Brantley's Birdie Smackdown

The highly-anticipated revival of Bye Bye Birdie opened last night, and call me crazy, but I don't think Ben Brantley liked it very much!

If you get a chance, send a few dozen get-well cards to Henry Miller’s Theater... Flu season has arrived, and an especially mean virus appears to have attacked the cast of the revival of “Bye Bye Birdie,” which opened Thursday night. I don’t think it’s the swine flu that has flattened Robert Longbottom’s production...

The symptoms in this case include tin ear, loss of comic timing, uncontrollable jitters and a prickly disorientation that screams, “Where am I?” and “What am I doing?” Theatergoers may feel an empathetic urge to rush home and bury their heads in their pillows.

Ouch! He goes on with a systematic take-down of the Roundabout's starry revival. The cast is a "painful example of misapplied talent". The director has "lost his sense of direction". The concept evokes "an old Old Navy or Nick at Nite ad" and not in the good way. Oh and John Stamos and Gina Gershon "tend to slide distractingly off key — not violently, but just enough to make you want to hit your ear." It goes on.

Aside from the comic effect of Brantley's purple prose, I have to confess a deep, sick appreciation for the big sloppy failures of star-fucked Broadway shows. When will they learn? These people cannot sing! And are not stageworthy! Do Stamos and Gershon really make such a difference in ticket sales that it's worth having a giant creative failure? I suspect not.

Ben Brantley is a Motherfucker

...according to Josh Brolin, that is!

“I hate that motherf——-,” Brolin says, “And I don’t think he’s a good writer.”

Update 1/7/09: Defamer brings us more from the delightfully inebriated Brolin's speech that night:

"Quite an actor, Sean Penn, quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing. [Pause] And now I'm an asshole. Like Russell Crowe. Because I'm not as smart as Sean. [Pause] Quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing actor. I've loved you in Milk, I thought what you did with that role was incredible. We've known you as an actor who doesn't smile very much. And the fact that you smiled as much as you did in this film is amazing. Truly incredible. You are an amazing actor. You are going to get the Oscar. Because you smiled so much."

Amazing, indeed! Yes, Sean Penn is quite an actor.

Brantley hates The Little Mermaid

Oh dear.

Loved the shoes. Loathed the show... O.K., I exaggerate. I didn’t like the shoes all that much.

And the real humdinger:

Directed by Francesca Zambello, this “Little Mermaid” burdens its performers with ungainly guess-what-I-am costumes (by Tatiana Noginova) and a distracting set (by George Tsypin) awash in pastels gone sour and unidentifiable giant tchotchkes that suggest a Luau Lounge whipped up by an acid-head heiress in the 1960s. The whole enterprise is soaked in that sparkly garishness that only a very young child — or possibly a tackiness-worshiping drag queen — might find pretty.

Theresa Rebeck's response to Jon Robin Baitz on the HuffPo

Several bloggers are discussing Jon Robin Baitz's excellent piece in The Huffington Post. The piece goes a long way in explaining why it's so hard for playwrights nowadays, why they go to television and film, and why nobody lets Chuck Isherwood sit at their lunch table. It's definitely a must-read, and you should certainly check it out.

BUT I'm interested in a response in the comments. A mysterious commenter named only "Rebeck" (who could it be?) responded:

HILARIOUS. your posting cheered me right up, Robbie. it has never been clear to me why they get so mad when we make a little money from the big old evil TV machine. would it be better for our craft if we jus sat around in crummy overpriced New York studios, worried about how we were going to pay the rent?

my experience has been it helps to have a little money in your pocket, when the New York Times whacks you on the head because of some utterly inane new rule they've come up with as an excuse to dismiss your play. Ben Brantley suddenly decides he likes David Mamet and uses his review of my play to express this fact? Oh brother. Maybe I should dip into my savings and go to Italy for a few days...

Theresa Rebeck's response is interesting, but also sadly unsurprising. She obviously has a point about how it helps to actually get paid, but her mention of the critical response to Mauritius is whiny and embarassing. It's one thing when Brantley and Isherwood carelessly eviscerate work that deserves at least a little respect, but Brantley's review of Mauritius didn't read as a discovery that he likes Mamet - more like an acknowledgement that Rebeck's play (as many, many others said) is just like American Buffalo - only less interesting.

Frankly, I find it difficult to place Rebeck in the same category as those playwrights who would really benefit from a bit more kindness from the critics. With a very few exceptions, her plays aren't really challenging the form. Don't get me wrong, she's written plays I've enjoyed, particularly Bad Dates. But Theresa Rebeck is not.. oh, Will Eno, Adam Rapp, Adam Bock, or the many other playwrights whose work sometimes gets trashed because they're taking risks, and that makes people uncomfortable. Nobody is calling Theresa Rebeck a hipster from Williamsburg in their reviews.