The Motherf**ker With the Hat Broadway Reviews

The Motherf**ker With the Hat is something you don't see on Broadway much: a tough and fresh portrait of working-class life in modern, multicultural New York.

Mr. Rock has never acted in a stage play, and his inexperience shows-he's a bit stiff at times-but you can see that he's well on his way to getting where he wants to go. His colleagues are stunningly good, especially Mr. Cannavale, who has the biggest part and makes the most of it...Don't let the stupid title put you off. If you do, you'll miss one of the best new plays to come to Broadway in ages.

Rock proves both a bold and canny choice for Ralph, a less sympathetic figure. More likable and less palpably ego-driven than many comedians of his generation, Rock doesn't exude the kind of crass narcissism that the sponsor eventually reveals...By not putting characters or their dilemmas in neat boxes, Guirgis gives us, in Hat, a slice of hard life that's as provocative as it is absorbing.

Playing a big-hearted lug, Cannavale's performance is what holds the play together as Jackie struggles to stay off booze and keep hold of his moral compass. As its title suggests, Motherf**ker comes on with a lot of tough-talking bravado and wild profanity. Underneath that, however, it's a wistful story of a couple who have loved each other almost all their lives, but can't keep it together. Cannavale's Jackie bounces from goofy exhibitions of romantic ardor to volatile explosions to wounded-puppy vulnerability to genuine pain, always putting his own unique spin on Guirgis' virtuoso dialogue.

Forget the smarty-pants title. I can't print it anyway. What you need to know is that Stephen Adly Guirgis' dark new comedy, which we're reduced to calling 'The ---- With the Hat,' is crazy-mad in love with its exhilarating nonstop language and with its screwed-up, hotheaded, odd-hearted urban characters. And so am I.

This is by far the most accomplished and affecting work from the gifted Mr. Guirgis, a prolific and erratic chronicler of marginal lives ('Jesus Hopped the ‘A' Train,' 'Our Lady of 121st Street')...The characters portrayed by a marvelous, intensely focused five-member ensemble - including the stand-up comic Chris Rock, in a solid Broadway debut, and a blazingly good Bobby Cannavale - are always striving for a mot juste to explain their less than clear-cut feelings. That Jackie's emotions, like those of everyone in 'Hat,' are a muddle doesn't mean that they don't burn clear, or bright enough to scorch.

Shapiro directs her actors to play the comedy very truthfully but quickly on an impressive setting designed by Todd Rosenthal that rapidly flips between three different apartments. A metal staircase that zigzags towards the heavens, a vertical slice of Manhattan skyline and a vast, empty billboard frame looming above the action lends visual grandeur to a human comedy that some viewers are likely to recognize as being all too close to home.

A newcomer to theater, Rock deserves credit for aiming high with a complex part that, incidentally, includes onstage wrestling. His performance is funny, if a bit stiff, and will likely get better when he relaxes into the role.

The play is broken up into nine scenes and set designer Todd Rosenthal keeps the action at a roiling boil by having three different apartments and furniture mechanically rotate and flip into view, echoing the choppy, bewildering world of Jackie. The riveting, original horn-led music by Terence Blanchard is the icing on the cake for a play that is shrill and ugly and funny and touching.

The only thing holding the show back, alas, is Rock. In the pivotal role of Jackie’s AA sponsor, Ralph, the gifted stand-up comic seems ill at ease; he doesn’t know how to hold his body onstage, and his awkwardness is damaging to a character defined by his charisma. (One can’t help feeling that the show might be even more powerful with his understudy, Ron Cephas Jones, in the part.) Each time Rock has a scene, The Motherfu**ker with the Hat falls off the dramatic wagon and takes a while to recover. But it finds its footing every time—with strength enough to kick.

In his Broadway debut, Rock acquits himself decently and makes the most of those occasions when his walking Namaste chant of a character veers close to stand-up territory with lines such as, 'I may be an a--hole, but I'm f---in' limber, bro!' Meanwhile, both Sciorra and Rodriguez breathe life into roles that could have come across as two-dimensional. There is no doubt, however, that it is Cannavale and Vézquez who are responsible for the show's greatest highs.

In his Broadway debut, Chris Rock plays Ralph D., the AA sponsor of Bobby Cannavale's Jackie. They share some heavy scenes -- red-blooded, profanity-laden bouts -- but Rock is a lightweight: The more experienced, more assured Cannavale knocks him out without even trying.

Comedian-actor Chris Rock is a naturally funny guy and probably the main reason this show is on the Main Stem rather than Off-Broadway, but he's totally wrong for Ralph D...Despite this central flaw-and it's a big one-there is still plenty to praise about 'Motherf**ker.' Fortunately, Ralph is not the play's central focus. That role-Jackie, a recovering alcoholic and Ralph's A.A. sponsee-is admirably filled by Bobby Cannavale. Set designer Todd Rosenthal not only cleverly conveys three very different NYC apartments in one setting, but he also gives us vital, specific clues about the occupants of each one. Luckily, four of the five actors do as well.

Cannavale's work is outstanding. With veins popping in his neck and a body language of tics and anxieties, he stunningly conveys a man fighting demons within and without; one day at a time never looked so daunting.It would seem that the X-rated- ranting Ralph D. would make a good fit for Rock, but it works against him. Rock gives the character a good shot, but when he delivers Ralph D.'s lines in his trademark grunts and high-pitched voice, it's too close to what's become his own comic specialty. He not only draws unintentional laughs, but some audience members spoke back to him. Goes to show - sometimes, it's fame that's a 'Motherf-.'

Guirgis' foul-mouthed and sexually explicit language is consistently funny, but much of the play drags and its premise quickly wears thin. The production, however, has been directed with finesse by Anna D. Shapiro, who won a Tony for 'August: Osage County.' She highlights the play's fighting quality and makes it feel authentically raw. Cannavale delivers a wildly aggressive performance as Jackie, highlighting the character's confusion and desperate nature. Rock, on the other hand, portrays the self-satisfied Ralph with a hilarious kind of ease and cockiness.

Rock just about gets through this assignment. Just. But you can see the fear in his eyes. Which would be fine if he were playing a weak character. But in 'Hat,' Rock is, in fact, playing the principal aggressor in a play about love and chemical addiction among a small group of characters in modern-day New York...It's a shame, really, because the first scene of this show, a blistering moment set in a so-called residential hotel in Times Square that takes place between Cannavale, playing a recovering addict named Jackie, and Rodriguez, as Veronica, his zesty-but-jumpy girlfriend, ignites the show as if someone had just poured gasoline on the theater.

Although Broadway proves too much of a stretch for Rock, if this multihyphenate talent is really serious about stage acting, there are some savvy thesps in this show who could show him the ropes. Bobby Cannavale and Elizabeth Rodriguez come out swinging -- and swearing a blistering blue streak -- as Jackie and Veronica, longtime lovers who are hooked on all kinds of evil substances and bad behaviors, but mostly on one another.

In a good Guirgis play (and my favorite is The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, overstuffed and Wiki-stubbed as it was), there’s always some glimmering, bobbing moral buoy that recedes but never vanishes as the bumptious, hair-trigger characters kick up waves of slangy chaos. Here, as Jackie faces off against a bottomless pit of moral relativism (“What are we, Europeans or some shit?”), the buoy goes under and, for the most part, stays there. But the play really doesn’t have the heft to earn the death of hope, nor does it have the stones or the seriousness to declare hope officially dead. Motherf**ker mainly concerns itself with a lot of big, mordant laughs (with Yul Vazquez, as Jackie’s slightly Aspie ex-sex-addict cousin Julio, walking away with the show’s chewy center). Jabbing exchanges like “I coulda fucked your wife the other night!” / “Shit, I coulda fucked your girl the other day — and I did!” land solidly in the audience’s breadbasket, yet overall, the play feels jumpy and scant. Anna D. Shapiro hops from laugh to laugh at such a workmanlike tempo, the characters sometimes feel on the verge of urban blue-collar caricature. Despite the monumental pain they feel, these people lack the savor we hear in Guirgis’s best stuff.

The Motherf**ker With the Hat has at least two things going for it right off the bat. The first is that marvelously profane--albeit generally unprintable--title. The second is the coup of having landed comedian Chris Rock for his Broadway debut in this new dark comedy by Stephen Adly Guirgis (Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Our Lady of 121st Street, among others). Ironically, both elements actually work against the production. The title, although certainly memorable, has proven off-putting to mainstream Broadway audiences. And Rock has been less of a box-office draw than expected, even though his presence no doubt accounts for this Broadway engagement of a play that would have seemed far more at home in an intimate, non-commercial environment.