ENRON Reviews

[LimelightMike]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 12:52pm

Today is Tuesday, April 27, marking the official opening of the acclaimed London production of Lucy Prebble's Enron, "a docudrama that uses song, movement, projections, video, masks — and naturalistic workplace scenes — to tell the real-life American corporate crime story," at the Broadhurst. Previews began April 8, under the direction of Rupert Goold.

For the U.S. incarnation, Tony Award winner Norbert Leo Butz plays CEO Jeffrey Skilling, Tony nominee Gregory Itzin plays Kenneth Lay, Drama League nominee Stephen Kunken plays CFO Andy Fastow, and Tony nominee Marin Mazzie plays vice president Claudia Roe (her character is a composite of several real people); the four principal wrongdoers at the top of the Enron foodchain in Houston.

The corporate crime shocked the nation in 2001. The play's action "takes place in Houston, Texas, between 1992 and the present day."

The rest of the Enron cast includes turns from Noah Weisberg, Rightor Doyle ), Ian Kahn, Mary Stewart Sullivan, Madisyn Shipman, January LaVoy, Jordan Ballard, Brandon J. Dirden, Anthony Holds, Ty Jones, Tom Nelis, Jeff Skowron, Lusia Strus, Ben Hartley and Ellyn Marie Marsh.

Best to all involved!

[MiracleElixir]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 1:30pm

Hoping for (and basically expecting) the best for this exciting, audacious production, but I can't say I'm confident reviews will go one way or the other. This should be interesting...

[Mike3]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 6:26pm

Bottom Line: Stylized theatrical depiction of the notorious energy company's rise and fall doesn't provide a satisfying return on the audience's investment.
The Hollywood Reporter

Posted: 4/27/10 at 6:29pm

TAKE THAT MARQUISE!


Team LiMi all the way!

[BroadwayBen]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 6:31pm

Financial Times: Enron is long, obvious and riddled with redundancy.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/85c24bce-521a-11df-8b09-00144feab49a.html

[BroadwayBen]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 7:14pm

Houston Chronicle: "Enron succeeds in placing this Texas-centered scandal into the sweep of U.S. history. The play has a harder time becoming a taut work of modern theater."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/6978443.html

[Mike3]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 7:31pm

Is this tragic story dramatic and stage-worthy? The answer is a resounding yes. It's all in the way you tell it, and the telling at the Broadhurst Theatre is riveting.
NY1

[BroadwayBen]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 7:33pm

NY1 (Roma Torre): Without manipulation or fraud, "Enron" the play earns a very "Strong Buy."

http://www.ny1.com/8-queens-news-content/ny1_living/117704/ny1-theater-review---enron-

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 7:47pm

Ugh...Roma Torre is so damn corny! I cringe whenever I see or read any of her reviews. Someone please buy this woman a thesaurus and a book on metaphors & axioms, stat!

[Sauja]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 7:57pm

But Play Esq., then we'd lose the fun of seeing her stone face her way through her own awkward metaphors on NY1, To quote RuPaul's Drag Race: "[They're] so wrong that I wouldn't change a thing."

[PiraguaGuy2]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:05pm

Chicago Tribune is POSITIVE

[BroadwayBen]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:25pm

BACKSTAGE is negative/mixed

http://www.backstage.com/bso/reviews-ny-theatre-broadway/ny-review-enron-1004086909.story

[BroadwayBen]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:27pm

AP is Negative/mixed

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=10493194

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:37pm

Please forgive my confusion. I haven't paid enough attention to the immediacy of reviews in the past, but isn't opening night still happening? Do some critics post reviews on opening night, after the curtain is up, based on earlier performances? I'm sorry to sound dumb about this - - and I always hesitate to ask what I know some on these boards will attack as a stupid question, but I am curious. Thank you.

[supersam1026]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:39pm

Critics see a show in the performances leading up to opening night and their reviews are made public on opening night

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:41pm

OK.... that makes sense, but don't most of the big critics also attend opening night? And don't some of the bigger reviews come out afterward? NY Times, for instance?

[Kad]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:43pm

All major critics attend final preview performances, write their reviews, which are then published the morning after the play's opening.

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:53pm

I don't think there was an empty seat the night I saw it, and the audience was fully engaged. And from the reviews I've read, even in the mixed ones, there's plenty of material for advertising. So I guess I'm saying that I sure hope you're wrong about the reviews shutting it down.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 8:57pm

Oh, I haven't read my favorite clueless-flop excuse in a while!

"It can't flop because the night I saw it there was a lot of people and they all clapped very hard!" Loves it.

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:07pm

Well, thanks, blaxx. It's so nice to have so-called grown-ups call you names when you're just trying to contribute to a discussion. And I'm far from the only "clueless" person out there if you're counting anyone who enjoyed Enron as such.

What is with you and the rest of the nasty people who haunt these boards and ruin otherwise civil threads? You're clearly not happy unless you're on the attack. And if you happen to work in the theater business, I might remind you that it's "clueless" people like me whose paid tickets pay your salary.

I've seen upwards of 150 shows on Broadway and I've loved some, enjoyed most, disliked some, but still have never felt the need to attack either the people in a show (who work their hearts out no matter what anyone thinks of the effort) or posters with other opinions.

Grow up.

[uncageg]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:15pm

I love Roma Torre.

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:20pm

LA Times is POSITIVE

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/theater-review-enron-at-the-broadhurst-theatre.html

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:26pm

L.A. Times excerpt:

...the synergy between Prebble’s play and Goold’s staging creates something that could only occur in the theater — a three-dimensional distillation of the greed, fraud and self-serving genius that spelled not just the demise of a company but the emergence of a form of casino capitalism that would by the decade’s end lead to the worst recession since the Great Depression. “Enron,” which had its official opening Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theatre, concentrates on a handful of top executives and ends up hauling in the zeitgeist.

Would you believe that that show often looks and behaves like a musical? Consummate song-and-dance man Norbert Leo Butz (a Tony winner for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) stars as Jeffrey Skilling, the nerdy Harvard-educated numbers guy who brought to Enron the concept of “mark to market,” which allows future income, valued at current market prices, to be written down as earnings as soon as deals are signed. Now this wouldn’t seem like the kind of thing to inspire much razzmatazz, but when the company’s stock price starts soaring, all that adrenaline-fueled avarice has a way of putting even socially awkward Skilling in a campy Hugh Jackman mood.

Goold, who directed the strikingly modern “Macbeth” with Patrick Stewart on Broadway in 2008, magnificently orchestrates this layered multimedia extravaganza on a set by Anthony Ward that’s like a mix between a smart phone and a corporate meeting room....

[adamgreer]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:27pm

Much like the opinions on the board, these critics reviews are all over the map!

[pacificnorthwest]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:42pm

Does someone have full access to Newsday? Not being a subscriber, this is as far as I could get:

Funny money gets devalued in 'Enron'
April 27, 2010 By LINDA WINER [e-mail]

For "Enron" to be any more timely, the financial satire with music would have to be happening in the offices of Goldman Sachs' lawyers. If Rupert Goold's fanciful multimedia staging of Lucy Prebble's London hit were any livelier, the actors wearing voracious debt-eating raptors masks on their heads would be dashing up the theater aisles gobbling credit-card receipts from our wallets.

In other...