Saw this on big stage at Williamstown this past summer and was extremely disappointed - so looking forward to hearing of vast improvements. That production was not reviewed, I assume acknowledging the need for significant further development and/or not to put the critical kibosh on the Broadway production. I hope for everyone’s sake they made a lot changes --as in tear-down-and-build-it-back-up-from-the-studs-type changes.
Will say that the cast I saw it with, Jo Beth Williams, Jamey Sheridan, Thomas Sadoski, Priscilla Lopez, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ashley Parker (some of whom are in the Broadway cast) were fantastic. I don’t know how they held the mediocre characterizations and ho-hum themes afloat but they were a well-oiled machine and injected much needed energy into some pretty hacky dialogue. Ferguson, for example, stepped into the character void by just doing an amped up version of Mitchell in “Modern Family” but with much less well-crafted lines to say. Enjoyable to watch, but ultimately just masked a lot of the plays flaws.
When the premise of a play is grown children gather at their parents’ retirement village condo to hear their senior citizen mother announce she wants a divorce, one automatically assumes that long simmering resentments and family secrets will be bursting forth. With that well-trod template, it might be important to lend the resentments and the secrets some punch and originality, but Wohl did not. There were perfunctory character arcs and passable dramatic structure but accompanying insights, revelations etc. never rose above average sit-com level.Given that the play is set in a retirement community, it would be easy to remark that this is the easily pleased audience the play was aimed at, but that would be insulting to seniors in a retirement community, who are much more energetic, funny and insightful than the play I saw.
I was only familiar with Wohl from a local (SpeakEasy- Boston) production of “Small Mouth Sounds,” which was an interesting exercise (for those not familiar a play with almost no dialogue) and I know she had critical success this season with “Make Believe.” Both are plays are based on ore interesting premises which she delivered on somewhat (did not see “Make Believe” only going by reviewed I read), so I hope she had the wherewithal to credibly and more imaginatively rethink “Grand Horizons”.
Here’s hoping Broadway gets better version than I did and it is worthy of the cast they assembled. I wish it well and will be happy to hear good reports.
joined:2/13/18
joined:
2/13/18
Posted: 12/23/19 at 8:25am