Review - The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Last year around this time, Elevator Repair Service had Gotham playgoers abuzz with their cover-to-cover, word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, re-titled Gatz. Director John Collins' off-beat adaptation, which had Computer Age office workers assuming the roles of Fitzgerald's Jazz Agers, intrigued many, but also terrified quite a few with its six hour and twenty minute length. (Intermissions and a dinner break stretched the production to over eight hours.)

While Gatz had its plusses, the company's inability to fill the evening with enough inventiveness reduced the night to a fancy parlor trick. Regrettably, Collins' new Ernest Hemingway adaptation, The Select (The Sun Also Rises) offers even less in the way of theatricality to sustain any serious interest. There's little wrong with the execution, but not enough interesting ideas to charge up this edited-text, 3½ hour rendition.

The 1926 novel is narrated by Hemingway's poster boy for The Lost Generation, American expatriate Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson); injured to impotency during The Great War and mixing in with the lives of his fellow hard-drinking drifters from the seedy cafes of Paris to the pageantry of bullfighting in Pamplona. Though he falls for the sexually liberated divorcée Lady Brett Ashley (Lucy Taylor), her affair with his friend, novelist and former college boxer Robert Cohn (Matt Tierney) squashes their relationship and she's eventually seducing 19-year-old matador Pedro Romero.

While Collins is by no means obligated to provide a 1920s atmosphere, the production suffers from a distinct lack of a specific personality. The acting tends to skim the surface, except for broadly played supporting characters. David Zinn's costumes are generically 20th Century, not suggesting any particular era and his set is a plain, wood-paneled bar with long, cafeteria style tables. Oddly immersed into the proceedings are the loud and plentiful sound effects by Matt Tierney and Ben Williams, that are of the Saturday morning cartoon variety, and two extended go-go dancing sequences, which I have no way of explaining.

Photo of Kate Scelsa, Lucy Taylor and Matt Tierney by Mark Burto

Click here to follow Michael Dale on Twitter.
Click here for Michael Dale's Twitterized theatre reviews.

"Half of the great comedians I've had in my shows and that I paid a lot of money to and who made my customers shriek were not only not funny to me, but I couldn't understand why they were funny to anybody."
-- Florenz Ziegfeld

The grosses are out for the week ending 9/11/2011 and we've got them all right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.

Up for the week was: FOLLIES (4.6%), HAIR (0.1%),

Down for the week was: HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING (-18.1%), ROCK OF AGES (-17.9%), The Addams Family (-14.2%), MARY POPPINS (-13.3%), BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL (-12.9%), WICKED (-10.2%), MEMPHIS (-9.9%), SPIDER-MAN TURN OFF THE DARK (-8.9%), JERSEY BOYS (-8.2%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (-8.0%), THE LION KING (-8.0%), CHICAGO (-6.5%), MAMMA MIA! (-5.9%), PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT (-5.0%), ANYTHING GOES (-3.5%), War Horse (-1.7%), SISTER ACT (-1.5%),

To post a comment, you must register and login.