High Broadway Reviews

The play is helped by two stunning performances - by Turner, who pretty much never leaves the stage, and Evan Jonigkeit, making his Broadway debut as the addict Cody. Watching these two angry, broken, world-weary animals circle each other is an uncomfortable pleasure...[Turner] is the play's fairy godmother and soul.

Indeed, 'High' has twists and revelations, but no suspense. Nobody will bat an eye upon learning about Sister Jamie's stormy past, or the reasons Father Michael is so invested in Cody's well-being. And when someone eventually makes a direct appeal to God, you think, 'What took so long?' Indeed, everything's foreshadowed with clumsy insistence. While the play clearly hits close to home for Lombardo -- who's been candid about his own faith and past drug problem -- its purple prose and potboiler flourishes could easily have come from a 1960s 'social issues' flick.

Despite its manipulative aspects, the play is nonetheless reasonably compelling due to the inherent emotional power of its subject matter and Turner’s compelling performance. The veteran actress commands the stage with a ferocious intensity that would make anyone scared straight.

'High,' directed by Rob Ruggiero, isn't a particularly subtle or deep drama, despite some fancy narration... But it does afford Ms. Turner's fans a choice opportunity to bask in her undeniable star wattage. Her performance as the tough but troubled Sister Jamie is funny, consistently entertaining and at times satisfyingly hammy.

Played by Kathleen Turner, Sister Jamison is a recovering alcoholic who curses like a sailor and bows to no one - sometimes not even God. Her full portrait slowly comes into focus as the action unfolds in director Rob Ruggiero's bare-bones staging.

'We all suffer from some form of addiction,' says Father Michael to Sister Jamison, urging her to continue the counseling of a 19-year-old suicidal gay hustler and meth-head named Cody. Sister Jamison, played by Kathleen Turner, doesn't appear to nod off at the banality of that proclamation or the many other snoozers in Matthew Lombardo's simplistic sin-and-redemption psychodrama, 'High.'

Turner's trenchant performance, and that of gifted newcomer Evan Jonigkeit, elevate Matthew Lombardo's three-character drama, High, above the level of its tritely sensational movie-of-the-week plotting and boilerplate construction...Turner exposes the character's deep well of compassion and the festering wounds of her self-reproach. Too bad the writing isn't sufficiently nuanced to make her calvary more affecting.

High culminates in a late-night, back-alley-set confession that's supposed to be shocking — but we have heard the same twisted type of revelation made in the umpteenth precinct of every TV crime show over the past two decades. It's shameful that High never manages to dig any deeper in that moment — or any moment.

It's too bad Kathleen Turner never got a chance to play Sister Aloysius in 'Doubt.' It might have spared her the embarrassment of now playing a nun in Matthew Lombardo's disappointing psychological melodrama 'High'...Jonigkeit overplays his role physically - especially the twitching and shaking - to the point of absolute ridiculousness. Meanwhile, Kunken, whose character is ill-defined, seems lost amid all the sparring.

For a while, the generational and cultural clash between this self-destructive throwaway child and the big-hearted nun are genuinely engaging. But while Sister Jamison is a colorful character, she's too limited in dimension to make serious demands on Turner. The other two characters are even more insubstantial...Even against that big night sky, a star needs some incentive to shine.

Rob Ruggiero's obvious direction does little to mask the writing's flaws, nor do the actors transcend them. The fiery Turner reminds us of her ability to command a stage, but she's hard-pressed to find Sister Connelly's emotional fragility, despite the fact that the plot depends on it. Stephen Kunken, who last season shone brightly while going down with the 'Enron' ship, is less successful here, unconvincing as a bullying administrator but then equally unpersuasive in the simple-mindedly weak and foolish choices his character makes. Evan Jonigkeit brings an admirably focused intensity to Cody but provides little variance in the character's surly defiance and textbook anguish.

As the show's bathos emissions rise and rise to thyroid-killing levels...[the show] would be in a church basement or the sanctuary of some some mega-tabernacle. Which is where High, minus a few dozen of Turner's f-bombs and all references to sodomy, might be heading soon, too, and maybe where it was meant to be all along.

Thank God for Kathleen Turner. I say this not just because she plays a woman of God, a foulmouthed nun, in her new star vehicle High. No, I thank God for Ms. Turner because without her measured, commanding and utterly compelling performance as Sister Jamison Connelly in this melodrama about addiction, religion and redemption, sitting through High would be like sitting through an ABC After School Special.

Lombardo, a recovering addict, has written an imitation of a play, and not a very good one. Kunken is petulant as Father Delpapp. Jonigkeit plays Cody with such incoherent gruffness suggesting he never gave up dope long enough even to get into the center. Under Rob Ruggiero's overwrought direction, 'High' plays more like an early workshop than a polished Broadway production.

Even if High didn’t have such stiff competition, it would still come across as sub-Lifetime-movie stuff.

The result comes off overwrought and far from a miracle. It doesn't help that this is the cheapest looking set in Broadway history (including the two folding chairs of A Steady Rain) and that the kid is made to strip and mock-hump Turner in a bit that redefines gratuitous for all time...Alas, for the most part, High gave me a crisis of my own. It made me lose faith in Broadway.

Was Kathleen Turner ever an actor? Maybe, but she's not one anymore. All she does nowadays is waddle onstage and hawk the self-parody that long ago became her stock in trade...'High' is playing next door to Stephen Adly Guirgis's 'The Motherf**ker With the Hat,' a comedy about addiction that is as bluntly funny and crisply written as 'High' is false and manipulative. If you're looking for a good time, be sure to pick the door on the right.