The Vertical Hour Reviews

USA Today is up early -- it's Mixed (two-and-a-half stars):

"The problem with this production, directed with a light, sure hand by Sam Mendes, is that the actors cast as Nadia and Oliver are not equals. Julianne Moore, the luminous leading lady known for her vibrant work in The Hours and many other films, isn't a stranger to the stage. But in this Broadway debut, she can seem strained and self-conscious.

In contrast, Bill Nighy's Oliver is thoroughly convincing and deliciously idiosyncratic. Walking with a slightly stooped gait and wearing an alternately amused and rueful expression, the stage veteran reveals his character's incorrigible, coarsely seductive exterior, his probing mind and, eventually, his aching heart. It's easy to see how this aging roué infuriates his son (charmingly played by Andrew Scott) and fascinates Nadia.

Two likable young actors, Dan Bittner and Rutina Wesley, also appear, as Nadia's students. Wesley's Terri declares in her paper that "there is only one truth: The powerful exploit the powerless. Indiscriminately."

"Despair's an affectation," Nadia tells Terri. "It's self-indulgence." Terri shoots back: "It's more like not fooling yourself." By suggesting the truth is more complicated than either woman maintains, The Vertical Hour takes us on a bracing, if not entirely smooth, ride."


http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2006-11-30-review-vertical-hour_x.htm?POE=LIFISVA

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Completely agree on Moore and Nighy. When I saw the play yesterday she seemed at times amateurish and out of place. Which is a shame, because she's such a fine film actress. Nighy, by contrast, superbly commands the stage. At the performance I attended, the cheers for Nighy were considerably louder and more enthusiastic than for Moore. Which, given that Nighy is far less recognizable as an actor, says a lot...

Well, I think it's a fair criticism. As I said my review, I thought she seemed tentative, was vocally underpowered and lacked presence, which ended up causing an imbalance in the play -- she simply wasn't Nighy's equal on the stage and she needed to be in order for the play to work. There are good things in her performance and in the play itself, but it's simply not the success that it could have been:

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.cfm?boardname=bway&thread=918302

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Updated On: 11/30/06 at 06:11 PM

I wonder how the Utopia men will be considered as far as lead/featured goes. Would you think they'd just put O'Byrne in lead and the rest in Featured? I'd imagine their chances (especially Crudup, who's not even in Salvage) would be better placed there.

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Talkin Broadway is Mixed:

"For the second time in a year, a beautiful, A-list movie actress with distinctive red hair is spending time away from Hollywood on a Broadway stage on West 45th Street, tackling a work by a prolific contemporary playwright. But unlike the last time, this debut is not so easy to dismiss.

Julianne Moore acquits herself far better in The Vertical Hour, which just opened at the Music Box, than Julia Roberts did in Three Days of Rain this past spring. David Hare's new play is intermittently provocative, but also pudgy and pandering. If Moore occasionally stumbles under the weight of those qualities, that she doesn't let them deter her from making a real woman from the symbolic construct they outline says much of the talent and commitment she's brought to Broadway.

Let's be clear: Her performance here is not really on par with most of her film work. An intense, sophisticated actress who brings a measure of high society to all her roles, Moore consistently gives some of the most intelligently articulated performances in movies today. In her Oscar-nominated turn as the suffering, progressive wife in Far From Heaven, as the drug-addled daughter in Magnolia, or even channeling Jodie Foster in Hannibal, she bears an airy wisdom and delicacy one would more readily associate with an early 20th century stage starlet.

These qualities would seem to make her ideal for the role of Nadia Blye, a war correspondent-turned-Yale professor who follows her boyfriend Philip (Andrew Scott) to England to meet his reclusive father Oliver (Bill Nighy) and finds more of herself than she anticipated. This outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, so fiercely protective of all human life she once advised President Bush, bursts with the staunch, independent spirit that has often inspired Moore onscreen.

Onstage, at least as directed here by Sam Mendes, Moore's performance is not exactly rife with complexities. It doesn't lack depth: There are flashes of insecurity beneath Nadia's curiously affected strength, of world-weariness struggling to escape its dangerously energetic host. But there are only flashes: Moore tends to adopt one dominant emotional stance in each of the play's five scenes, enact its necessary variations, and move on to the next.

Even so, Moore maintains a quietly captivating aura. This is likely because her performance is well in keeping with the way David Hare has written the play.

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The reserved, smoldering Nighy is solid vocally and emotionally as Oliver, but is physically bizarre: His rickety movement, which suggests a malfunctioning Swiss Army knife, give him a distractingly unnatural posture onstage. Moore, while more comfortable, frequently moves stiffly as well.

One is tempted to blame Mendes, whose direction is short on decisiveness and tends to let tiny moments get too big. But that wouldn't explain Scott, whose understated, casual ease makes his work the production's smoothest and most satisfying. So affable is he as the son trapped in two people's shadows that you wish the character were less of an afterthought. He's essentially apolitical, and his feelings for Nadia are limited to concern and jealousy that give him few opportunities to display any innate warmth.

Scott manages to anyway, but that's the play's problem in general: When politics and romance collide, someone will be left out in the cold. In the world of the play, that's Philip; in our world, it's us. Moore suffices as the show's shimmering, radiant heart, even the life force on which these disjointed pieces can thrive, but The Vertical Hour needs a fortified spine and a more engaged and open mind that she, for all her virtues, cannot bestow."

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

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well this thread sure is less happenin' than the company review thread

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...that didn't give away the ending, did it?

Benedict Nightingale of the Times of London gives it three out of five stars:


"David Hare’s last play, Stuff Happens, was a docudrama about the war in Iraq which opened at the National and moved to New York. The Vertical Hour is a fiction on substantially the same subject and could well make the opposite journey, presumably with Sam Mendes still as director and, conceivably, with Julianne Moore as the American war correspondent who becomes a political analyst and a Yale professor, and proceeds to shack up with a British bloke who works in New England as a “physical therapist”.

It is unusual for Broadway to give a premiere to a play that is as topical as it is serious, articulate, witty and absorbing, and yet I can’t say that I exactly warmed to The Vertical Hour. Or, rather, it left me feeling the way I do about much of George Bernard Shaw’s work.

The play fizzes with intellectual passion but tends to falter when things get inner and personal. It is almost as if Hare is in a debate with himself on a truckload of subjects, starting with the rights and wrongs of Iraq."

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I suppose the play could be attacked as too discursive, but I prefer to see that as a sign of a mental curiosity seldom encountered on Broadway. Rather, the twin dramatic problems are Nadia’s relationship with Philip and Philip’s with Oliver. Is it plausible that, whatever her weariness with war reportage, this bright, mature woman would fall for a thirtyish man who seems not only terminally dull but infantile in his love-hate feelings for his dad?

Although it is probably meant to show that conflict and the need for negotiation exist in the private worlds that underlie and help to shape the public ones, this side of the play seemed to me unconvincing, uninteresting or both. Certainly, poor Scott can do little with so weedy a character. And Nighy and Moore? Well, he fidgets, jerks and vocally slithers about while she strives to be tough and incisive. He is mannered but arresting; she is unpretentious but samey and unexciting.

But then maybe you can’t expect emotional depth in a play where, just after meeting each other, characters say things such as “People blame materialism because they feel it doesn’t nourish them”, or “As long as we had two superpowers in some sort of balance, then there seemed to be a procedure for determining the world’s affairs”. That is, after all, Hare in his Shavian mode."


http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14936-2479650,00.html

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Variety is Mixed:

"After dealing directly in "Stuff Happens" with the buildup to war in Iraq, David Hare reflects on the intense self-examination prompted by it in "The Vertical Hour." But while the 2004 play made grippingly contentious, impassioned theater out of public editorial fodder, this more private drama about personal and political responsibility is unfocused. Stuffed with stimulating insights, it's never dull but ultimately feels as messy and unresolved as the conflict behind its central debate. Sam Mendes' production does have one reason for unstinting recommendation, however, in Bill Nighy's fascinatingly eccentric performance.

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Via Nadia, Hare advocates the necessity of involvement and the refusal of passivity. He warns against letting psychology rule principles and action. Laced with clever dialogue, the play makes lots of intriguing points on power, capitalism, materialism, imperialism and the big daddy of -isms: terrorism. The trouble is these notations never add up to a thematically cohesive point of view.
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The artificiality of her role and its self-contradictory journey may be partly to blame, but Moore's lack of stage technique is a problem, especially in the stodgy opening. A luminous screen performer capable of exquisitely naturalistic vulnerability -- in "Far From Heaven," for instance, or the Hare-scripted "The Hours" -- she's stiffly self-conscious here. Early on, it's as if she's trapped in a Loreal commercial, tilting her face into the light with an expression of beatific serenity that goes against the scene's argumentative nature.

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Moore's strongest moments are when she's playing off Nighy, but the match is an uneven one.

Rock-star thin and with eyebrows possibly arched since birth, Nighy's rangy physique and in particular his spindly legs are almost as expressive as his softly mocking eyes or droll delivery. His twitchy, loose-limbed body language is so controlled and precise that often he seems to be undermining Moore/Nadia with his feet alone.

Oliver opens up about his past but has no illuminating self-realization to equal Nadia's. Yet in Nighy's hands, he's a far more complete, coherent character. The friction between him and his son (deftly played by Scott with a disarming mix of maturity, awkwardness and bottled anger straining beneath the sweet-natured surface) is consistently more involving than the main event.

If "The Vertical Hour" seems not destined to rank among Hare's greater accomplishments, it at least has the merit of having brought Nighy's bracing originality to the New York stage."



http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932227.html?categoryid=1265&cs=1

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Updated On: 11/30/06 at 08:27 PM

I ultimately loved the play as a whole, and Moore, but I found that first scene -- about which a few of these critics are perturbed -- almost unplayable. (And maybe even unnecessary? Why not begin with the introduction to Nighy?) Moore is saddled with some of the most convoluted, eliptical, philosophical speech ever handed to an actor -- particularly trying and hard to make natral for a lead-in. She's game, but the premise of the scene is precious and arch (a boy in love with her), the text dense and the words not the type to spring to the lips naturally. Once the play settles down -- and it truly does, in a harrowing 2nd act debate that raises the roof -- and the character's voice is more sure, Moore reveals that luminescent emotional clarity for which is deservedly touted. For my money, when the play shines, so does she.

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Updated On: 11/30/06 at 09:50 PM

Sadly, Moore swallowed the line that defines the play tonight (i.e., the war-time jargon of "the vertical hour" when a soldier is shot) and several of the peple around me were perplexed leaving the theatre.

In Hare's construction, the "vertical hour" is the first scene of Act II. A beautifully written scene between Moore's and Nighy's characters.

Nighy is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. As Margo suggests, I hope the committee remembers him at Tony nomination time.

While he emerged on the scene as a visionary, Sam Mendes is proving most inconsistent.

Updated On: 11/30/06 at 11:00 PM

LA Times is Mostly Negative:

"OK, so how did Julianne Moore's Broadway debut compare with Julia Roberts' coolly received one last season?

Moore wins by a nose. But David Hare, the esteemed British playwright, shouldn't be smiling. In fact, much of what is lacking in Moore's performance can be attributed to the unconvincing role Hare has written for her.

The play is called "The Vertical Hour," and it had its world premiere Thursday at the Music Box under the direction of Sam Mendes. Stage and film veteran Bill Nighy costars, and he's firing on all cylinders. But not even his flamboyant realism can rescue this sluggish and exhaustingly verbose excuse for a drama.

If this sounds harsh, let me say that I was stalwart in the face of boredom. I felt certain there would be a payoff. Hare is too experienced a political dramatist not to redeem the slowness of his tactics.

No such luck. And not even Moore's exquisite beauty could ease the disappointment, which is saying something when you consider she possesses one of the great faces in contemporary cinema.

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Hare has written a psychological play about political people. His perspective seems to be that psychology is both inescapable — we are motivated by unconscious forces that are shaped by our pasts — and inadequate to describe what drives exceptional altruists like Nadia and Oliver.

The title of the play, which refers to the moment in combat medicine when a caregiver can still helpfully intervene, reflects the mental surgery Oliver and Nadia are performing on each other. Formally, the work mixes the moral disputation found in Jean-Paul Sartre's plays with the dramatic indirection of Henry James' late novels, in a half-baked manner that can be blamed only on Hare.

But back to Moore, who's a first-rate film actress though out of her depths onstage. For her, acting is largely about the close-up, which means that she tries to authentically experience what her character is going through moment to moment.

This kind of method acting for the mirror can be highly effective in the movies. The camera is a lie detector, and Moore can be counted on for scrupulous honesty. But it's not enough for the theater, and neither Hare's play nor Mendes' paralytic staging lead her into that heightened form of expression in which inner experience is forced to confront a tribunal larger than the self.

Nighy, on the other hand, offers a master class. Too bad it's in the service of Hare's time-wasting curriculum.
http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-et-vertical1dec01,0,2161396.story?coll=cl-stage

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Clive Barnes gives it Three-and-a-half Stars (why am I not surprised?):

"What's fun about English playwrights is that they see no division between politics and people.

Nadia, with her commitment to the war in Iraq, and Oliver, cynical and scornful of America's intervention, can still find certain emotional common ground.

Hare, unlike Shaw, is nonpolemic. We know Hare's politics, or at least we think we do, from his brilliant, anti-war drama last season, "Stuff Happens."

Stuff happens in "The Vertical Hour," too, but it's evenly dished out and, as a result, we acquire unusual insight into three characters and their lives. Yes, at times the play is glib - the scenes in Yale that bookend the play are a tad too neat, and Oliver's basic persona just a touch too obvious.

Still, not only is it one of the best plays Broadway has seen in years, but Sam Mendes has staged it with exquisite skill, allowing the main actors to play like a well-honed musical trio.

Moore, better known for her films than her stage work, deftly shades the complexity of this activist/academic gingerly threading her way through the moral choices that are the land-mined territory of her intellectual landscape. She's firm, understated and superb.

Nighy (the tentacled Davy Jones of the last "Pirates of the Caribbean") steals everything on the stage that hasn't actually been nailed down by the script.

He has made eccentricity a way of acting. His louche, disreputable manner, summed up in a charming vocal sneer and defensive smile, is delivered with a panache that disguises the sheer technique under it.

He is, of course, wonderful. Then again, anyone who's seen him in film or onstage in London expects nothing less."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12012006/entertainment/theater/a_shaw_thing_in_hour_town_theater_clive_barnes.htm

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Updated On: 12/1/06 at 01:14 AM