Call Me Izzy Broadway Reviews

Smart’s performance lives up to her name: measured and nuanced, both vulnerable and full of rage, depending on which of the handful of characters she’s inhabiting. Her adjustments, under the direction of Sarna Lapine, shift seamlessly from one to the next. Perhaps it’s the clipped cadence of friend Rosalie, or a broadening of the shoulders as she embodies Izzy’s menacing husband. Smart pulls us into the conversation—not an easy task in a 1,000-seat theatre.

All that is to say “Call Me Izzy” is not a total bust, especially given Smart’s formidable acting chops. Monologic shows like this with no explicit person being addressed require deeply conversational kinds of performance, as if the audiences were all your best friend who just happens to be outside the bathroom door. Smart is skilled and experienced enough to forge such a bond. I believed her entirely as a woman from small-town Louisiana capable of both great stoicism (often a feature of those in abusive relationships) and profound artistic yearning. Her performance is somewhat under-scaled and under-vocalized for so large a Broadway house (and why are we here in so huge a space, one wonders), but then it has been 20 years and the deeply honest Smart is clearly immersed in her character, with nary a note of condescension.

Ultimately, as well, I left perplexed why this tale really needs to be told, especially to Broadway audiences in 2025. I admit some women (and a few men) in the audience will find “Call Me Izzy” to be inspirational or perhaps even motivational, while many other theatergoers will simply be content to be in Smart’s presence and hear her talk the talk. To me, however, the entire enterprise simply feels like a case of wrong place, wrong time, and wrong theater. (Studio 54 is way too vast for such an intimate piece, no matter how hard scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams tries to convince us otherwise.) Call me cynical, if you must.

The main draw here is Smart, and she does not disappoint. The Emmy-winning actress has an easy command of the stage and at 73 convincingly plays a much younger woman, with frizzy ginger hair sweeping down past her shoulders on a series of slightly oversized Walmart-ready outfits (deisgned by Tom Broecker) that underscore her lower-middle-class status. From the outset, Smart uses her down-home chatterbox delivery and upright stature to draw us into her confidence, smoothing over the many contradictions and inconsistencies in the script.

As grim as all this sounds – and the lighting design by Donald Holder and sound design by Beth Lake never let us forget Izzy’s captivity – Smart draws us in with an amazing grace and good humor that in real life would make for fine best friend material. No, she never dismisses the pain that underscores her existence, and when good things happen – she makes a friend in the trailer park, who encourages her to come along to an adult literature class at the local college, and to get a library card in secret that serves as a passport for imagination – we know the risk, but knowing doesn’t prepare us for the shocking “whack” that Smart verbalizes when the cruel husband learns at least one of her secrets.

The script, which is set in 1989 for no reason I can discern other than to avoid the topic of social media, takes a condescending and elitist attitude toward Isabelle’s situation. It presents her as a perfect victim while obfuscating the sad reality of abuse, which indiscriminately crosses lines of geography and monetary wealth. Wax suggests that Isabelle especially deserves to be saved—to be uplifted—because of her special talents, not simply because she’s a human being.

The 73-year-old actor, most famous, at least at the moment, for her starring turn on the Max comedy Hacks, possesses the kind of seasoned verve and magnetic presence that is never less than fun to watch, even if the material can’t match her. Like her Emmy-winning Hacks character Deborah Vance, Smart is making the most of a late-career renaissance, surfing a wave of goodwill to the bright lights at Studio 54 for her first Broadway role in a quarter century, where she plays a woman with starkly different means – though no less resilience.

Smart is funnier, deeper and, well, smarter than anything in playwright Jamie Wax’s mummified one-woman show that opened Thursday night at Studio 54. Yet she’s relegated to cracking “Moby Dick” jokes next to a toilet. This Wax work, a musty quilt of cliches, is about a Louisiana woman who lives in a trailer with her abusive, deadbeat, hard-drinking husband. Essentially alone, Izzy writes poetry on two-ply as an escape. She then hides it away in a Tampax box that no one dare open.

What Max has written—the outcome of which won’t be divulged—is a study of a woman, perhaps like millions of other women, in a society where their resources, other than as efficient homemakers, are regularly and sometimes cruelly repressed. The playwright appears convinced that the feminist movement (possibly as a feminist himself, in a happy marriage) has had an effect but so far a limited one.

Smart brings the character to vivid life but she can only do so much to engage the audience when the writing falls short. [...] And yet even with Smart’s bravura acting and the extreme cruelty Izzy experiences, the playwriting never quite manages the emotional depth that the story requires.

'Call Me Izzy’ offers pockets of humor, and an opportunity for Smart to demonstrate her versatility as an actress. There is even at least one poem that Izzy recites that is worth listening to. But a play that revolves around domestic violence evokes comparison to such seminal dramas as ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ and such popular musicals as ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Waitress.’ This new play, which veers between the predictable and the implausible, adds little to the conversation, and pales beside that canon.

The subject matter of Call Me Izzy is inherently dark, but under the direction of Sarna Lapine (2017's Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway), there is an undeniable air of hope. Despite the smallness her husband imposes on her, Izzy moves through spaces confidently. She walks us through her life verbally and physically as the set transitions from Izzy’s bathroom to her kitchen to the shared outdoor space of her Louisiana trailer park.

Though well-paced, Lapine’s staging doesn’t really fight that tendency, leaning into the pretty murk instead. Interstitial music by T Bone Burnett aptly suggests the Deep South but might as well be the soundtrack to an arty ghost story. Yet spousal abuse isn’t arty. As deep as Smart digs into the horror of it, the play and the production keep topping off the hole. That’s crushing in every sense.

As for Smart, she elevates the show in every sense imaginable. Returning to Broadway for the first time in 25 years, the soft-spoken actress delivers a richly textured performance that brings Isabelle to vivid life, in all her strength, humor and resourcefulness. No matter how often Ferd strikes and belittles her, Isabelle always manages to brush herself off and turn her pain into art. But eventually, his decades of mistreatment come spilling out of her, and Smart’s palpable grief for a life and family lost is devastating to witness.

Such perspectives make Wax’s Izzy a multi-layered and often contradictory character: self-assured, yet also self-doubting; brazen, yet guilty; fearless, yet also fearful. These swerves of impulses could easily go off the tracks but the combination of the steady direction of Sarna Lapine (“Sunday in the Park With George“) and Smart’s riveting performance make Izzy’s world real and her conflicts believable. T-Bone Burnett’s original music, Donald Holder’s lighting and Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ set design also give the production an atmospheric grounding.

That’s too bad, because Smart is more than capable of a subtler gradation of performance. I’d love to see her in material that supports and challenges her, preferably alongside some other actors. But even alone, she’s got a quicksilver sense of timing, and she can guide her audience through sudden shifts between the broadly comic — often too broad, in this case, as Wax puts a lot of weight on Izzy’s drawling one-liners — and the violent.

Ms. Smart never strikes a false or histrionic note, even when she steps from Izzy into the half-dozen or so other characters, all crisply delineated. It’s a terrific performance, but one that nevertheless remains constrained by the material’s limitations.

Smart, returning to Broadway after some 25 years, brings astonishing clarity and depth to the part. Spinning an enticing yarn from shopworn material — the action is set in 1989, when it may have struck a modern tone — she delivers a performance that feels deceptively featherlight while demonstrating total command. She lends Izzy’s tin-eared poetry a soaring lyricism and Wax’s trope-heavy script the texture of a character study. Every expression feels alive, and the sum total is transfixing.