THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION Reviews

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 4:10pm

A couple are up early --


The Financial Times is Positive:

"In interviews, Sorkin – whose first play, A Few Good Men, was turned into a hit film and who wrote the upcoming feature Charlie Wilson’s War – has said that he is better at dialogue than at storytelling.

In the new play, however, it is the contrary. Both the Farnsworth story (technical invention of television, loss of the fight to patent it, family tragedy) and the Sarnoff saga (immigrant tale of boy wonder’s rise, dazzling corporate career, dashed dream of making radio and television non-consumerist) are recounted with dizzying skill.

The dialogue, meanwhile, gives mostly the appearance of panache: the biggest laugh comes late in the evening from a recycled joke about oral sex. For my taste, Farnsworth relies too heavily on narration; by the time Farnsworth and Sarnoff meet face-to-face I was so grateful for the dramatisation that I didn’t mind finding out that Sorkin had invented their encounter.

In spite of its structural weaknesses, Farnsworth manages to be highly enjoyable. For that, credit the director, Des McAnuff. With only a slight variation on the two-tier set that he used in Jersey Boys, he slides the large company of actors around the stage with characteristic fleetness."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2a389bca-a1c6-11dc-a13b-0000779fd2ac.html




MTV.com(?) also reviewed it and it's Mostly Positive:

"The most exciting new show on Broadway may be a play about the birth of television. This seems an unlikely subject, but "The Farnsworth Invention," which officially opens Monday night (December 3) at the Music Box Theatre, is a rousing theatrical experience and a triumphant star showcase for its lead actors, Jimmi Simpson and Hank Azaria.

The sleek script by Aaron Sorkin (the Emmy-winning writer of "The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip") crackles with lively sarcasm and zingy asides. And Des McAnuff, the Tony Award-winning director (of the current "Jersey Boys," among many other shows), shapes the play's complex elements — a whirl of scientific background, corporate-media history and penetrating biographical detail — with unflagging clarity. McAnuff is working with a big two-tiered set and a large cast (19 actors, playing a variety of roles and doing on-the-fly set changes, too), but their stage movements have been intricately choreographed by Lisa Shriver, and so he's able to keep the story in nonstop motion. There are no songs in "The Farnsworth Invention" (there is some startling instrumental punctuation), but the show is paced almost like a musical.....

.....Simpson and Azaria prowl the stage like gladiators, trading barbed jibes, needling protests and conflicting versions of the events we're watching — a clever way of dealing with the gray areas in the real-life story. That the script takes some liberties with this tale is to be expected — there are compressions of both characters and chronology. Unfortunately, in one instance, Sorkin ventures beyond the realm of taking liberties into factual distortion. In a proceeding at the U.S. Patent Office, we see a judge rejecting Farnsworth's petition and awarding the rights to the contested television technology to Zworykin. This is the opposite of what actually happened. It was Farnsworth who prevailed, and RCA was eventually compelled to pay him $1 million to license his patents. And although the company's ongoing appeals in the case drained the inventor financially, it's not clear that they ground him down into a depressive, alcoholic has-been — Farnsworth went on to do important work in nuclear fusion, radar and electron microscopy, among other things.

"The Farnsworth Invention" gets a lot of exceedingly complicated history right, though. And Sorkin's gift for vividly distilled characterization and tangy dialogue brings it alive. Simpson and Azaria take it from there, and they take it all the way."

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1575582/20071203/index.jhtml

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 04:10 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 6:23pm

amNY gives it Three-and-a-half Stars:

"Just like Peter Morgan's "Frost Nixon," Sorkin's drama is a fast-paced, compelling, extraordinarily well-staged ensemble drama rooted in 20th Century American history that will likely appeal to a large audience........

.....Tackling a plot that revolves around loopholes in the patent system and photoelectron theory must not have been easy. But Sorkin has endowed his characters with crackling dialogue, sympathetic emotions and risky character choices.

There is so much movement in Des McAnuff's ("Jersey Boys," "Tommy") production that a choreographer is also credited. At a length of merely two hours, "The Farnsworth Invention" is a truly gripping, even somewhat inspiring, experience. Welcome back to Broadway, Mr. Sorkin! As long as you're here, why not write another play?"



http://www.amny.com/entertainment/am-farnsworth1203,0,7051634.story

[uncageg]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 6:30pm

MTV.com?! Have we seen reviews from them before?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 6:31pm

Not that I can remember.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 7:22pm

Variety is Mixed:

"Chronicling the birth of television and the ensuing patent war through the clash between an enterprising scientific genius from Utah and a Russian immigrant turned hard-nosed corporate honcho, "The Farnsworth Invention" tells a fascinating story. But despite Des McAnuff's stylish production, tells is the key word here, not dramatizes. Aaron Sorkin's first new play since "A Few Good Men" in 1989 was originally conceived as a screenplay. The plot-heavy drama is light on fully fleshed-out characters or subtext, making it likely to play more satisfyingly when it inevitably reverts to being a film or cable project.

Not that some audiences won't respond to Sorkin's ingratiating approach, his manicured dialogue and the jingoistic fervor of his paean to good old American innovation -- to the pioneering spirit of pushing boundaries and boldly exploring new frontiers. They just won't necessarily be the sophisticated audiences seeing Broadway plays on the same block, like "Rock 'n' Roll" or "August: Osage County.

It's interesting that McAnuff, set designer Klara Zieglerova and lighting chief Howell Binkley last teamed on "Jersey Boys." There are distinct similarities here in the foot-on-the-accelerator direction as well as in the physical production and extensive use of direct-address narration to trudge through acres of exposition. The chief difference, though, is that "Jersey Boys" has emotional texture and clearly defined conflicts while "Farnsworth" never fully moves beyond its stream of overexplained factoids.....

......The subject matter here is engrossing enough to yield a multi-episode docudrama, and its content ensures that "The Farnsworth Invention" is never uninteresting. But when the playwright enlists his two protagonists to talk the audience through both the human drama and the scientific back story -- pointedly indicating what's important and what will be later on -- the dramaturgical laziness undermines even the most robust narrative."




http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117935557.html?categoryid=1265&cs=1

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 07:22 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 8:14pm

The AP is Negative:

"The Farnsworth Invention," Aaron Sorkin's fanciful look at the birth of television, is long on exposition but short on qualities that could bring it to life on stage _ qualities such as heartfelt, earned emotion, fully developed characters and a modicum of suspense.

In Sorkin's slick reimagining of the battle between
David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America and a founder of the NBC network, and Philo T. Farnsworth, boy genius, to gain the patent for the creation of television, the outcome is announced almost as soon as the evening begins. And then the play proceeds to work its way back to that point.

The results make for a glossy, yet curiously inert docudrama, quite a letdown from the man who has given us such accomplished TV fare as "The West Wing" and "Sports Night" and who obviously has a great deal of affection for the medium that made his name.

But "The Farnsworth Invention" which opened Monday at Broadway's Music Box Theatre, suffers from feeling undernourished and overproduced -- at the same time.


http://www.pr-inside.com/an-ap-arts-review-aaron-sorkin-s-r330190.htm

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 08:14 PM

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 8:20pm

MTV? That is so random. But congrats to them for actually doing some theatre.

[jake6970]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 8:24pm

MTV has really been getting into theatre lately...they did a spring awakening special, they aired legally blonde, and they just had a segment on the strike ending.

[CouldaWouldaShoulda]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 8:43pm

Word of Mouth Review

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:13pm

Theatremania is Positive:

"Obsession, we all know, can lead to madness, destruction, even death. But obsession, of a slightly healthier kind, can have its benefit -- a lesson we're reminded of in Aaron Sorkin's extremely involving new Broadway drama, The Farnsworth Invention, which is being given a highly accomplished and ultra-slick production by Tony Award winner Des McAnuff......

..... Most importantly, for all of the situation's David vs. Goliath aspects, Sorkin resists the temptation to paint either of his lead characters in shades of black and white -- and he is more than ably aided in that goal by the superb performances of Azaria and Simpson, which truly anchor the production. (Indeed, the 16-person ensemble, while consistently fine, don't make much of an impact.) Sarnoff, whom Farnsworth fans have long wanted to paint as a villain and thief, is most definitely a man who knows and gets what he wants -- not always by the cleanest possible means -- but also a person of conscience and good intention. For his part, Farnsworth -- due perhaps to naiveté, insecurity, or even an overwhelming belief in the greater good rather than personal glory -- comes off as a brilliant child-man who is ultimately his own worst enemy.

The Farnsworth Invention is the first show to officially "open" after the 19-day Broadway strike. There's perhaps a certain delicious irony that a man who has repeatedly proved how entertaining television can be is also the one to remind us how important -- and entertaining -- live theater really is."



Isn't he forgetting last night's opening of CYMBELINE?
http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/12197

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:16pm

For those who have seen this, would it have been better as a cable/movie?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:27pm

Probably. If it were rewritten to cut out the bulk of the heavy exposition and constant intrusive narration and let the characters do, speak and behave as they would in real life, rather than having the script constantly TELLING you rather than showing you, it would have been much more effective. Also, it would have helped to flesh out and give dimension to the main characters (who both lack depth and complexity here) and be able to cast the dozens of smaller roles with individual actors rather than having the cast of 16 constantly doubling and tripling, thereby making nearly every character other than the leads seem interchangeable and without dimension, distinction or impact.

The whole thing would have worked far better as a tv movie for HBO.

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 09:27 PM

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:38pm

Well the good news is that you will get to see it as a movie!

This is one of the three films that Steven Spielberg signed on to do with Sorkin.

[April Saul]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:39pm

Kudos, Margo--that was actually the best critique of Farnsworth I've read! I think that observation was dead-on. I liked the show, although I wasn't crazy about it, but it did kind of get in its own way, as you describe...

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:52pm

Thank you Margo. :)

[CouldaWouldaShoulda]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 9:58pm

Brantley

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 10:02pm

The Times is Mixed-to-Negative:

"With billionaire parents now producing bar mitzvah celebrations and sweet-16 parties as if they were major motion pictures, it’s only a matter of time before this spare-no-expense approach is applied to their kids’ school projects. Imagine that Mr. Hedge Fund, with money to burn and many favors to call in, imports a crack combination of writer, director and actors to put across Junior’s oral report with envy-making, A-worthy flair.

The resulting effort might well be something like “The Farnsworth Invention,” the new play by Aaron Sorkin that had its strike-delayed opening last night at the Music Box Theater. This information-crammed, surface-skimming biodrama about the creators of television suggests nothing so much as a classroom presentation on a seven-figure budget.

The show certainly deserves high marks for all those traits that exacting schoolteachers hold dear: conciseness, legibility, correct use of topic sentences, evidence in defense of two sides of an argument and colorful examples to support the main thesis.

Such virtues are given efficient life onstage by a team that includes Des McAnuff, a director known for melding slickness and liveliness (“The Who’s Tommy,” “Big River”), and two appealing stars who hold your attention even when the subject is cathode-ray tubes: Hank Azaria and Jimmi Simpson. Then there’s Mr. Sorkin, who knows from television, having become famous as the originator of the celebrated White House series “The West Wing.” (He is also the author of the pot-boiling military play and movie “A Few Good Men.”)

Whether these combined talents make for compelling theater as well as a peppy educational experience is another matter. “The Farnsworth Invention” — which follows the converging fortunes of Philo T. Farnsworth, a boy genius from Idaho, and David Sarnoff, a New York broadcasting czar born in Russia — is packed with the stuff of high drama: corporate espionage, the death of a child, the Wall Street crash, village-burning Cossacks, even the sinking of the Titanic (which figured in the young Sarnoff’s rise at a telegraph company) and a slew of those eureka moments you associate with easy-reading biographies about scientific discoveries.

And yet you’re likely to leave “The Farnsworth Invention” feeling that you have just watched an animated Wikipedia entry, fleshed out with the sort of anecdotal scenes that figure in “re-enactments” on E! channel documentaries and true-crime shows. This two-hour play is a fast-moving sequence of reflex-stimulating information- and emotion-bites. It never pauses long enough to find depth in any of them........

........Having made a great success in television, Mr. Sorkin knows its pitfalls and limitations inside out. But it’s hard to avoid the impression that, for all its high-reaching ambitions, “The Farnsworth Invention” often shares the glibness and reductionism of which mainstream television is regularly accused. Besides, in recent years, many television dramas — including Mr. Sorkin’s “West Wing,” in its first seasons — have exhibited far more complexity and shading than “The Farnsworth Invention” ever allows. "




http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/theater/reviews/04farn.html?ref=theater

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 10:02 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 10:02pm

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 10:02 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 10:20pm

Talkin Broadway is Mixed:

"After hundreds of football games, boxing matches, and Presidential debates, can it be true that the most exciting fight in the history of television was over the establishment of television?

The answer is yes - and no. With his new play The Farnsworth Invention, which just opened at the Music Box, Aaron Sorkin lays unquestionable claim to the former. His exploration of the genesis of one of mankind's greatest technological achievements, as directed by Des McAnuff, is such a gripping entry in the Broadway season that you'll regret even more the stagehands' strike that kept it shuttered for nearly three weeks.

As for the latter... Well, there's one little matter that throws a frantic jolt of unwelcome snow into the reception of this otherwise extremely entertaining (if emotionally empty) evening: whether or not it happened. Depending on which websites and morning newspapers you read, you may have learned that there's some controversy about Sorkin's take on the animosity between technical wunderkind Philo T. Farnsworth (played here by Jimmi Simpson) and RCA head David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria overshooting dramatic license and landing in the territory of full-blown inaccuracy. With respect to certain key elements - especially the climactic court decision (which will not be revealed here) that officially determined which man possessed television's priority of invention - some major facts do not seem to be in Sorkin's favor........

.........The do-or-die nature of the Farnsworth-Sarnoff contretemps gives Sorkin plenty of opportunity to sharpen and deploy the razor-edged confrontations and Gatling-gun quips that have long categorized his best work on the stage and screen.....

.....But for all Sorkin's facility writing speeches and scenes about matters technical (light tubes, Pyrex sealing caps, the relationship between agriculture and image dissection), legal, and theoretical, he's all but stymied when it comes to approaching the human side of the equation. Farnsworth and Sarnoff are the closest he comes to creating fully rounded characters, and they're defined more by their relationship to each other than anything else. (Their corresponding wives, respectively played by Alexandra Wilson and Nadia Bowers, are little more than set pieces, anonymous to the point of interchangeability.).......

......... In forcing you to appreciate this play - as with much of his work - strictly on an intellectual level, Sorkin robs you of the opportunity for feeling in your bones the importance of Farnsworth and Sarnoff's struggle.

As a result, The Farnsworth Invention invariably seems more suited to TV than to the stage; not coincidentally, it was reportedly adapted from an aborted TV property from several years back..........

.......... But with no underlying heart, The Farnsworth Invention ultimately feels nearly as two-dimensional as the images you see on the small screen. "




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

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 10:20 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 10:47pm

The Chicago Tribune is Mixed-to-Positive:

"Like Peter Morgan’s superior “Frost/Nixon” last season, this is one of those Boomer-friendly, media-savvy, self-aware pieces of effective theater that feel like they owe a lot to TV writing and our celebrity-obsessed culture. But since Sorkin pretty much invented the rapid-fire style of witty dialog that now dominates prime time, it’s hardly reasonable to now accuse Sorkin of being overly indebted to a style he created himself, even if one resists it in the theater......

......Boy, this is a jumpy piece of writing. It feels like the writer is worried the audience might change the channel. That’s not entirely a bad thing. As fans of Sorkin’s TV shows know well, the internal psyche of Sorkin is a very stimulating place in which to dwell for a couple of hours. His characters are uncommonly articulate and witty—albeit without much differentiation. He has mastered all the dramatic rules so well, he can titillate you by deconstructing and then reassembling them. And in this case he certainly knows how to make a dry scientific quest into a provocative piece of theater.

Depending on your point of view, McAnuff is either an ideal or a dangerously simpatico director for Sorkin’s work. He understands its rhythms, its machismo, its need for flash, its desperate need not to linger too long in any one place. Not all of the actors are on the same page here—this is a show that tends to roll too fast over any overtly emotional episodes. And Azaria has both inspired and awkward moments. But the show has one superb performance from Simpson, who catches, in one big, Sorkin-friendly rush of unleashed nervous energy, both the vitality and the pathos of being a flawed genius trying and maybe not fully wanting to stave off the big guys.

He kept reminding me of a former playwright trying—to paraphrase the last line from McAnuff’s “Jersey Boys”—to find his way home. Without wanting to burn any of the bridges he built himself."

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2007/12/theater-review.html

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 10:57pm

So we have:
Theatremania - Positive
amNY - Mostly Positive
MTV.com - Mostly Positive
The Financial Times - Positive
The Chicago Tribune - Mixed-to-Positive
Variety - Mixed
Talkin Broadway - Mixed
The Times - Mixed-to-Negative
AP - Negative

Would you agree in saying that the show got mostly Mixed-to-Positive reviews?

The only thing is that all of the major reviews were Mixed and/or Negative.
Updated On: 12/3/07 at 10:57 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 11:06pm

Well, we still have the reviews from The Daily News, The Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The NY Sun, Reuters, The Newark Star-Ledger, The Bergen Record, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, The Hartford Courant, The Journal News, and Backstage which will all be out by the morning, plus New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Voice, TimeOut NY, The Observer, Bloomberg, Time Magazine, and the LA Times which will all be out in the next few days. So, right now there's no way to come up with any sense of what the overall critical consensus will be (though the trend seems to be mostly mixed reviews -- unfortunately the postive and mixed-to-positive reviews come from sources that have next to zero impact on ticket sales; of the ones that have come out so far, The Times, Variety and The AP are the only ones that really count).

Updated On: 12/3/07 at 11:06 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 11:29pm

NY1 is Mixed-to-Negative:

"Aaron Sorkin's new play "The Farnsworth Invention" is something of a hybrid – a cross between theatre and docudrama – and while we're given the impression this is a mostly factual telling about the invention of television, it seems Sorkin took quite a bit of dramatic license for this work.

That's disturbing considering that it's rendered as an historical account. Despite some outstanding performances, “The Farnsworth Invention” disappoints on two fronts. As history, at least according to Farnsworth's sons and biographer, it's dishonest; and as a play, it's more concerned with history than drama..........

.........Ultimately, the play doesn't quite fit the medium. It's plot-heavy with dozens of quick scenes shifting back and forth featuring more than 120 characters, most of whom barely register dramatically except to drive the narrative with key bits of information.

It is, however, sharply acted. Newcomer Alexandra Wilson as Farnsworth's wife, generates much of the play's badly needed warmth. Hank Azaria as Sarnoff and Jimmi Simpson as Farnsworth are sensational. But forced to narrate much of the story, the two performers are ultimately hamstrung. When they should be emoting they're stuck explaining what happens next.

Des McAnuff does a fine job keeping the action fluid which could easily have bogged down amid the 19 actors on stage. At best, it's a strong draft in which Sorkin attempted to lay out the facts on his way to shaping what could be a great drama. But picking and choosing facts in a play that purports to tell the true story is a problem. That aside, “The Farnsworth Invention” would still need more show and less tell."
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=76179

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 11:32pm

Ultimately, the play doesn't quite fit the medium. It's plot-heavy with dozens of quick scenes shifting back and forth featuring more than 120 characters

Where did she come up with that number?!

[Sauja]

Posted: 12/3/07 at 11:59pm

"Ultimately, the play doesn't quite fit the medium. It's plot-heavy with dozens of quick scenes shifting back and forth featuring more than 120 characters

Where did she come up with that number?!"

That's the number that the show used in its publicity materials. My guess is that some poor intern somewhere had to count them up...and that they were right. It did feel like a great big mess of a thing, to me at least. Loathe as I am to admit this, I'm with Brantley all the way on this one.