THE PHILANTHROPIST First Preview Thoughts

Hey All!

To any and all attending via the $10 ticket offer (or otherwise), by all means, please post your thoughts, comments, concerns, opinions here. I'm admittedly still reading the script to this one (that first sequence is super-intriguing enough, so I kept at it!), and am considering booking for later this month, or into the summer months. We'll see. Anyhoo, without rambling any more, here's my best to the cast and crew! Welcome back, Mr. Broderick!

I was at the final dress last night. I won't post my thoughts until tonight though.

"I was at the final dress last night. I won't post my thoughts until tonight though."

Uh-oh, sounds ... not promising.

This one's for my boy M-Brodz. Anyone else find it funny that he and Nathan are opening on Broadway around the same time in plays produced by theater companies?

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I am going with an open mind.

Updated On: 4/10/09 at 04:41 PM

I was at the first preview tonight.

I found myself laughing at much of it, and I definitely enjoyed it more than the last few Roundabout shows, but it's certainly got major problems. Several scenes are very dry & seem to drag on and on. (And since the show is only a tad over 2 hours, that's not a good thing.) But my biggest problem was with the actors. Why did everyone have to have British accents? There's no reason to set the show in England and it just drew attention to the horrible horrible accents. Jennifer Mudge as Araminta kept falling into some bizarre mashup of American southern/Cockney/RP. Steven Webber lost his accent several times (and his lines as well? Or was that meant to happen? At one point he started stammering & muttered "F*CK it, what was I going to say?" I wasn't sure if that was a flub or a character element.) Matthew Broderick's whole performance felt one-note, though I suppose that was intentional. The problem is it didn't make me care about his character.
The whole bit about the English politicians & the assassin? What the hell was that about? That had nothing to do with anything and could have completely been excised.

I liked how each scene was a vignette related to one of the seven deadly sins & the use of the letters on the back wall. I think this is a play that would benefit greatly from the actors getting comfortable in their roles. A lot of the scenes, while humorous, felt stilted & dry. Perhaps they will become more fluid later in the run.

Despite my criticisms, I was entertained, which I think is due more to the actual book than any of the performances. Although I suppose saying it was better than recent Roundabout fare is really just damning with faint praise.

I'm curious what other people thought, as I heard very mixed reactions from other audience members. The man sitting next to me loved the show, while someone else said it was dreadful.

Oh, and can someone tell me what the title is supposed to mean? I don't get how it relates to the show at all.

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Updated On: 4/11/09 at 12:12 AM

I agree with much of your assessment regarding this play. I'm not sure exactly what the writer was going for but he missed the mark. I understand that it's supposed to be a play about intellectuals and their various perceptions of events going on about them. I just found some of the scenes (especially the drawn out dinner scene) to be confusing, dull and not entertaining. There needs to be a lot of trimming and as Cape Doom said, it's not that long to begin with. There needs to be a bit more action, yelling or something to offset some of the long windedness.

Having said that, I did think that the performances were pretty good considering it's a first preview and they will get better once the actors are more comfortable with each other and the material. I will say that I thought the performance of Jonathan Cake was too over the top as he dominated that dreadful dinner scene, while Matthew needed to exert a bit more presence into this play. Granted, he had almost nothing to do in the first act except serve drinks, but I thought his interaction with Anna Madeley in the second act showed much more chemistry and more of a human element. His character appears to be almost identical to Charlie Baker, the character he played a few years back in The Foreigner.

I do agree with Cape that the play did not need to be set in England at all and that the actors having to focus on accents more than substance is a bit distracting. I don't think this play will appeal to the masses and from the people I spoke with after, it pretty much came down to tourists hating it and subscribers kind of liking it but wanting to see some changes before it opens. Personally, I liked much of it but thought that while the play opened strongly, it lost alot of steam in a very long winded and boring dinner scene. It picked up again in the second act but it was tough to recover from the one scene. Hopefully, they will cut a good portion of it since it wasn't funny at all and added nothing to the overall play.

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Updated On: 4/11/09 at 12:33 AM

Yes Dave....you're right....I don't think I've ever seen that happen before in a play.

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So sad to hear all of this. Ugh. Not the biggest Broderick fan, so I'm not shocked, but I really do like quite a lot of the rest of the cast.

The best character was Liz, who didn't have a single line.

She shook her head "no" once too!

But the only flaw in her job is that she has to sit through that dreadful scene. The problem I had with this show was that I just did not care about ANYTHING the characters were saying.

I almost started counting the books on the bookshelf during Act Two because the scenes were nothing more than two people just sitting around talking... the plot didn't really go anywhere.

Between this and Godot, I'm just not exactly wanting to go see any of Roundabouts shows. I'll wait for the crazy discounts.

I don't think it was part of the original lineup.

But I'm not 100% sure. And is DANCIN' coming next season? Or did I just make that up?