in its transatlantic crossing -- and particularly in its recasting with American actors -- than the Michael Frayn drama.

But it suffers from a central stroke of miscasting in Billy Crudup, whose naturalistic style sits pallidly and unconvincingly on Katurian K. Katurian, a writer hauled in for questioning by police when the gruesome child killings of his stories are replicated in real-life murders. Crudup is a fine actor and always watchable, but he seems too bland and pretty here, barely hinting at the passionate nature of a man who values the survival of his art above all else."
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"There's a coldness to the play that will be offputting for many, and the scene in which Katurian and Michal are locked in the same cell is overly protracted despite compelling, painfully vulnerable work from Stuhlbarg. His Michal -- imagine Robin Williams channeling Jack Nance in "Eraserhead" -- is a lumpen sweet-natured man-child whose role suggests the blackest interpretations possible of the sacrifices and inspirations that feed and color art. But despite the harrowing drama of the brothers' encounter, the scene becomes punishing and devoid of resonant emotion.

The play only truly ignites and comes together after intermission in a bracing second act that begins with its most audaciously theatrical flourish, a story titled "The Little Jesus." A shockingly funny anti-parable played against cartoonish stained-glass windows, it concerns a young girl convinced she is the second coming of Christ, whose parents use drastic measures to dissuade her. The visual correlation between a barbed-wire crown of thorns and an electrode helmet is one of the play's more wickedly twisted quips.

Whether it's the unblinking harshness of McDonagh's writing or the wiry animation of Goldblum's magnetic performance, the most intriguing character onstage is Tupolski, and his scenes, particularly in act two, are what give this interrogation nightmare its singular edge. Each of the characters has his own grimly formative back story and Tupolski's emerges obliquely after his own memorable stab at the creation of fiction with a hilarious mini-narrative about a Chinese deaf-mute boy and an oncoming train."
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"The malevolent power of fiction is a constant here, notably in the haunting title tale of a 9-foot-tall man made of fluffy pink pillows, who travels around persuading children to take their own lives and escape the agonies that lie ahead in life. It's no bedtime story, to be sure, but the harsh poetry and bold manipulation of "The Pillowman" make for a strikingly original play, something now seldom seen on Broadway."




Variety (requires subscription)