Faith Healer Reviews

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:30pm

FAIRLY POSITIVE:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002463099

"Brian Friel's "Faith Healer" is acknowledged as a modern classic, but it takes more than a little faith to sit through. The play, which had its world premiere in an unsuccessful Broadway production in 1979 starring James Mason, is being given a revival with a cast that should well ensure commercial success despite its challenging nature. It includes three of our finest theater performers: Ralph Fiennes, making his first Broadway appearance in more than a decade; Tony winner Cherry Jones; and Ian McDiarmid, best known as Emperor Palpatine in the "Star Wars" films.

Rather surprisingly, it's the latter performer who will garner the lion's share of acclaim and awards here. Making his New York theater debut as Teddy, the loving, downtrodden manager of an itinerant faith healer, McDiarmid delivers a tour-de-force comic performance that is as moving as it is amusing."

"Over the course of a sometimes lugubrious 2 1/2 hours, the three characters relate their intersecting tales, with enough variations to make us wonder as to the actual truth. As we listen to the story of Frank, a haunted man who wanders about the villages of Wales and Scotland applying his not-always-reliable healing powers, it becomes evident that the play is a thoughtful but allusive meditation on the nature of love, faith and truth.

Those meanings, however, are more than a little difficult to discern in the rambling, amorphous text despite the best efforts of the performers. Fiennes, made to look properly seedy, subtly and skillfully conveys the pain and doubt underlying his character's presumed gifts. Jones' Grace is more obviously anguished, which the actress is able to communicate without lapsing into histrionics."

Updated On: 5/4/06 at 05:30 PM

[Calvin]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:36pm

Poor Ian McDiarmid. A brilliant actor who will forever be bridled with "best known as Emperor Palpatine." I just hope no one shows up just to make him sign a lightsaber or something equally idiotic.

Between him and Richard Griffiths, this could be the season of lesser-known actors whom I've liked for years finally getting their much-deserved recognition in the U.S.
Updated On: 5/4/06 at 05:36 PM

[GYPSY1527]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:37pm

Total thread jack!

-lugubrious
Can you use that in a sentence please?

[blueflame]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:44pm

The toast given by the Best Man at the wedding was oddly lugubrious.


It means "mournful". Try "lachrymose" and see where it gets you!

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:46pm

I don't mean to be rude, but I like when Margo starts these threads...

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:47pm

So don't post.

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:50pm

If you're going to do it, at least write rave/pan/mixed.

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:51pm

Better?

[InfiniteTheaterFrenzy]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:52pm

blueflame, i think GYPSY was actually quoting Spelling Bee, not asking for a definition...

[blueflame]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:52pm

I love Margo also -- she sets a high standard. But, I think others can be helpful as well. Perhaps Margo is indisposed just now.
EDIT: Oh darn it! And I knew that in the back of my mind but I'm just too damn literal!

Updated On: 5/4/06 at 05:52 PM

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:53pm

Just cutting and pasting a review isn't helpful.

[blueflame]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:55pm

Don't you want to read them for yourself and make up your own mind?

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:55pm

Nevermind. Updated On: 5/4/06 at 05:55 PM

[blueflame]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:57pm

I'm not belittling you, I'm asking a legitimate question regarding the posting style of a review thread.

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 5:58pm

It's just nice, if you don't have the time right away, to quicky read positive/negative/mixed, etc.

Just saying, if you're gonna do it, do as good a job.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 6:04pm

I can't believe that someone is being belittled for posting Broadway information on a Broadway message board.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 6:30pm

Newsday is Positive:

"It seems straightforward enough: Two men and a woman deliver lengthy monologues. Each of them - small-time faith healer Frank Hardy, his woman Grace, and manager Teddy - is alone onstage for at least half an hour, after which Frank returns for a final soliloquy. The speeches relate their distinctive memories of more or less the same story, their perceptions of hard life on the shabby roads of Wales and Scotland and Ireland.

For some people, such a narrative may feel like an untheatrical slog through somebody else's distant troubles. My mind understands such a reaction to Brian Friel's exquisitely written (even overwritten) 1979 drama "Faith Healer." But my gut could not disagree more.

The revival that opened last night at the Booth Theatre is a peculiar but mesmerizing evening. Jonathan Kent's bravely exposed staging offers a microscopic yet magisterial acting lesson by Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and the dazzling Ian McDiarmid, in his overdue American debut."
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Kent, Fiennes' theater director of choice, allows us to see faces change brutally, as if in unforgiving close-up. We don't care much about the story, but we are as rapt by the storytelling as if we had curled up with a strange, compelling novel.
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Kent insists that "Faith Healer," for all its lurking mysticism, is really a metaphor about the ways artists damage themselves and their loved ones. When Frank and then Grace repeat, over and over, the strange, beautiful names of disappearing Welsh and Scottish towns, the sound of the damage is haunting."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/ny-etlede4728326may05,0,894685.story?coll=ny-theater-headlines

[devonian.t]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 7:20pm

Years ago, I saw him 4 times in 'The Black Prince'! The man is a legend, and the work he did in resuscitating The Almeida Theatre deserves much greater recognition. Unquestionably he should be Sir Ian!

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 7:38pm

Broadway.com is Mostly Positive:

"Acting this good can be healing. In Brian Friel's Faith Healer, the simplest and most hypnotic show on Broadway, audiences find themselves in the capable and tender care of three very different, indeed vividly distinct, pros: Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid. Just the sound of director Jonathan Kent's spare, evocative production—those three voices, each speaking solo but between them conjuring the reverberations of a vanished world—has an intimate, unamplified musicality that practically qualifies as folk medicine in itself. Leaning in intently, as we do, to absorb such well-considered performances certainly feels cleansing.

Indeed, we might luxuriate in the acting too much to notice that Friel, like the shambling con man at the center of his play, is running something of a shell game, narratively and thematically.
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Thanks to the exquisite Fiennes, we feel that we have seen at least a glimmer of Frank's radiance, and never more so than when he laughs it off as dumb luck. At times Fiennes seems to be floating inside Frank's seamy suit and pathetic little green tie, as if he's found some secret way to transcend the squalor around him; other times he stands at a doubtful angle, defying gravity to answer him. Fiennes' nervy, mannered precision can seem cold when it's frozen on film; onstage, in this part at least, his every flash and flutter registers with uncanny immediacy.

The marvel of Jones' virtuoso monologue as Grace is its scale. Shoeless and planted in a chair by a small table stocked with whiskey and cigarettes, Jones paints a broad-stroked portrait of barely contained grief but shades it with palpable delight, doing a kind of dance without leaving her seat. Perhaps most heartbreakingly, she captures and somehow ennobles the signal trait of enablers everywhere: a sweetly doting devotion to her bad choices.
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Of course, no character escapes a Friel play with a clean emotional bill of health, but the playwright's schematic storytelling—the elliptical feints; the sometimes perceptive, often overstated metaphors; the conjurer's mix of premonition and hindsight—starts to creak under its own self-important weight, particularly as the evening approaches the three-hour mark.

Still, you won't hear Friel's language, which is lyrical to a fault, sounding any richer than it does coming from this trio. For the sheer pleasure of taking the air with these guardedly garrulous narrators, Faith Healer is a heartily recommended restorative.





http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=528827

Updated On: 5/4/06 at 07:38 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 9:00pm

The NY Times is a Rave:

"HE is certainly in love with himself, isn't he, this middle-aged rake with the time-shined suit and the gaunt, unshaven face. Or is it that he holds himself in even more contempt than he does the rest of the world? Either way, the narcissism is overwhelming. And despite yourself, you can't take your eyes off him, because the power behind the pose is so genuine that it hurts.

Playing the title role in Brian Friel's great play "Faith Healer," which opened last night in a mesmerizing revival at the Booth Theater, Ralph Fiennes paints a portrait of the artist as dreamer and destroyer that feels both as old as folklore and so fresh that it might be painted in wet blood. The self-lacerating vanity that has always been central to Mr. Fiennes's presence as a film actor ("The Constant Gardener," "The English Patient") has rarely been to put to such powerful use.

This shrewd channeling of his glamorously peevish star shine may finally get "Faith Healer," a production from the Gate Theater of Dublin, directed with poetic starkness by Jonathan Kent, the New York audience it deserves. First (and last) seen on Broadway in 1979 for a mere 20 performances with James Mason as its star, "Faith Healer" is a dense and lyrical series of monologues, a form little loved by action-hungry American theatergoers.

Yet anyone who starts listening, with full attention, to the words — and, just as important, the silences — of the three characters who tell their horrible, fantastic and oddly familiar story should be fatally hooked. Intricate and self-contradicting, the narrative has the addictive pull of a detective yarn, a cosmic version in which the clues do and do not add up to a clear solution. And in Mr. Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid this production has storytellers who know how to hold a stage unconditionally, even when, in Ms. Jones's case, the performer doesn't entirely match the part.
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Mr. Friel leaves the answers in shadow. But the pain that emerges from these conflicting accounts is as hard and lucid as crystal. You come to realize that the distortions and lies — if that's what they are — are an anesthetic that allows these people to tell their stories, as is often the case with personal myths. But as Mr. Fiennes, Ms. Jones and Mr. McDiarmid demonstrate so powerfully, such evasions can keep anger, closely followed by anguish, at bay only for so long.
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If there is a weak link, as impossible as this sounds, it is Ms. Jones, the remarkable American actress who won a Tony Award last year for "Doubt." It's not just that her Anglo-Irish accent is uncertain. She is too palpably strong as a woman who sees her very identity erased by the man she loves. But Ms. Jones's fierce, artful balance between resentment and agony, between disgust and wonder, is beautifully sustained in ways that finally enhance the play's emotional patterns.

Mr. McDiarmid, a stalwart of the London stage, is beyond reproach. With his blatantly dyed orange hair and shabby showman's attire, his Teddy registers at first as a pathetic joke, a seedy old vaudevillian with a repertory of showbiz anecdotes about earlier acts he managed, like the whippet that played the bagpipes. But this jocularity is a shield that slips. And when his narrative strays into descriptions of humiliation and loss, the hurt breaks through the bravado like a fist through papier-mâché.

In like manner Mr. Fiennes plays up the showman in Frank. There are vestiges here of Laurence Olivier as the decaying music hall performer in John Osborne's "Entertainer," conveying the same mixed urges to ingratiate and alienate. But beyond the contempt and charm is an awareness of imponderable darkness within. You sense it when he speaks of foreseeing the play's climactic event and opens his mouth into a maw that becomes a black hole.
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The tragedy for the characters in "Faith Healer" is that while connection among them is elusive, the memory of fleeting contact remains and scalds. That the same might be said of the play's effect upon us is, more than anything, what makes "Faith Healer" a major work of art."

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/05/05/theater/reviews/05heal.html?pagewanted=all

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 9:22pm

Wow! Excellent reviews so far.

[fflagg]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 9:24pm

The Times as usual overrates a play.

To wit:

1. great acting from the men
2. Cherry: is fine except her accent is uneven. I think her character says she was educated in the States [hence the lack of a consistent Irish accent]. If not then it is her fault for not attending to this [and she has an accent coach].
3. the play is a wordy bore. At almost 3 hours, it is talk, talk, talk in a pretentious manner that saps away all the tension and empathy you might feel.

It is though 1,000 better than WELL which plays like a Lifetime movie sans Meredith Baxter.

[jrb_actor]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 9:30pm

In what world is Cherry merely "fine" in this production? She's DEVASTATING.

3 great actors giving solid work imho.

Updated On: 5/4/06 at 09:30 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 9:47pm

Talkin Broadway is Positive:

"Brian Friel's Faith Healer is dedicated to the proposition that the least reliable interpreters of history are those who actually witness it. Any number of interpretations are provided of the trials and triumphs surrounding the traveling trio at the play's center, but which - if any - can be believed is the most confounding conundrum.

Nonetheless, thorough distrust is rarely as invigorating as in the Gate Theatre Dublin production of the play, which has just opened at the Booth. Buoyed by world-class actors and probing direction from Jonathan Kent, this mounting doesn't shy away from the dark shadows cast by the questions from which the play is constructed. But nor does it deny you the thrill of feeling that somewhere, buried beneath mountains of ambiguity, the answers are waiting to be discovered.
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Kent's production - despite being designed with an unnecessary oppressiveness by Jonathan Fensom, though it's superbly lit by Mark Henderson - reveals this as yet one more convenient inaccuracy. Faith Healer doesn't provide the depth of emotional affirmation that Friel's other plays, like Dancing at Lughnasa or Philadelphia, Here I Come!, do, but it offers more intellectual and haunting pleasures that prove no less resonant after leaving the theater.

Despite operating individually, Fiennes, Jones, and McDiarmid create complex interlocking relationships that form an ironclad family among these disagreement-prone people. This is exactly as it should be, as each is structurally vital: Fiennes's matter-of-fact delivery of his first monologue provides a strong foundation for the evening; Jones, with her subtly aching soulfulness, and McDiarmid, with cockney-tinged confidence, then take turns refuting some segments and reinforcing others.
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It's a part of them all, and yet separate - something everyone knows, but something no one can know for sure. This Faith Healer, however, makes attempting to divine what really happened the most engrossing mystery of the year.
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/FaithHealer.html

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 5/4/06 at 10:13pm

USA Today gives it Three-and-a-half out of Four Stars:

"Through their contrasting accounts, Friel movingly examines the complex relationship between strength and vulnerability, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, and the subjectivity of all human experience.

In the title role, Ralph Fiennes, returning to Broadway for the first time since his Tony Award-winning turn 11 years ago in Hamlet (also directed by Kent, originally for the UK's Almeida Theatre), again delivers the nuanced intensity that makes him one of our most compelling stage and screen actors. His Frank is at once defeated and defiant, a ravaged man who nonetheless retains the fire that drew, and singed, his enablers.

Fellow Tony winner Cherry Jones is, likewise, predictably captivating as Grace, adding to the string of vanity-free bravura performances with which she has spoiled Broadway audiences in recent years.

And Ian McDiarmid is fiercely funny and heart-rending as the flamboyant but haunted Teddy, who for all his protestations of professional detachment is an integral member of Frank and Grace's dysfunctional, interdependent family.

As traced here, that family's strange journey offers proof that true interpretive artists are still being nurtured in commercial art."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2006-05-04-faith-healer_x.htm