It's Only a Play Broadway Reviews

Some people might call 'It's Only A Play' a valentine to the theater, but you mustn't believe them. Terrance McNally's play is not so much a love letter from a shy, smitten admirer as a mash note sent by a stalker who's written it in capital letters and smeared it with what may be bodily fluids. Whatever it is, it's a pure hoot, a rollicking comedy with perfect casting and deft direction in Jack O'Brien that gleefully dissects modern Broadway and doesn't pretend to mask its targets by using fake names...Lane is the unquestionable star here, at his droll best with perfect timing, mugging when he needs to or raising a haughty eyebrow to sell a joke the next. The rest of the cast -- including a really remarkable Broadway debut by Stock in a company of powerful stars -- is superb, all hysterical at first and then revealing deeper desires as the play continues.

Some artists mellow with age. And then there's Terrence McNally...Part of what gives the new edition its sting and zing is McNally's keen awareness of how stage business has come to intersect with the broader celebrity culture, and how much more pervasive and, frankly, sillier the latter has become...As always, though, it's Lane we marvel at. Working with a playwright and a director -- Jack O'Brien, at his most delightfully mischievous -- who know the range of his comedic gifts and how to fully tap them, Lane whips the audience into fits of laughter, both jaded and joyful, from the moment James enters, promptly dialing his Hollywood agent to wax snarky about his buddy's show.

If only it were a better play...A lot has changed on Broadway in 30 years, but for McNally it all comes down to changing not much more than a few tons of famous names. McNally doesn't just drop names -- he stomps on them, too...These put-downs comprise act one. In act two, the characters take turn reading the bad reviews. Brantley takes more jabs, but frankly, his New York Times reviews are much funnier than McNally's imitations. Many of the jokes would fail if not for Lane, Broderick and their savvy director, Jack O'Brien...Somehow the vet actors deliver and the new talent keeps coming, and it's nice to report that this revival offers not one, but two, spectacular Broadway debuts.

Nathan Lane holds the dubious distinction of being one of Broadway's biggest stars while also being one of the stage's most underappreciated actors. Though four Tony Award nominations and two wins is rather nice, it's astonishing to think that someone so highly regarded as one of the few remaining stage stars nationally known primarily for acting in the theatre has gone sixteen times without a nomination. Whether or not number nineteen garners him the honor remains to be seen, but in the first ten minutes or so of Terrance McNally's wickedly funny offstage farce, It's Only A Play, Lane demonstrates why he is undoubtedly one of the greatest stage actors of his generation.

Nobody does mean-nasty-vicious like Terrence McNally, bless his black heart. The pitiless playwright has exhumed 'It's Only a Play,' his 1986 love-hate letter to those big babies who work and play on Broadway, and updated it for today -- and for the timely if schmaltzy reunion of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The comedy's slight plot, about the high drama (and low comedy) of the opening night of a new Broadway show, is still a trifle. But the well-aimed and highly personal zingers are more malicious, and delicious, this time out.

The in-jokes come thick and fast in this extensively retooled revival...it's in Lane's dynamite early scenes with gifted newcomer Micah Stock that this funny if flimsy comedy really fires on all cylinders, while Broderick underwhelms in a key role. McNally's farcical doodle starts out like gangbusters but becomes increasingly uneven. It has an annoying habit of stalling when it should accelerate, particularly in a padded second act that could use an editor...What keeps it entertaining even when the writing falters is McNally's equal-opportunity ribbing of everyone involved -- playwrights, producers, actors, directors, theater landlords, stagehands, etc. That favorite punching bag, the critic, takes a beating...But ultimately, this starts to feel less like the tight collaboration of a writer and director intent on keeping the comedy machinery humming than the product of an overcrowded writers' room full of gagmeisters trying to outdo one another...It's Only a Play begs to be done as a brisk one-act...Either way, while the vehicle is not exactly robust, McNally and O'Brien know the terrain well enough to ensure that it sparkles more often than it sags.

If the entire dream cast of Terrence McNally's backstage revenge play had less than split-millisecond timing, the merciless inside-showbiz observations about the theater and theaterfolk might wound deeper than they amuse. Instead, McNally's major update and overhaul of his 1985 work is likely to remind the gleefully unrepentant among us of Alice Roosevelt Longworth's quote that, more or less, said, 'If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me....Lane revels in the ego and insecurity of the actor with the TV series who turned down a part written for him by his playwright-buddy, underplayed with deft earnestness and panic by Broderick, the comedy's straight man. Channing is delicious as an aging star with drug issues and a parolee's ankle bracelet. Mullally has a dumb-smart way with malaprops as the eager fledgling producer. Grint -- all spiked red hair and raccoon eyes -- is perfectly bratty as the British directing genius, while Abraham skulks creepily around as a vicious critic with an agenda...As long as they're not up there laughing at you, however, this is the rare Broadway comedy that's as smart as it is funny.

Andnow it's landed on Broadway at last in a hilarious and star-packed evening of theater in-jokes that often plays like a nonmusical version of Forbidden Broadway...Director Jack O'Brien's production reteams Tony winners Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who these days pack a bigger punch at the box office than in terms of natural onstage chemistry. The two play old friends...But while Lane commands the stage with his quippy narcissism (abetted by some of McNally's strongest meta-jokes), Broderick continues his recent run of stiff, somnambulent, and overly mannered stage performances. The energy and pace of the show deflate whenever he opens his mouth...The rest of the cast, though, enlivens characters who can border on the thanklessly one-dimensional...Despite McNally's considerable revisions, there's just not enough plot here to sustain a two-and-a-half-hour show -- and what plot there is can seem thinner and more obvious than Abraham's toupee...It's Only a Play is a poison-pen mash note to New York theater, at once gleefully bitchy and affectionate. B+

Big names drop like hailstones in Terrence McNally's 'It's Only a Play,' the kind that look like diamonds from a distance and then melt away before you know it...There is also another, less famous name that is bandied about. That's Ben Brantley, the theater critic for The New York Times whose review of the play in 'It's Only a Play' is being anxiously awaited...he clearly bears little resemblance to the critic who has written the review you are reading now. O.K., so maybe he does. But I still find it hard to take the references too personally. For one thing, the self-important, vitriolic Mr. Brantley is treated no more harshly than the self-important, vitriolic characters onstage...Such improper proper-noun-slinging probably goes down better now than it did three decades ago...[Lane's] portrayal here of James Wicker...is sterling. He and Ms. Channing -- who is hilarious as a washed-up, substance-and-plastic-surgery-abusing Hollywood star -- give the show a sheen and a heart it might otherwise lack...Mr. McNally's play is a bit more old-fashioned, perhaps, but then so is the theater, God bless it.

Mullally, meanwhile, turns Julia into an irritating caricature, affecting a squeaky, drawling, little-girl voice that suggests the character has escaped from a cartoon. The two portrayals aren't the production's only problems. The play, in which nothing much actually happens, requires zippy pacing. But Jack O'Brien's direction is unusually sluggish, especially in the first act, dulling the impact of the script's often-sharp one-liners.

Part sentimental confessional, part caustic farce rooted in bitterness and wholly insider theatrical baseball, this intermittently amusing, celebrity-juiced Terrence McNally comedy from 1982 has been updated, often painfully, for an age of gossip, annoying media personalities and an all-powerful critic likely to eat your precious creative baby as his late-night sushi on the train home...Fine, so this is a comedy. As directed by Jack O'Brien, it is also a depressingly uneven production. The first scene, which takes place between the immaculate Lane, who is superb, and the one no-name in the cast, Micah Stock -- having a career-making moment playing a newbie to Broadway and thus the guy serving the drinks -- sparkles with pleasures...But then Grint...enters...And then the otherworldly Broderick shows up...and, well, the air goes out of the whole affair because Grint is about six sizes too large and Broderick's performance is, with a few funny exceptions, just too creepy to be funny.

A passel of well-known actors from film, stage and TV including Matthew Broderick, Stockard Channing, Megan Mullally, Rupert Grint and F. Murray Abraham cavort along with Lane in this evening of intermittent amusement -- merely lukewarm because with its slightly dated conceits, it can't decide whether to go in fully for sentimentality, satire, or the kill...And though McNally has updated the comedy's name-dropping...the breathless premise on which the comic complications hang, the outrageously eviscerating verdict of a dyspeptic New York Times critic, feels sorta kinda out of the lore of another era. Those who revel in Broadway mythology, though, will forgive the shortcomings (and drawn-out speechifying) of 'It's Only a Play' and enjoy some of the better skewering of theater archetypes.

You will not likely find anything funnier onstage, just now, than Nathan Lane in the opening scene of Terrence McNally's It's Only a Play. Lane, as a humble off-Broadway actor turned top-tier sitcom star, is given a barrage of robustly funny jokes to launch at us, mostly of the lacerating variety...Mind you, laughs continue throughout the two-plus hours of this Jack O'Brien-directed opus; and good old Mr. Lane is omnipresent, always working to entertain us...Theatergoers will get their money's worth, if you can calculate worth by belly laffs, but it turns out that McNally's It's Only a Play is not all that much better than the play-within-a-play that the characters spend the night lamenting. 'It's Only Nathan Lane,' though, is a boffo bonanza.

Some playwrights (they know who they are) have a middlebrow gift for making audiences feel smart by throwing in just the right dash of intellectual-seeming palaver. McNally has a gift for making the audience feel like Broadway insiders, unleashing an absolute cataract of inside-baseball jokes about shows currently running a few doors down, about theater producers and landlords whose names no-one outside a 10-block radius has ever heard of, and personal competitors like playwright and book-writer Harvey Fierstein...Lane indeed carries the show on his capable shoulders, doling out the cutting lines and abashed double-takes as expertly as a Las Vegas croupier at a gaming table...O'Brien's unimpeachable pacing and the engaged performances may be enough to satisfy even those not in the know. But It's Only A Play is wildly overlong and wears out its welcome a full half-hour before the final curtain. It is, after all, only a play.

...when [McNally] writes about the theater, as he does in It's Only a Play...he knows what he's writing about. That's the great pleasure of it, and perhaps the great problem. It's the kind of show, filled with sly references and oversize personalities, that used to be called a back-stager or a love letter. But it isn't quite either. For one thing, it's more of an off-stager, set at the opening night party for a disaster-in-the-making called The Golden Egg...But having assembled a lifeboat of extreme personalities, McNally doesn't let much happen...Rather, what McNally offers, mostly in chop-chop joke format...is a comic rumination on life in the theater...If it's a love letter at all, it's a love letter to what theater has become, which is to say a horrible business filled with insane people, vindictive critics, and Tommy Tune.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick made magic and a megahit together in 'The Producers'...Now the Great White Way's dynamic duo is back on stage...The reunion is wildly hit and miss -- Lane is the hit, while Broderick is the, well, you know....Wicker is custom-tailored for what Lane does best. Catty one-liners? Check. Sly slow burns? Check. High-spirited howls? Check. Lane makes the familiar fresh and delivers gusts of laughing gas. Meanwhile, Broderick drains the air and momentum as playwright Peter Austin, Wicker's BFF...What's lacking are surprises. Characters get one dimension apiece...Completing the cast is Micah Stock, a Broadway rookie who more than holds his own as a simpleton coat check with the gift of ingratiation. One reason he makes such an impression is that he shows up on Broadway without any baggage -- so the audience gets the joy of discovering a new talent making his major stage debut. Besides good old dependable Nathan Lane, this diversion has good timing going for it. People are desperate for laughs and comedies on Broadway are bloody rare. If only McNally's 'Play' was more well-done.

'It's Only a Play' makes for an exciting way to spend a night, but keep your expectations in check. This season's hottest ticket...is a behind-the-scenes Broadway satire starring a murderer's row of talent, each in roles that hew closely to the parts that made us love them in the first place...It's also trying to be too many things to too many people, and occasionally tripping over itself in the process...Mullally's hold-her-head-high producer has sass, but less edge...I kept wishing for a sharpness that never materialized, particularly in McNally's meandering second act. As James Wicker...Lane's performance -- he's essentially playing himself -- is the most consistently funny...Channing...mugs her way through some pretty good one-liners as an old pro who hoped the show would rehab her reputation... F. Murray Abraham seems to be having a swell time as snide critic Ira Drew...Grint makes a hilarious un-Ron Weasley-like entrance, and then tears through the rest of the production behaving like a cross between Billie Joe Armstrong and Richard Branson.

In essence, this is a commercially attractive package deal for theatergoers eager to relive their memories of Lane and Broderick in 'The Producers' and indulge in what looks like a dizzying laugh fest commanded by stage pros...While act one offers plenty of silly, lightweight fun, the play essentially collapses in the self-indulgent, overly sentimental act two. At an overall length of close to three hours, one can't help but wonder why it wasn't seriously cut. Director Jack O'Brien could have done a better job coordinating the broad performances offered by the cast into a cohesive, farcical whole. Lane is relaxed and altogether terrific, and Mullally, Channing and Abraham have their moments. Less successful are Grint, who looks amateurish in his heavy makeup, and Broderick, who throws everyone else off with a labored performance.

Aside from Broderick - who looks and moves as if he's embalmed, even during Peter's big aria of a speech - the cast works overtime under Jack O'Brien's direction. Mullally and Lane alone are almost worth the price of admission, with a sense of timing that's a thing of wonder. As for the rest? It's barely a play.

'Tonight, everyone's a critic,' says TV actor James Wicker (Lane), in town to celebrate the Broadway debut of his playwright friend Peter (Broderick)...Wicker's line is one of the few honest remarks in Terrence McNally's otherwise cliché-filled It's Only a Play. Mostly plotless and spun from the sketchiest of stereotypes and hoariest of showbiz prejudices, this insider trifle is too long, too shallow and not nearly funny enough...There are the customary paeans to the nobility of theater artists and their sacrifices for the wicked stage, but the evening's dominant mood is bitter, out-of-touch self-regard...If you're a show person of any sort...you may get a hearty laugh at the low-hanging fruit. If not, It's Only a Play may seem alien and awkward, a hybrid of 1980s sitcom schmaltz and 2014 Gawker trolling. Either way, it's a night of shameless, attenuated playwright navel-gazing.