Review - Lombardi: Defensive Lines

While football and baseball have been slugging it out for decades for the title of America's Most
Popular Sport, there's no doubt that the latter is Broadway's baby, boasting Tony-winners Damn Yankees and Take Me Out. Aside from inspiring amusing songs for Wonderful Town and High Button Shoes, football's longest Broadway run was the short-lived musical All-American, which featured the unlikely combination of Ray Bolger acting in scenes written by Mel Brooks. Heck, even basketball (That Championship Season) and rugby (The Changing Room) have fared better on Broadway than football.

But with Eric Simonson's Lombardi, a solidly written play uplifted by Thomas Kail's distinguished direction and performed by an excellent company, football might finally start getting some respect from the show people.

If you know who Vince Lombardi is, the play is most likely exactly what you'd expect it to be: a portrait of decent, honorable figure who earns the devotion of his players by tough-loving them into the best they're capable of being. If you don't know who he is, you can simply disregard the scattered names from the past and sprinklings of sports jargon, and Lombardi stands as self-explanatory. Just remember that if you hear a few chuckles and/or applause for some seemingly random lines ("We didn't lose; we just ran out of time.") it's because the evening does embrace quite a few beloved sports clichés; but Lombardi is such an earnest play that the clichés seem perfectly natural in context.

The evening's only fictional character, Michael McCormick (Keith Nobbs), is a young magazine journalist given the opportunity to live for a week in the Lombardi home and have access to the practice field as his Green Bay Packers prepare for an important game. It's 1965 and although Lombardi, leading the team as both coach and general manager since 1959, has turned the sorry organization into a two-time league champion, the Packers are now facing the unacceptable possibility of a third straight second-place finish. This special treatment is offered because the coach respected McCormick's father, also a sportswriter, as a man who stuck with the basics and didn't try to promote himself at the expense of the team. "Be like Grantland Rice," he advises, naturally assuming he can control the way the article is written the same way he controls his players.

Dan Lauria, in the title role, is a scrappy, over-achieving bulldog who knows when his players need to be inspired and when they need to be humiliated. But through private moments we see glimpses of vulnerability peeking through his carefully designed public image. In one well-played moment he loses himself a bit, admitting to the reporter that he always feels sorry for the head coach of the team he's defeated, but then, realizing who he's speaking to, mutters a stern, "That's off the record."

McCormick's attempts to get on-the-record material from the Green Bay players (Robert Christopher Riley as Dave Robinson, Bill Dawes as Paul Hornung and Chris Sullivan as Jim Taylor, displaying a variety of attitudes and accents that give the team some regional diversity) finds them just as protective of their boss as he is toward them, and as the play progresses Nobbs does a fine job in communicating the reporter's growing affection for his subject conflicting with his desire to write something beyond a fluff piece.

Nearly walking away with the show is Judith Light, stately and arid as Lombardi's wife, Marie, a New Jersey sophisticate out of water in the tiny community of Green Bay who, between numerous martini sips, protectively watches her husband's back. Her sardonic delivery gives the play some realistic comic bite (In a flashback scene she floors the place when, upon learning that her husband has accepted a job in Green Bay, she leaves the room with the glib exit line, "I'm going to get an atlas.") and she and Lauria have terrific chemistry as a pair of opposites who have comfortably settled into working a loving relationship through their differences.

Kail gracefully maneuvers the production through the difficult playing space of Circle in the Square (it's really shaped more like a hockey rink) and keeps the energy of each scene visible through all site-lines while maintaining a natural feel. Still, the performances all around are so good you may find yourself, as I did, angling yourself in your seat in order to catch any facial expressions going the other way.

Set designer David Korin's 1960s suburban chic depiction of the Lombardi living room is just right and Zachary Borovay's projections provide a noteworthy moment when the team's signature play evolves from maneuvering X and O patterns into a film of the play in action. Lombardi might benefit from a few more moments like this, delving into the workings of the game to show what made the man a superior strategist, but the focus on the man's roles as a husband, a father figure and a nationally-known celebrity representing a small community makes for a strong and tight ninety minutes.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Judith Light and Dan Lauria; Bottom: Dan Lauria.

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