Enron Broadway Reviews

Industry doomsayers were all wet about 'Enron.' This London bombshell is both a dazzling piece of entertainment and a gripping cautionary tale about the criminal chicanery that eviscerated the most respected corporate body in America. Still, it cost a bundle (a reputed $5 million) to haul this hi-tech show into town, and everyone's wondering if starstruck musical junkies will part with their coin for a straight play. What's clear is that the sensational stage effects deliver the same blood-pumping thrills of a musical, wrapped around a play, by Lucy Prebble, with more brains in its head than any tuner since 'Assassins.'

After snoozing through many well-meaning tracts about Iraq, the prospect of a play about a financial meltdown wasn't appealing. But 'Enron' is a whip-smart, edge-of-your-seat ride that'd rival anything at Six Flags -- there are even raptor-headed businessmen prancing around.

Enron, the hit London import that opened last night at the Broadhurst Theatre, is a surprising and remarkable creation: It’s a two-and-a-half-hour lecture on business history, and it’s utterly thrilling. Credit for this feat of alchemy goes primarily to second-time playwright Lucy Prebble, and her director, Rupert Goold, artistic director of London’s Headlong Theatre, which commissioned Enron. Together, they take the seemingly dry subject matter and, with a clever, tightly constructed script and dark, menacing, inventive staging, produce a vibrant, deeply theatrical experience.

With Goldman Sachs executives answering to a Senate committee this week, the latest round of financial wizards under fire after being accused of corrupt practices, perhaps the Enron scandal of 2001 seems like yesterday's news. Not so, argues the young British writer Lucy Prebble. In Enron, her intellectually challenging, exuberantly entertaining new play, Prebble makes the case that the disgraced energy company's abuses and collapse were both a harbinger of future debacles and a reflection of long-standing, deep-rooted social and human frailties.

he semi-factual drama by Lucy Prebble (28 when she wrote it) will appeal to those familiar with the case and knowledgeable of the most esoteric aspects of accounting. The rest of us, lacking total comprehension, can revel in the racy dialogue, remarkable visuals and frequent humor delivered by a virtuosic ensemble. I can’t say where actual quotation and verifiable fact commingle with the author’s lively imagination. Nevertheless, Prebble’s writing and the production dreamed up by director Rupert Goold are stunning enough to provide steady wonder, involvement and delight.

The English-born multimedia docudrama Enron, about the rise and crash of the Texas energy-trading behemoth, smelled strongly of what I called “transatlantic schadenfreude” in a review of another import: a topical satire in which Brits laugh up their sleeves at greedy, gullible American rubes. I was able to hedge my low expectations with my tremendous respect for director Rupert Goold and my boundless admiration for musical-comedy trouper Norbert Leo Butz, who portrays Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. What a surprise, then, to discover that Lucy Prebble’s multilayered play is not your typical Yank-bashing, but a darkly exhilarating portrait of hypertrophied capitalism and a society that allows faith-based fiscal systems to ravage the body economic. Drawing from a deep bag of theatrical tricks and riffling through found text, news videos and observed gestures, Prebble and Goold supply Broadway theatergoers with the sort of play they demand—a sharp-witted and rollicking business thriller to dazzle the eye and tickle the brain. If Enron’s stock were still circling the ticker, my advice would be to buy, buy, buy.

If ever there was a real life modern-day tragedy in the classical sense, the colossal rise and fall of Enron would be it. Yet while the dynamics are certainly there – hubris, larger-than-life characters, tragic flaws – Enron was an energy company! Tragic maybe, but dramatic? Stage worthy? The answer is a resounding yes! It's all in the way you tell it . . . and the telling at the Broadhurst Theatre is riveting.

“Enron” won’t win any awards for stylistic unity, nor for subtlety. It comes with some of that irritating, knee-jerk anti-Americanism — especially anti-anything to do with Texas — that afflicts many left-leaning British writers essaying U.S. subjects from afar and invariably results in brash, crude, stereotypical cocktails of sex, excess and the rodeo. That can still play well in Manhattan, where the avaricious think themselves more subtle. And with Prebble, and director Rupert Goold, throwing in everything from fireworks to musical numbers to puppets to a chorus of ravenous dinosaur raptors (a riff on the debt-eating financial creations of Andy Fastow, Skilling’s CFO sidekick), “Enron” is a mish-mash with one foot in the tatty, good-night-out tradition of British political-populist theater, and another inarguably hypocritical foot clearly enjoying a rare chance to blow a Broadway budget.

Prebble frames her case study as a classical tragedy, where unethical behavior goes unchecked and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Jeffrey Skilling, the Harvard grad who seized power under the careless watch of Enron founder Kenneth Lay, is portrayed as a tragic figure along the lines of Macbeth. The play often strains as it attempts to condense an overwhelming amount of exposition and introduce complicated financial models. But for the most part, Prebble cuts a clear narrative through this unwieldy terrain. Rupert Goold's slick, aggressive production maintains a chaotic energy level mixed with playful theatricality: Enron's shell companies are symblized as hungry raptors with glowing red eyes that literally eat the company's debt, and stock traders perform as a barbership quartet. Wait till you see how Lehman Brothers and Arthur Anderson are portrayed.

One understands the desire to goose material that is both potentially dry and well past its sell-by date. (In the wake of AIG and Bernie Madoff and Lehman Brothers' own collapse, doesn't the Enron scandal seem so 2001?) But subtlety gets lost in the process: At one point, Butz's Skilling literally stomps his foot like a petulant 2-year-old when Lay sides with Roe in a corporate dispute — an over-the-top gesture that undercuts any effort by the production to make its characters more than cardboard stand-ins for American Big Business excess and immaturity. Goold further muddles the satire with kitchen-sink showmanship, employing everything from a barbershop quartet of traders to a mini-ballet by lightsaber-wielding execs. He even creates anthropomorphized 'raptors' to represent the shady debt-laden shell companies that led to Enron's ultimate unraveling. We see Fastow and Skilling kill the raptors at the end, but there's no real-world explanation of what they're doing; Goold is too caught up in his theatrical conceit to serve the fact-based story he's trying to tell. Too often, in fact, Enron plays like 60 Minutes on acid.

Unlike the company whose storied fall it chronicles, Enron clearly telegraphs its intention to defraud the consumer: 'When we tell you [this] story, you should know it could never be exactly what happened. But we're gonna put it together and sell it to you as the truth.' This proviso is delivered by a lawyer, who adds: 'I could tell you how the world works, but I don't have the time, and you don't have the money.' That gets broad laughs—and broad laughs are what's for sale here. Subtlety is not a commodity that Lucy Prebble's fast, flashy, feckless Epcot ride of a play is trading in: If twelve-gauge potshots at the likes of Schwarzenegger and Lehman Brothers are your taste, you won't be disappointed.

Despite the serious research and the playful imagination, the splendid new American cast and the irresistible craven puppets, the play tells us what it is in the first half-hour and then tells us again for another two hours. Board members are blind mice in suits. A video of Bill Clinton reminds us that he 'didn't have sex with that woman.' Voting in Florida was too close to call. Bush deregulated electricity and California is still paying for it.

The brainchild of British playwright Lucy Prebble, who's just 29, it's a slice of American history and a cautionary tale that's audaciously theatrical but watery soup when it comes to content. Prebble follows a long tradition of English dramatists who've had an instinctive desire to revisit history - dissecting victims, concocting motives, even going so far as to make up revisionist excuses for them. Think: 'Frost/Nixon,' 'Stuff Happens' and 'Democracy.' Further back - Shakespeare did it, with a fictional twist. There's a lot of sizzle, but not a whole lot of steak.

But for all its imaginative conceits, 'Enron' is more intellectually than emotionally engaging. The characters rarely rise above the level of caricature and, with rare exceptions -- like the shattering moment at Lay's funeral when a financially devastated former employee angrily confronts an unrepentant Skilling -- the play fails to provide a human element to its complicated narrative.

The financial finagling is not as much fun as it should be in 'Enron,' a flashy yet lumbering docudrama that has arrived on Broadway trailing rave reviews from England, where maybe they take a much keener delight in all-American chicanery.

Yet even with a well-drilled cast that includes bright Broadway headliners like Norbert Leo Butz and Marin Mazzie, the realization sets in early that this British-born exploration of smoke-and-mirror financial practices isn’t much more than smoke and mirrors itself. “Enron” is fast-paced, flamboyant and, despite the head-clogging intricacy of its business mathematics, lucid to the point of simple-mindedness. But as was true of the company of this play’s title, the energy generated here often feels factitious, all show (or show and tell) and little substance.

Playwright Lucy Prebble gets points for ambition. 'Enron' wants to be a bold, slashing piece of political theater that exposes the greed and selfishness at the heart of American capitalism through the titular energy company's collapse. I'm in sympathy with her point of view but unpersuaded by her methodology. Her play is like a big, shiny, beautifully wrapped package that once eagerly ripped opened reveals a horde of Styrofoam peanuts through which you search vainly for the anticipated present.