All together now: it’s Friday! I’m still out of town, so Our Girl has kindly posted the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, an all-Broadway edition in which I hold forth on the new cast of Doubt and the new revival of Barefoot in the Park:
Few tasks are so ungrateful as replacing the star of a Broadway hit–unless you’re Eileen Atkins, who just took over Cherry Jones’s part in “Doubt.” One of the great stage actresses of our time, Ms. Atkins doesn’t appear in the U.S. very often, and her last stint on Broadway was in a shoddy piece of theatrical goods, “The Retreat From Moscow.” John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning play, by contrast, gives her plenty of elbow room to pass a miracle. As always, she delivers: Ms. Atkins’ stupendous performance is the best piece of acting in town….
Was it Neil Simon who invented the kind of play in which ordinary people talk like stand-up comics? If so, then “Barefoot in the Park,” Mr. Simon’s first megahit, belongs in the Smithsonian, preferably under glass. I know I’d rather see it there than on Broadway, even in a production as effective as the revival that opened last night at the Cort Theatre. Indeed, this “Barefoot in the Park” is something of a triumph for Scott Elliott, the highbrow director whose whip-smart production of Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party” is still running Off Broadway. I wouldn’t have guessed Mr. Elliott to be the kind of director who’d be really, really good at staging slapstick, but most of the biggest laughs of the evening come from the crackling precision with which he puts Amanda Peet, Patrick Wilson, Jill Clayburgh and Tony Roberts through their physical paces….
No link, so proceed as follows: (1) Buy a copy of the Friday Journal. (2) Go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, along with lots more art-related coverage. (By the way, here‘s an unsolicited blogospheric tribute to the Journal‘s arts coverage.)