Three Days of Rain Reviews

A couple of out-of-town papers jumped the gun and have their reviews posted already.

The Financial Times (UK) gives it Three out of Five stars:

"Garbo laughed; Julia Roberts knits. There she is at last, sitting on a Broadway stage, the needles darting to and fro as her character, Nan, converses with Bradley Cooper, who plays Pip, her former lover. Roberts drops no stitches, but her acting is less consistent. Anyone who thought Hollywood’s reigning female star would disgrace herself live will be disappointed. At the same time, her stunning, made- for-close-up face seems unable to project the kind of external theatricality necessary to make a character come alive fully on a big stage.

It does not help that she is making her Broadway debut in an intimate story shown to much better advantage off-Broadway in 1999. Richard Greenberg’s tale of the neurotic families of two New York architects has the narration-heavy bearing of a first-person short story, as well as exquisite parallels between act one, set in the mid- 1990s, and act two, set in 1960, that sometimes elude Joe Mantello’s underpowered staging.
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In theory, one applauds Roberts’s taste in choosing a beautifully written contemporary drama for her leap into the theatrical big league. But a more standard star vehicle might have made her technical deficiencies less of an issue."

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/552a4f1a-cfc5-11da-80fb-0000779e2340.html



The Chicago Tribune is Mixed:

"Of all the movie actresses of the past two decades, none has been more associated with romantic longing and American aspiration than Julia Roberts. How curious, then, that this most elegant and poised of actresses makes her Broadway debut in Joe Mantello's uneven revival of Richard Greenberg's smart and prismatic play "Three Days of Rain" with a performance so introspective and lacking in sexual energy that it feels almost apologetic.

Perchance it's a matter of being slightly embarrassed by the veritable riot her luminous presence is causing on 45th Street. Maybe it's a well-meaning—even subconscious—desire not to overwhelm a Broadway culture in which she's a humble neophyte. More likely, though, Roberts' difficulties in "Three Days of Rain," a three-actor but six-character drama, are just another reminder that live theater requires different skills from the screen, even though it ironically needs willing movie stars to move tickets to serious works like Greenberg's torrid, triangular exploration of inter-generational angst, familial miscommunication and sexual uncertainty.

Roberts' orbit here feels so limited in range—and so lacking in oomph, projection and the necessary vocal support—that one has to repress an urge to jump up on stage, get close to that famous, wide-mouthed visage, and see precisely what she's doing. Her impulses, one suspects, are very sound. Roberts is a class act. She just has yet to figure out how to communicate that act beyond a lens.
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Cooper, extrovert but perpetually complex, finds the best balance of style in a show that celebrates a fine script but lacks a pervasive stylistic anchor. Rudd is also moving and impressive in the second act, but in the first part of the show he's a tad too far on the normative side of Walker, a man capable of greater strangeness, passion and aggression than we're seeing here.

That's the rub with Roberts and the show. Greenberg offers strangeness in all its quirky, risky, slightly incoherent glory. To embrace it is the only way to thrive. In the theater, that is."


http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/reviews/critics/mmx-gcl289f44.9apr19,1,3493033.story?coll=mmx-home_bottom_hedsh2o

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I think that Julia will get generally respectful reviews, with probably a few very positive ones. Based on what people have been posting, it sounds like she has gotten significantly better during the preview period (which after all is part of the point of having a preview period).

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Broadway.com is Mixed:

"Star power is a fragile thing. It can be measured in box-office dollars and eight-figure salaries, it can be burnished by sympathetic lighting and framed by deft publicity spin, but ultimately it's reducible to the flesh-and-blood presence of a single human actor. Nowhere is this more true than in the real time and shared space of the theater, which can prove to be a most unforgiving microscope for an actor's instrument, particularly if that instrument is accustomed to different registers. In the case of Julia Roberts, who uneasily headlines the new Broadway production of Three Days of Rain, the stage is more like a telescope through which her star flickers, recognizably but dimly.

With her Easter Island bone structure, gulping smile and preposterously red cheeks, Roberts is the kind of sui generis star Hollywood supposedly stopped minting decades ago; a soft-focus hybrid of Joan Crawford and Audrey Hepburn, she's a gamine with backbone. But in Richard Greenberg's meditative gem of a play, which has seen better productions elsewhere (including one at L.A.'s Evidence Room five years ago), Roberts is all spine and teeth. First as Nan, a woman mourning her father and tending to her messed-up brother, Walker (Paul Rudd), then as Nan and Walker's blowzy mom, Lina, Roberts gives careful, stilted line readings and moves with a studied diffidence that doesn't seem to belong to the same lithe physical comedienne who caromed so winningly through Erin Brockovich or My Best Friend's Wedding. She's on slightly surer footing when she's still, in tete-a-tetes that play like virtual close-ups, though even from Row D these moments resonate faintly at best.


Roberts' reticence seems to have sent Rudd into hysterics. In the first act, in which Nan and Walker have a tense reunion in the abandoned former studio of their architect father and his partner, the fine-featured, shaggy-haired Rudd paddles furiously, as if he's trying to keep a sinking ship afloat, but he can't strike sparks against Roberts' flinty passivity. Sure, Walker is a raw nerve prone to dramatic disappearances and emotional blackmail, but Rudd plays his highs and lows with such strenuous exertion that Roberts' Nan seems to have little choice but to recede into pity and disapproval. There's little evidence of director Joe Mantello's work in these early scenes, except possibly as a referee.

It takes a third wheel to balance this wobbly frame. As Pip, a happily shallow TV actor whose late father was the other half of the architecture partnership, Bradley Cooper gives a preternaturally assured performance, working himself up to a first-act aria of exuberant pique that kicks the play into vibrant life. With an equal sparring partner, Rudd suddenly has a plausible target for Walker's overcooked anger, and even Roberts rises, with disarmed amusement, to the occasion presented by Cooper's undeniable presence. She may have star power, but Cooper has stage power.
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Ultimately, though, the weather report on this uneven Three Days of Rain is lightly cloudy, zero chance of thunder."


http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=527761

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Lalawood Times

"Partial sunshine amid drizzle
'Three Days of Rain' isn't the best vehicle for Broadway rookie Julia Roberts."

http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-wk-rain20apr20,0,3634036.story?coll=cl-stage-features

"New York — The jawline cuts with the same diamond precision. The platypus lips are as delectably thickset as ever. And the subtle wave in her reddish-brown hasn't lost its power to hypnotize. But Joe Mantello's production of "Three Days of Rain" at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre strangely muffles the nuclear star power in its midst.

Julia Roberts' Broadway debut may have engendered press hysteria not seen in the theater since Madonna's 1988 UFO-like appearance in David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow," but onstage Pretty Woman doesn't yet warrant all the commotion."

"Roberts is going to need regular practice if she's to lose the inhibitions that, despite her unmatched radiance, cause her occasionally to get lost in the woodwork — unthinkable, if not physically impossible for her, in film. She's also going to have to choose a director next time who understands her gifts and can help her find material that will release them at full strength."

"Mantello adopts a more naturalistic approach. It's not totally wrongheaded, but it turns into something that's too often prosaic and flat. These characters, after all, are eccentrically theatrical, which is why they can flit into direct-address monologues without any awkwardness. They're accustomed to performing their identities to a public that's invariably impressed by their sophistication and sheen."

Updated On: 4/19/06 at 09:00 PM

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/theater/reviews/20rain.html

Brantley is spot-on.

To me, unfair to the men. But it's doomed to be that kind of event -- if Roberts is the centerpiece, the evening's muscle as well as the cause celeb, the distortion is too overpowering, the imabalance too pervasive, and other values tend to fall by the wayside.

I still feel bad for Greenberg's genuinely luminous story being buried under a mere diva debut. (Good plays are too rare; stars can always go back to being stars.) Despite its NY particulars -- to some, its pretentious airs -- about architects and their legacy, the plight of the rich and famous, the underlying family tale is actually very universal and to my thinking accessible.

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EWW! I just read Brantly's entire review. Although he was fair in his assessment of her performance, he was so disgustingly obnoxious in his gushing over her. Not cute at all. Gross, in fact.

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Kinda interesting that most people who have bought tkts for this production have never read a theatre Review in their lives.

Hmmm...I can only afford two shows. I thought about TRYST and this one. So...NOT this one?

I also just read the whole Brantley review, and think it's perhaps one of the most self-indulgent of his often self-indulgent career. His ruminations about Roberts are oddly reverential (her beauty) and borderline dishy and then brutal. But okay, that's part of his job. It's the personal investment in her stardom and value to his moviegoing, the "Julia-holics" blathering, that to my thinking is purple rhetoric beneath the critic of the TIMES. He writes as if we're deeply curious about not his critical appraisal, but his boyish movie-going star worship. Not.

That part is almost Brantley parody. We learn that Julia is often a character in his dreams -- ick, too much information, and in this context -- her b'way debut -- decidedly of the wrong type.

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i am now officially in love with bradley cooper. just wanted to share.

:)

Clive Barnes ripped it apart. Not a very nice review sadly. But for the most part there are generally favorable reviews. I liked the USA Today one.

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