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Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns - The New York Times December 8, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns By BEN BRANTLEY The fight has gone out of the once-robust boys from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of sharks in a small pond. Sure, they still curse and rant and beat up on the furniture in the production that formally opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Saturday night, after an indecently extended preview period. These hack real estate salesmen also slam doors hard enough to make walls tremble. They mug their way through their foul-mouthed monologues in a style that begs for (and receives) applause. The eldest of their tribe, and this production’s pacesetter, is portrayed by a grizzled Al Pacino with the exaggerated pantomiming of a boozy player in a late-night charades game. Yet somehow their hearts just don’t seem to be into the business of scamming clients and stabbing one another in the back. It’s as if all the competitive fierceness had been sucked from them by some cosmic super-vacuum cleaner — a product that these forlorn hustlers probably wouldn’t be able to persuade anyone to buy. As salesmen, they’re as worn down and wrung out as Willy Loman at twilight. That sense of defeat has always lurked beneath the speeding dialogue of “Glengarry.” But in Daniel Sullivan’s deflated production, which also stars Bobby Cannavale as the hotshot Ricky Roma, subtext has been dragged to the surface and beached like a rusty submarine. This is a “Glengarry” for a recessionary age. When a character in the first act mutters, “It’s cold out there now, John. Money is tight,” the lines glare in a way they didn’t in the mid-1980s. Whether comic or bitter, dialogue is often allowed to resonate in empty air. Unlike any previous “Glengarry” I’ve seen — including the 1992 movie (which starred Mr. Pacino in the role played here by Mr. Cannavale) — this one moves slowly enough to keep you aware, at all times, of the hollowness of its characters’ talk. You may also find yourself newly conscious of plot contrivances and improbabilities. I can understand why Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Pacino would want to reconceive “Glengarry” on their own terms. The play was given a superb Tony-winning revival in 2005, directed by Joe Mantello, and starring Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, a highly caffeinated production that left you short of breath. If discerning theatergoers were going to revisit “Glengarry” less than a decade later, they’d surely demand something different. But “Glengarry” was built for speed. Much of the beauty of this play comes from its revved-up rhythms. (When you read it, the words percolate on the page.) Mr. Mamet created a cast of salesmen who keep themselves alive through their relentless, aggressive talk. They’re selling lies on a whole lot of levels, and to themselves as well as to their friends, foes and patsies. Relaxing the tension in their spiels is fatal, because that’s when we (and they) hear the falsehood of what they’re saying. They’re pitching as fast as they can out of animal need and instinct. http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/glengarry-glen-ross-by-david-mamet-with-al-pacino.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:23:00 AM] Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns - The New York Times Though there’s poetry in their obscene talk, the collective sound that rises from them is the din of beasts struggling to survive in Darwin’s jungle. Of course they’re doomed; all animals die eventually. But in the meantime there’s fire in the fight and the friction that makes great theater. So it comes as a shock here when the first note that’s sounded in the opening scene (set in a seedy Chinese restaurant; Eugene Lee is the designer) is one of senility. Mr. Pacino is Shelly Levene, the faded former star of a fading real-estate office on the North Side of Chicago. He’s trying to convince his boss, John Williamson (David Harbour, in the show’s most convincing performance), to give him better clients. But why would anyone turn over important business to someone who speaks as falteringly as this guy does? Looking like a bag man coming off a bender, Shelly talks in a fretful, rambling singsong voice that sometimes gets stuck on a word like a phonograph needle. (The inflections seem partly borrowed from Mr. Pacino’s Tony- nominated Shylock in Mr. Sullivan’s brilliant “Merchant of Venice” of two years ago, but with nothing like the same passive-aggressive intensity.) Mr. Pacino switches gears for the second act, when Shelly shows up in the office triumphant after making a big sale. But though Shelly may be flushed with new confidence, he hardly inspires it. His back bowed, his legs wide apart, he recounts his victory with the expansive, literal-minded gestures of a kindergarten teacher. We have advanced, it seems, from senility to dementia. By the way, it doesn’t look as if Shelly is addressing his fellow employees; his gaze is focused directly on us, the folks out there in the dark. This performance places Shelly firmly and dominatingly at the center of “Glengarry,” which needs to be a tight ensemble piece. There’s not much the other actors can do to compete with or even balance Mr. Pacino’s grandstanding. Much of the cast — which includes John C. McGinley, Richard Schiff and Jeremy Shamos — goes for obvious laughs in line readings. Mr. Cannavale, an electric presence in the “The ____________ With the Hat” last year, should be a natural for Roma, the cock-of-the-walk sales star. Yet he never feels as dangerous or as seductive as he needs to be here. Instead he brings to mind a strutting Damon Runyon-style gangster; you expect him to break out with, “What’s playing at the Roxy? I’ll tell you what’s playing at the Roxy.” The production’s strange combination of comic shtick and existential weariness makes it feel rather like a long- running sitcom being filmed before a live audience that knows its characters’ signature tics and flourishes by heart. That may well be what the Broadway public of today wants. This “Glengarry” has been selling out (in more ways than one) since its early previews. When I saw the show, the audience stopped it frequently to give ovations for blustery tirades. What with the closing notice already posted for Mr. Mamet’s dreary new play “The Anarchist,” which opened last week, this season has not been kind to one of America’s greatest living playwrights. And yes, he still deserves to be thus described. Read “Glengarry” again, and you’ll understand why. Just don’t expect to find the evidence on Broadway this year. Glengarry Glen Ross By David Mamet; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by James F. Ingalls; technical supervision by Hudson Theatrical Associates; production stage manager, Stephen http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/glengarry-glen-ross-by-david-mamet-with-al-pacino.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:23:00 AM] Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns - The New York Times M. Kaus; general manager, Richards/Climan. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, JAM Theatricals, Luigi and Rose Caiola, Gutterman Chernoff, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Amy and Phil Mickelson, Patty Baker, Mark S. Golub and David S. Golub, Ken Greiner, Meg Herman, Kathleen K. Johnson, Stephanie P. McClelland, Harvey Weinstein, James Fuld Jr./Kirmser Ponturo Fund, Kit Seidel/Myla Lerner, Will Trice and Gfour Productions, in association with RPMedia Company. At the Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Through Jan. 20. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. WITH: Al Pacino (Shelly Levene), Bobby Cannavale (Richard Roma), David Harbour (John Williamson), Richard Schiff (George Aaronow), John C. McGinley (Dave Moss), Jeremy Shamos (James Lingk) and Murphy Guyer (Baylen). http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/glengarry-glen-ross-by-david-mamet-with-al-pacino.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:23:00 AM] ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Lion King’ Make Hamburg a Theater City - NYTimes.com December 9, 2012 Broadway on the Elbe By PATRICK HEALY HAMBURG, Germany — An eight-hour production of Goethe’s “Faust” may be the highbrow hit of the fall at the grand Thalia state theater here, but it is an altogether different blockbuster — the Disney musical “Tarzan” — that exemplifies why modern Hamburg has become that rare thing in the theater world: a reliable profit center for producers outside of their two biggest markets, New York and London. “Tarzan” has proved that even out-and-out flops on Broadway can go on to lucrative afterlives in this destination city for Germans, as long as the shows have the spectacle and pageantry that theater producers here say enthrall people across the country. “Tarzan,” composed by Phil Collins, delivers characters swinging on vines over audiences’ heads and generates gasps. While it closed on Broadway in 2007 after 14 months at a loss of roughly $12 million, the show (with some retooling) is in its fifth year here and has become the top-grossing production of this musical in the world, taking in $224 million so far. “Watching the Tarzan actor and the monkey actors flying above us — it is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Katrin Welsch, a recent university graduate who drove here from Saarbrücken, over 300 miles to the south, to take her parents to the show.