Brief Encounter Broadway Reviews

I first saw this 'Brief Encounter' in London two years ago, and then again when the production came to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn last winter. I always remember it as a delicate, whimsical creation, and worry that it might not thrive in a new environment. Yet it consistently proves sturdier and smarter than I have allowed it to be. And the current incarnation, which arrives courtesy of the Roundabout Theater Company, feels to me richer than ever. It has also been altered, ever so slightly, with the aim of seducing a Broadway audience, which likes to leave a show feeling roused and exhilarated.

Proving once more that Noel Coward wrote sexier scenes for clothed people that most playwrights could with naked ones, the evening's steamy highlight comes in a moment where Yelland and Sturrock, alone together at last, finally reach the 'will we or won't we' point. With the company singing Stu Barker's soft ukulele arrangement of 'Go Slow, Johnny' in the background, the tension is elegantly unbearable.

The concept relies heavily on audio/visual elements which are ingeniously woven into the production. And when all is said and done what emerges is a beautifully touching piece of theatre. To compare it to the source would be a disservice since creator/director Emma Rice's staging is itself artfully original. What she’s achieved is something of a reconstruction of the Noel Coward work. Rice added songs written by the author, along with puppets, evocative choreography and a giant screen featuring filmed projections, all of which contribute yet another dimension to the story.

Even if you're not familiar with David Lean's 1946 movie melodrama Brief Encounter, you will find yourself caught up in writer-director Emma Rice's brilliantly reconceived stage adaptation, now playing at Broadway's Studio 54 following a successful run last winter at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse. (EW's original review). Despite playing in a much-larger theater, the show loses nothing of its considerable wit or charm.

Upon entering the theater, you're greeted by ushers in period garb who regale you with comic banter and musical numbers. This immersion continues with the show proper, which ingeniously incorporates old-style film images and projections into which the characters pop in and out. The overall effect is visually dazzling, but the neatest trick is that the technological gimmickry never overwhelms the simple emotionality of the tale.

Rice uses a variety of charming strategies to ward off the stuffier conceits of the period love story, much of it set just before World War II in the railway station where the furtive lovers meet. Actors and musicians perform Coward songs such as 'Mad About the Boy' and 'Always,' the latter written with Stu Barker; a band plays some numbers before the show, and others are woven into the plot. Onto Neil Murray's industrial set, meanwhile, a screen is occasionally lowered, so that flesh-and-blood actors can interact with their celluloid interlocutors, a technique used to similar effect in Woody Allen's sly movie comedy 'The Purple Rose of Cairo.'

To pin down precisely what Brief Encounter is (a para-cinematic mock-expressionistic play with music? A self-conscious post-Luhrmann meta-movie-musical onstage?) would quickly exhaust the Earth’s dwindling supply of hyphens. I’ll settle for “cabinet of wonders,” which seems to get at the false-bottomed delights of this sui generis theatrical event from director Emma Rice and her eager-to-please Kneehigh Theatre troupe. Ferried more or less intact across the East River from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Studio 54, Brief is built atop filmmaker David Lean’s dour postwar chiaroscuro of the same name, about an impossible affair carried on by two married, decent, highly un-Byronic souls. (The 1945 film was based on Noel Coward’s star-crossed stage melodrama Still Life, and Rice has restored some of Coward’s original dialogue.)

Those who associate Coward with sophisticated couples gliding glibly through dry repartee may be surprised by the depths of sensuality and tenderness reached in this adaptation of his work, which opened Tuesday at Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54. Initially performed at London's Kneehigh Theatre, Encounter draws on both Coward's screenplay of the same title and his one-act play Still Life, on which the film was based.

Last winter, fortunate theatergoers fell madly, hopelessly in love with 'Brief Encounter,' the enchanting British spin on the Noel Coward movie that had a limited sold-out run at the adventurous little St. Ann's Warehouse under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it turns out, our brief affair was not hopeless after all. The Roundabout Theatre Company has swept up the ingenious import and put it on Broadway...

When Kneehigh Theatre's multimedia stage adaptation of the classic Noël Coward-penned film 'Brief Encounter' played St. Ann's Warehouse this past December, this Coward fan attended with great trepidation, only to fall head over heels for it. I felt similar trepidation when I heard that Roundabout Theatre Company would bring the show to Broadway at Studio 54. St. Ann's is a decidedly intimate space. Would the show fill a much larger house? Happily, the answer is ringingly affirmative.

The brilliant production of 'Brief Encounter' that opened on Broadway last night should make all but the sourest puss believe in romance again. It's a spirited charm offensive that's just impossible to resist.

We've seen any number of stage attractions derived from motion pictures, and some of these have incorporated actual footage -- either vintage or shot-to-order -- into the proceedings. But Broadway doesn't seem ever to have seen live actors interact with, and actually step directly into, the movie.Kneehigh Theater's production of Noel Coward's 'Brief Encounter' might lose some of its impact in its relatively large Main Stem house, especially on the extreme sides and in the mezz; previous runs in London and Brooklyn played venues that were well under 500 seats. Even so, the play should get a warm reception here.

Although Brief Encounter offers plenty of comic embellishments and artful stage business, it is most powerful when it quiets down to give the material’s sorrow full scope. Adapter and director Emma Rice’s use of Coward’s songs—“A Room with a View” and “Mad About the Boy,” to name two—makes structural (if not always tonal) sense, even if you wish the cast included stronger singers. But then again, it’s the whole artful package, not its individual parts, that seems to sweep some people off their feet.

But in practice, some of the captivating coziness is lost, and Laura and Alec's romance seems to get swallowed up. It feels a little off.

Supporting actors double as a small band, providing jaunty tunes that express the characters' repressed emotions. (The cast—mostly unchanged since St. Ann's—is multitalented and very hardworking.) Crashing waves—a metaphor for surging emotion and unattainable freedom—are projected on the upstage wall. There's ingenious 39 Steps-style stagecraft—dummies for children; an actress with a long stick moving a windblown newspaper across the stage; the full cast bobbing rapidly in unison to suggest an express train rumbling past. Characters jump in and out of the movie itself, a live Purple Rose of Cairo. This Brief Encounter is vibrantly theatrical and totally absorbing.

They are part of the reason theatregoers leave the play with a smile. That, and the cast itself waiting for you near the bar at the end, singing modern songs by Beyonce, Cyndi Lauper and Journey while playing accordion, trumpet, double bass and ukulele. Does being serenaded by the actors after the doomed romance on stage ends in tears make sense? Not really, particularly after all the blissful hijinks have evaporated. But if this is what Rice can do with a mere sliver of a story, just imagine what she can do with something more meaty.

Emma Rice’s overstuffed and overwhelming production, which premiered Off-Broadway last season, adds song and dance, slapstick comedy, video projections, puppetry and a jazz band to what is a relatively sober and sad tale of star-crossed lovers. The end result is just as clever as it is irritating and unnecessary.

There's so much inventiveness in this import from Britain's Kneehigh Theatre that I feel like a grump having to report that the show itself is something of a disappointment.

'Still Life' is a fine play. 'Brief Encounter' is a classic film. Personally, I don't need to see the two texts conflated into some 90-minute seriocomic extravaganza that undermines and mocks the subtle essence of Coward's work while presumably paying homage to it.

This show annoyed me greatly—as I watched it and then, later, as I thought about what it signified. Because apart from being a prankish and gimmick-ridden stunt, I don't know what it's supposed to be about. It's not a sincere retelling of Coward's screenplay, or a deconstruction of it, or a parody of it. It wants to eat its cake and have it too by pretending to care about the romantic story at Brief Encounter's heart while simultaneously revealing it to be hollow and hackneyed. Why do artists fetishize cultural icons like this? And why does an organization like Roundabout Theatre Company want to use its (relatively) scarce resources to present work that's both derivative and devoid of any kind of substance when so many worthy American artists are making new work that's neither of those things?

Ultimately, Rice finds too much of herself and too little of Coward. She deploys his plot and his songs, but her ironic flashiness illustrates rather than penetrates the punishing emotions of the film.

Pity the actors caught in this bastardization, especially Yelland and Sturrock, fighting memories of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, unsurpassable in the movie version. Also Alessi, saddled with conspicuously doubling Albert and Fred, Laura’s husband.