The Vertical Hour Reviews

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:00pm

USA Today is up early -- it's Mixed (two-and-a-half stars):

"The problem with this production, directed with a light, sure hand by Sam Mendes, is that the actors cast as Nadia and Oliver are not equals. Julianne Moore, the luminous leading lady known for her vibrant work in The Hours and many other films, isn't a stranger to the stage. But in this Broadway debut, she can seem strained and self-conscious.

In contrast, Bill Nighy's Oliver is thoroughly convincing and deliciously idiosyncratic. Walking with a slightly stooped gait and wearing an alternately amused and rueful expression, the stage veteran reveals his character's incorrigible, coarsely seductive exterior, his probing mind and, eventually, his aching heart. It's easy to see how this aging roué infuriates his son (charmingly played by Andrew Scott) and fascinates Nadia.

Two likable young actors, Dan Bittner and Rutina Wesley, also appear, as Nadia's students. Wesley's Terri declares in her paper that "there is only one truth: The powerful exploit the powerless. Indiscriminately."

"Despair's an affectation," Nadia tells Terri. "It's self-indulgence." Terri shoots back: "It's more like not fooling yourself." By suggesting the truth is more complicated than either woman maintains, The Vertical Hour takes us on a bracing, if not entirely smooth, ride."


http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2006-11-30-review-vertical-hour_x.htm?POE=LIFISVA

[FOAnatic]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:05pm

I thought this would happen.

I loved the play and Nighy.

And I thoroughly enjoyed Moore as well. But, she did seem a bit self-conscious. I figured the reviewers would have their claws sharpened.

[BroadwayChica]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:07pm

Completely agree on Moore and Nighy. When I saw the play yesterday she seemed at times amateurish and out of place. Which is a shame, because she's such a fine film actress. Nighy, by contrast, superbly commands the stage. At the performance I attended, the cheers for Nighy were considerably louder and more enthusiastic than for Moore. Which, given that Nighy is far less recognizable as an actor, says a lot...

[mijofly19]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:09pm

I haven't seen the show yet and I know it will be closed by Tony time but do you see a Tony nom in the future for Nighy? Everything I've heard about him has been raves. He's one of my favorite actors and I can't wait to see him in this.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:11pm

Well, I think it's a fair criticism. As I said my review, I thought she seemed tentative, was vocally underpowered and lacked presence, which ended up causing an imbalance in the play -- she simply wasn't Nighy's equal on the stage and she needed to be in order for the play to work. There are good things in her performance and in the play itself, but it's simply not the success that it could have been:

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.cfm?boardname=bway&thread=918302

Updated On: 11/30/06 at 06:11 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:19pm

I hope that Nighy is remembered at Tony time, but it's going to be a competitive season for lead actor in a play. Off the top of my head, so far we have:

Kevin Spacey, Moon For the Misbegotten
Brian O'Byrne, Coast of Utopia
Ethan Hawke, Coast of Utopia
Billy Crudup, Coast of Utopia
Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Michael Sheen, Frost/ Nixon
Liev Schreiber, Talk Radio
Nathan Lane, Butley (maybe)

Plus whoever's cast in the lead of Prelude to A Kiss and Journey's End could be up as well. That's a lot of competition for 5 slots, though Nighy has a shot.

[mabel]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:39pm

I wonder how the Utopia men will be considered as far as lead/featured goes. Would you think they'd just put O'Byrne in lead and the rest in Featured? I'd imagine their chances (especially Crudup, who's not even in Salvage) would be better placed there.

[theatrespaz]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:40pm

And also...

Brian Dennehy
Christopher Plummer

for Inherit the Wind

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:41pm

Talkin Broadway is Mixed:

"For the second time in a year, a beautiful, A-list movie actress with distinctive red hair is spending time away from Hollywood on a Broadway stage on West 45th Street, tackling a work by a prolific contemporary playwright. But unlike the last time, this debut is not so easy to dismiss.

Julianne Moore acquits herself far better in The Vertical Hour, which just opened at the Music Box, than Julia Roberts did in Three Days of Rain this past spring. David Hare's new play is intermittently provocative, but also pudgy and pandering. If Moore occasionally stumbles under the weight of those qualities, that she doesn't let them deter her from making a real woman from the symbolic construct they outline says much of the talent and commitment she's brought to Broadway.

Let's be clear: Her performance here is not really on par with most of her film work. An intense, sophisticated actress who brings a measure of high society to all her roles, Moore consistently gives some of the most intelligently articulated performances in movies today. In her Oscar-nominated turn as the suffering, progressive wife in Far From Heaven, as the drug-addled daughter in Magnolia, or even channeling Jodie Foster in Hannibal, she bears an airy wisdom and delicacy one would more readily associate with an early 20th century stage starlet.

These qualities would seem to make her ideal for the role of Nadia Blye, a war correspondent-turned-Yale professor who follows her boyfriend Philip (Andrew Scott) to England to meet his reclusive father Oliver (Bill Nighy) and finds more of herself than she anticipated. This outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, so fiercely protective of all human life she once advised President Bush, bursts with the staunch, independent spirit that has often inspired Moore onscreen.

Onstage, at least as directed here by Sam Mendes, Moore's performance is not exactly rife with complexities. It doesn't lack depth: There are flashes of insecurity beneath Nadia's curiously affected strength, of world-weariness struggling to escape its dangerously energetic host. But there are only flashes: Moore tends to adopt one dominant emotional stance in each of the play's five scenes, enact its necessary variations, and move on to the next.

Even so, Moore maintains a quietly captivating aura. This is likely because her performance is well in keeping with the way David Hare has written the play.

________________________________________________________________


The reserved, smoldering Nighy is solid vocally and emotionally as Oliver, but is physically bizarre: His rickety movement, which suggests a malfunctioning Swiss Army knife, give him a distractingly unnatural posture onstage. Moore, while more comfortable, frequently moves stiffly as well.

One is tempted to blame Mendes, whose direction is short on decisiveness and tends to let tiny moments get too big. But that wouldn't explain Scott, whose understated, casual ease makes his work the production's smoothest and most satisfying. So affable is he as the son trapped in two people's shadows that you wish the character were less of an afterthought. He's essentially apolitical, and his feelings for Nadia are limited to concern and jealousy that give him few opportunities to display any innate warmth.

Scott manages to anyway, but that's the play's problem in general: When politics and romance collide, someone will be left out in the cold. In the world of the play, that's Philip; in our world, it's us. Moore suffices as the show's shimmering, radiant heart, even the life force on which these disjointed pieces can thrive, but The Vertical Hour needs a fortified spine and a more engaged and open mind that she, for all her virtues, cannot bestow."

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/Vertical.html

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:42pm

That's right, I forgot about Inherit the Wind.

[Caroline-Q-or-TBoo]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 6:46pm

well this thread sure is less happenin' than the company review thread

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 7:07pm

The Guardian (UK) is Mostly Positive:

"All this is richly stimulating stuff: a reminder that one of the pleasures of sitting in a theatre lies in encountering a civilised mind. My problem, as Americans love to say, lies with the character of Nadia. This is in no way the fault of Julianne Moore, who gives a fine performance. She has an extraordinary physical quality in that her flame-red hair is offset by a skin of almost translucent whiteness. She also has a gift - rare in American actors - of stillness. She listens to Oliver's arguments with a rapt intensity that implies, in a vital part of the play's sub-text, that she is slowly falling in love with the father while having sex with his son.

My doubts spring from Hare's insistence on what he calls Nadia's "innocence". He uses the character's first-hand knowledge of war to explain her belief in "humane intervention". But Nadia's climactic decision to return to Iraq also doesn't emerge as quite the heroic stance Hare envisages. In the current situation, where reporting is obviously subject to severe physical limitations, it looks more like a piece of gesture politics. In performance, in fact, something strange happens. Nadia is obviously the protagonist. But Hare's anguished romanticism, which is one of his greatest qualities, is here transferred to the character of Oliver. It helps that he is played superbly by Bill Nighy, who is a master of tortured idealism. With his seamed features and lean, concave form, Nighy looks like a man who has suffered interestingly. He brings out all the different facets of the faintly twisted Oliver: the flawed father and impenitent seducer as well as the decent doctor and cool ironist.

When Moore says that defending the war has not been a popular position in liberal Connecticut, Nighy sardonically remarks: "It's not been big in Shropshire either." Perhaps inevitably, we become more interested in Oliver than Nadia.

But the fault is partly camouflaged in Sam Mendes' beautifully articulated production with its seductive Shropshire garden evoked by Scott Pask's spacious design. The Irish actor Andrew Scott, making his Broadway debut along with Moore and Nighy, also invests Oliver's son with the right simmering resentment.

In a nutshell, Hare's play, whatever its flaws, is about big ideas. Not just the tragic mess of Iraq. It also deals with the lawlessness of elected politicians, Anglo-American cultural differences, the dangers of denial, the futility of isolating politics from private life. At a time when the bulk of Broadway theatre - and, to be honest, much of the West End too - is designed to offer sensation and escape, Hare's play engages the heart and mind. After a diet of commercial candyfloss, it was like being offered a five-course meal; and the Music Box spectators, having looked up, were grateful, as I was, to have been so nourishingly fed."
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1961504,00.html

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 7:08pm

...that didn't give away the ending, did it?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 7:13pm

The AP is Mixed-to-Positive:

""The Vertical Hour" by David Hare is a dysfunctional family drama decked out with some serious ruminations about right and wrong, duty and honor and how to lead one's life.

Before you immediately consider heading for the exit at the Music Box Theatre, where the play opened Thursday, be advised that many of the arguments in the British playwright's muscular morality tale are delivered by the marvelous Bill Nighy. The man lifts the sometimes ponderous debate into heady theatrical territory.

Nighy portrays a randy rooster of an English doctor engaged in strenuous discussions with his son's attractive girlfriend (Julianne Moore), an American journalist turned academic.

Both performers are making their Broadway debuts in this production but it's Nighy who steals the show with a witty, Tony-caliber performance.

_______________________________________________________________

Moore, best known as a film actress in such movies as "Far From Heaven,""The Hours" and "Boogie Nights," is a little tentative, particularly in the first act. Yet she gains confidence in Act 2, when Oliver and Nadia go head to head for a late-night confrontation on the lawn of the doctor's home. The actress is at a disadvantage, too, in that Hare has given her more of his high-tone pronouncements — statements that often sound as if they are little sermons.

________________________________________________________________

Director Sam Mendes keeps the often dense dialogue moving at a reasonable clip. And there is something refreshing and airy about designer Scott Pask's bucolic setting of a lawn in Wales, dominated by a large tree.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/11/30/entertainment/e153704S03.DTL

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 7:25pm

Benedict Nightingale of the Times of London gives it three out of five stars:


"David Hare’s last play, Stuff Happens, was a docudrama about the war in Iraq which opened at the National and moved to New York. The Vertical Hour is a fiction on substantially the same subject and could well make the opposite journey, presumably with Sam Mendes still as director and, conceivably, with Julianne Moore as the American war correspondent who becomes a political analyst and a Yale professor, and proceeds to shack up with a British bloke who works in New England as a “physical therapist”.

It is unusual for Broadway to give a premiere to a play that is as topical as it is serious, articulate, witty and absorbing, and yet I can’t say that I exactly warmed to The Vertical Hour. Or, rather, it left me feeling the way I do about much of George Bernard Shaw’s work.

The play fizzes with intellectual passion but tends to falter when things get inner and personal. It is almost as if Hare is in a debate with himself on a truckload of subjects, starting with the rights and wrongs of Iraq."

_____________________________________________________________


I suppose the play could be attacked as too discursive, but I prefer to see that as a sign of a mental curiosity seldom encountered on Broadway. Rather, the twin dramatic problems are Nadia’s relationship with Philip and Philip’s with Oliver. Is it plausible that, whatever her weariness with war reportage, this bright, mature woman would fall for a thirtyish man who seems not only terminally dull but infantile in his love-hate feelings for his dad?

Although it is probably meant to show that conflict and the need for negotiation exist in the private worlds that underlie and help to shape the public ones, this side of the play seemed to me unconvincing, uninteresting or both. Certainly, poor Scott can do little with so weedy a character. And Nighy and Moore? Well, he fidgets, jerks and vocally slithers about while she strives to be tough and incisive. He is mannered but arresting; she is unpretentious but samey and unexciting.

But then maybe you can’t expect emotional depth in a play where, just after meeting each other, characters say things such as “People blame materialism because they feel it doesn’t nourish them”, or “As long as we had two superpowers in some sort of balance, then there seemed to be a procedure for determining the world’s affairs”. That is, after all, Hare in his Shavian mode."


http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14936-2479650,00.html

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 8:00pm

The Independent (UK) is Negative:

"The Vertical Hour is not a good play, though it expresses certain views with great crispness and force. Julianne Moore - a hennaed, pale, tensile presence - is not a natural stage actress but she does what she can with a very difficult role, even if she often comes across as an awkward student rather than the powerful academic she is supposed to be.

_______________________________________________________________


Ironically, watching The Vertical Hour, I was constantly reminded of Keats's profound view that we dislike art that has "a palpable design" upon us. The whirring mechanism in The Vertical Hour almost deafens you to the moment when the play works as drama not polemic.

Bill Nighy, the "thinking woman's crumpet", is accorded little chance to demonstrate his sex appeal in a play where he is a philandering doctor with a son (uncomfortable Andrew Scott) who has defected to the United States as a kind of upmarket Hippocratic-oath-taking personal trainer and who returns to show off his new, older girlfriend - a former war reporter turned Yale academic (Moore) - to erring, supposedly magnetic papa. What follows is an honourable attempt to create a debate in which the personal and the political become painfully inextricable. Apart from one or two brilliant moments, it fails.

We need a play that burrows deep into the nervous system of a bright person who sincerely thought that the invasion of Iraq amounted to "liberation". We need a play that sees Western indulgence through the eyes of someone from the West who is more of a Muslim cast-of-mind than she knows. We need a play that says the knee-jerk antipathy to everything that America has done in the past five years could do with some vigorous questioning. But the toxic combination of George Bush and Tony Blair engender a crudity of response.

The Vertical Hour is better than the latest plays by Caryl Churchill and Sam Shepard and it may be one of those works that will mean more 10 years from now. At the moment, though, what one registers is disappointment."


http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/reviews/article2029282.ece

Updated On: 11/30/06 at 08:00 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 8:27pm

Variety is Mixed:

"After dealing directly in "Stuff Happens" with the buildup to war in Iraq, David Hare reflects on the intense self-examination prompted by it in "The Vertical Hour." But while the 2004 play made grippingly contentious, impassioned theater out of public editorial fodder, this more private drama about personal and political responsibility is unfocused. Stuffed with stimulating insights, it's never dull but ultimately feels as messy and unresolved as the conflict behind its central debate. Sam Mendes' production does have one reason for unstinting recommendation, however, in Bill Nighy's fascinatingly eccentric performance.

________________________________________________________________

Via Nadia, Hare advocates the necessity of involvement and the refusal of passivity. He warns against letting psychology rule principles and action. Laced with clever dialogue, the play makes lots of intriguing points on power, capitalism, materialism, imperialism and the big daddy of -isms: terrorism. The trouble is these notations never add up to a thematically cohesive point of view.
______________________________________________________________

The artificiality of her role and its self-contradictory journey may be partly to blame, but Moore's lack of stage technique is a problem, especially in the stodgy opening. A luminous screen performer capable of exquisitely naturalistic vulnerability -- in "Far From Heaven," for instance, or the Hare-scripted "The Hours" -- she's stiffly self-conscious here. Early on, it's as if she's trapped in a Loreal commercial, tilting her face into the light with an expression of beatific serenity that goes against the scene's argumentative nature.

______________________________________________________________


Moore's strongest moments are when she's playing off Nighy, but the match is an uneven one.

Rock-star thin and with eyebrows possibly arched since birth, Nighy's rangy physique and in particular his spindly legs are almost as expressive as his softly mocking eyes or droll delivery. His twitchy, loose-limbed body language is so controlled and precise that often he seems to be undermining Moore/Nadia with his feet alone.

Oliver opens up about his past but has no illuminating self-realization to equal Nadia's. Yet in Nighy's hands, he's a far more complete, coherent character. The friction between him and his son (deftly played by Scott with a disarming mix of maturity, awkwardness and bottled anger straining beneath the sweet-natured surface) is consistently more involving than the main event.

If "The Vertical Hour" seems not destined to rank among Hare's greater accomplishments, it at least has the merit of having brought Nighy's bracing originality to the New York stage."



http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932227.html?categoryid=1265&cs=1

Updated On: 11/30/06 at 08:27 PM

[BroadwayChica]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 8:40pm

Wow...The Guardian review gave away the ending of the show. Way to ruin it for people who have yet to see it.

[Auggie27]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 9:50pm

I ultimately loved the play as a whole, and Moore, but I found that first scene -- about which a few of these critics are perturbed -- almost unplayable. (And maybe even unnecessary? Why not begin with the introduction to Nighy?) Moore is saddled with some of the most convoluted, eliptical, philosophical speech ever handed to an actor -- particularly trying and hard to make natral for a lead-in. She's game, but the premise of the scene is precious and arch (a boy in love with her), the text dense and the words not the type to spring to the lips naturally. Once the play settles down -- and it truly does, in a harrowing 2nd act debate that raises the roof -- and the character's voice is more sure, Moore reveals that luminescent emotional clarity for which is deservedly touted. For my money, when the play shines, so does she.

Updated On: 11/30/06 at 09:50 PM

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 10:33pm

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/theater/reviews/01hour.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1164943980-atRY5jMtbnH1wbZUbH4vsQ

Mixed-to-Negative, with a rave for Nighy.

"The home team doesn’t stand a chance. On paper it looked as if the Yanks might at least put up a good fight in “The Vertical Hour,” David Hare’s soggy consideration of the Anglo-American culture divide, which opened last night at the Music Box Theater.

Yet in theatrical terms (never mind the ideological side), there is never even a contest. Though Ms. Moore appears at home on the stage, her American star shine is no match for Mr. Nighy’s wily British craftsmanship. Mr. Nighy, to put it bluntly, mops the floor with Ms. Moore. You could even say that with his irresistibly mannered performance, he mops the floor with Mr. Hare’s play. Under the circumstances this can only be counted as a blessing.

For all its obvious topicality, much of “The Vertical Hour” feels like a musty throwback to the psychological puzzle plays of the 1950s, which translated the dynamic of the analyst’s couch into theatrical confrontation and revelation. The watchword here is “underneath,” spoken in knowing italics and introduced early in the play (in a prefatory scene in Nadia’s office at Yale) by a rich student (Dan Bittner) with a crush on his telegenic professor.

Ms. Moore, alas, is miscast. On film she has brilliantly elucidated the inner conflict in passive women (“The Hours,” “Far From Heaven”), but has invariably seemed less authoritative in action roles (“Hannibal,” “Jurassic Park: The Lost World”).

But let’s be honest. Without Mr. Nighy, “The Vertical Hour” would be heavy sledding. First of all, there’s the magnetic physicality of his performance: the battery of restless tics and gestures that belie Oliver’s air of wry understatement; his tendency to treat his towering toothpick frame as if he were his own perpetually on-call masseur; his way of letting his limbs and fingers spring out at cutting angles, like the blades of a Swiss Army knife.

This isn’t just window dressing. The uneasy mannerisms suggest an inveterate physician, troubled by conscience and a sense of the fragility of life, forever taking inventory of his body. Mr. Nighy turns simply listening into a compulsively watchable activity."


Updated On: 11/30/06 at 10:33 PM

[Smartful Dodger]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 11:00pm

Sadly, Moore swallowed the line that defines the play tonight (i.e., the war-time jargon of "the vertical hour" when a soldier is shot) and several of the peple around me were perplexed leaving the theatre.

In Hare's construction, the "vertical hour" is the first scene of Act II. A beautifully written scene between Moore's and Nighy's characters.

Nighy is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. As Margo suggests, I hope the committee remembers him at Tony nomination time.

While he emerged on the scene as a visionary, Sam Mendes is proving most inconsistent.



Updated On: 11/30/06 at 11:00 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 11:48pm

Theatremania is Mixed:

"Those mini-monologues do have a big plus, though. They mean that Nighy has that much more to do. It's a good thing, because his performance goes a long way toward lending needed vitality to Hare's uneven script. Calling Nighy an eccentric actor is like calling Christmas just another day in the year. Hoo-boy, is he strange -- and kind of wonderful!

At times he's like a gopher on a prairie; his head swivels on his neck as if to spot encroaching enemies. He's constantly chewing his inner cheeks, adjusting his trousers at the hips with the palms, jamming his hands in his pockets and pulling them out just as fast, precariously shifting his balance. He continually suggests that his mind is as restless as his long and lanky body. Indeed, the constant jitterbugging is in service to a nervous character still in flight from the aftermath of a long-ago accident.

Another bonus is that in the extended, politics-threaded duologue with Moore, Nighy finally coaxes her to his level. Before that scene, she strains even willing credulity as a brilliant professor whom Philip calls "formidable certainly. Committed. Articulate. Passionate. Full of strong feeling." In her introductory scene with Bittner, Moore exhibits none of those advertised qualities, registering more as a callow freshman trying to impress a suspicious mentor. On the other hand, Scott, who's also been imported from England, is definitely committed, articulate and passionate as someone longing angrily to reconnect with his father. In their single scenes, Bittner and Wesley are convincing Yalies.

With its strong American female protagonist, The Vertical Hour is a return to the plays The Secret Rapture and Strapless which Hare tailored for red-haired actress Blair Brown when they were an item in the 1980s. Apparently, he still has more to say on those subjects. While he takes a while getting there, what David Hare eventually says about the choices we make is worth hearing."


http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/9565

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 1:03am

LA Times is Mostly Negative:

"OK, so how did Julianne Moore's Broadway debut compare with Julia Roberts' coolly received one last season?

Moore wins by a nose. But David Hare, the esteemed British playwright, shouldn't be smiling. In fact, much of what is lacking in Moore's performance can be attributed to the unconvincing role Hare has written for her.

The play is called "The Vertical Hour," and it had its world premiere Thursday at the Music Box under the direction of Sam Mendes. Stage and film veteran Bill Nighy costars, and he's firing on all cylinders. But not even his flamboyant realism can rescue this sluggish and exhaustingly verbose excuse for a drama.

If this sounds harsh, let me say that I was stalwart in the face of boredom. I felt certain there would be a payoff. Hare is too experienced a political dramatist not to redeem the slowness of his tactics.

No such luck. And not even Moore's exquisite beauty could ease the disappointment, which is saying something when you consider she possesses one of the great faces in contemporary cinema.

_______________________________________________________________

Hare has written a psychological play about political people. His perspective seems to be that psychology is both inescapable — we are motivated by unconscious forces that are shaped by our pasts — and inadequate to describe what drives exceptional altruists like Nadia and Oliver.

The title of the play, which refers to the moment in combat medicine when a caregiver can still helpfully intervene, reflects the mental surgery Oliver and Nadia are performing on each other. Formally, the work mixes the moral disputation found in Jean-Paul Sartre's plays with the dramatic indirection of Henry James' late novels, in a half-baked manner that can be blamed only on Hare.

But back to Moore, who's a first-rate film actress though out of her depths onstage. For her, acting is largely about the close-up, which means that she tries to authentically experience what her character is going through moment to moment.

This kind of method acting for the mirror can be highly effective in the movies. The camera is a lie detector, and Moore can be counted on for scrupulous honesty. But it's not enough for the theater, and neither Hare's play nor Mendes' paralytic staging lead her into that heightened form of expression in which inner experience is forced to confront a tribunal larger than the self.

Nighy, on the other hand, offers a master class. Too bad it's in the service of Hare's time-wasting curriculum.
http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-et-vertical1dec01,0,2161396.story?coll=cl-stage

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 1:14am

John Simon is Mixed:

"Moore never fully plumbs Nadia's turbulent depths, and her voice lacks a certain richness and variety. But she does display a nice mix of sass and self-doubt. As the sneaky Oliver, Bill Nighy has a dazzling conjurer's bag of tricks: quizzical grimaces, hypnotically fluttery hands, delightfully disingenuous humility, Socratic traps of pseudo-naivete, and long, treacherous pauses. But his manner shouldn't spill over into mannerism, as it all too often does.

Andrew Scott's Philip is just right in his blend of strengths and weaknesses. Personable and amusing, his Philip is not cut out for an ideological battlefield. Ann Roth has dressed all of them with her customary stylishness.

The brilliant Sam Mendes has staged a potentially static contest with a variety of revealing movements and suggestive business: Note how the distance between characters keeps shifting in telltale ways and how Brian MacDevitt's superb lighting, as it modulates from night to dawn, offers visual counterpoint to psychological revelation. Hare also provides sparkling comic relief with all kinds of humor, notably political, that often has the audience in stitches.

What, then, is lacking? The main events all take place offstage, which is a bit of a letdown. At times, the persistently dialectical progression becomes a trifle schematic, or even a mite arcane. So the eponymous ``vertical hour' remains underdeveloped. Nadia merely says, ``In combat medicine, there's this moment ... after a disaster, after a shooting -- there's this moment, the vertical hour, when you can actually be of some use.' A tad too cryptic for me.

Yet what a pleasure to be able to leave a theater engaged in thinking about what we gleaned, both from coruscating talk and from its burr-like ``Underneath.'


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=am7FVh6jC51g&refer=muse

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 1:14am

Clive Barnes gives it Three-and-a-half Stars (why am I not surprised?):

"What's fun about English playwrights is that they see no division between politics and people.

Nadia, with her commitment to the war in Iraq, and Oliver, cynical and scornful of America's intervention, can still find certain emotional common ground.

Hare, unlike Shaw, is nonpolemic. We know Hare's politics, or at least we think we do, from his brilliant, anti-war drama last season, "Stuff Happens."

Stuff happens in "The Vertical Hour," too, but it's evenly dished out and, as a result, we acquire unusual insight into three characters and their lives. Yes, at times the play is glib - the scenes in Yale that bookend the play are a tad too neat, and Oliver's basic persona just a touch too obvious.

Still, not only is it one of the best plays Broadway has seen in years, but Sam Mendes has staged it with exquisite skill, allowing the main actors to play like a well-honed musical trio.

Moore, better known for her films than her stage work, deftly shades the complexity of this activist/academic gingerly threading her way through the moral choices that are the land-mined territory of her intellectual landscape. She's firm, understated and superb.

Nighy (the tentacled Davy Jones of the last "Pirates of the Caribbean") steals everything on the stage that hasn't actually been nailed down by the script.

He has made eccentricity a way of acting. His louche, disreputable manner, summed up in a charming vocal sneer and defensive smile, is delivered with a panache that disguises the sheer technique under it.

He is, of course, wonderful. Then again, anyone who's seen him in film or onstage in London expects nothing less."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12012006/entertainment/theater/a_shaw_thing_in_hour_town_theater_clive_barnes.htm

Updated On: 12/1/06 at 01:14 AM