The Merchant of Venice Broadway Reviews

Giving what promise to be the performances of this season, Lily Rabe, as Portia the heiress, and Al Pacino, as Shylock the usurer, invest the much-parsed trial scene of this fascinating, irksome work with a passion and an anger that purge it of preconceptions. You may find yourself trembling, as one often does when something scary and baffling starts to make sense. At the same time you’re likely to have trouble figuring out exactly where your sympathies lie. For at this moment everybody hurts.

The uniformly excellent supporting cast includes Byron Jennings, David Harbour, Jesse L. Martin, Heather Lind and Christopher Fitzgerald. Their combined work represents nothing short of a master class in acting Shakespeare.

I must point out, however, that what Mr. Sullivan has done all but turns on its head the plain meaning of the text of 'The Merchant of Venice.' For my part, I prefer to see the play directed in an unsparingly harsh manner that doesn't paper over its ugliness, the way that Barbara Gaines staged it for Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 2005. But Mr. Sullivan's softer-edged interpretation works on its own terms, and no matter how you think 'The Merchant of Venice' ought to be done, this version will sweep you along with such hell-bent momentum that you'll forget there was an intermission.

Similarly, as Bassanio's buddy Gratiano, Jesse L. Martin exudes an infectious joie de vivre, but shades it with suggestions of irresponsibility and, in scenes with Shylock, something worse. And Heather Lind is a soulful, plaintive Jessica, Shylock's daughter, who deserts her father for a Christian lover, only to find a new, more pronounced sense of isolation. She reaches into our hearts and haunts our minds, as this Merchant does in general.

With deepened characterizations from the park holdovers and efficient design tweaks to move the staging indoors, this is an uncommonly satisfying production of one of Shakespeare's more difficult plays.

Everything that was very right about Daniel Sullivan's staging in Central Park last summer is even more impressive indoors, especially Lily Rabe as a Portia who begins with strength and wit and grows into devastating self-knowledge. And everything that was annoying - that is, the more jarring buffoonery - has been recast with theater veterans and redirected to smarten the comedy under a human shade of melancholy. After exploring Shylock on film and in the Park, Pacino keeps finding quieter and scarier layers in this sympathetic and flawed outcast.

It's all good and well to enjoy Shakespeare under the stars, a piney breeze wafting over the lake and small woodland creatures pausing to savor the iambic pentameter, but I'm more awed and engaged by Daniel Sullivan's supremely intelligent Merchant of Venice now that it's moved indoors. This somber and stately (but never dull) production was the hot ticket in a boiling summer at the Delacorte Theatre. Such zeal was stoked, obviously, by Al Pacino's turn as vengeful moneylender Shylock. But surely urgent word of mouth also swelled the throngs of people waiting for free tickets. Now the seats carry a hefty price tag, but I doubt that will dampen sales or demand.

Now that Mark Wendland's revolving wrought-iron set has been fitted into a smaller indoor space, with the black-painted theater wall serving as a backdrop, the emphasis has shifted to the darker story of Shylock (Pacino), the revenge-hungry Jewish moneylender bent on exacting a pound of flesh from Antonio (Byron Jennings), the merchant of the title and bosom friend of Bassanio. When the two tales converge in the blistering trial scene, theatrical fireworks explode as two heavyweights at the top of their game—Pacino and Rabe—clash.

Her musical voice pitched low and conversationally, Rabe depicts a very smart Portia who's well aware of the princess image she needs to project in Belmont, which interestingly makes her later decision to masquerade as a young scholar seem natural. Portia's amused composure during the challenge scenes — nice to see Charles Kimbrough's cameo as an elderly dandy — turns flustered and deeply ardent when she encounters Bassanio.

Ms. Rabe's portrayal is mesmerizing. The young actress is of course beautiful, poised and confident, but there's more. She displays an inner intelligence and certainty even at moments when the play allows Portia to be more frivolous, and she forcefully holds her own on the stage, even opposite Mr. Pacino, when Portia, disguised as a young jurist, faces off with Shylock and outwits him, depriving the moneylender his pound of flesh.

Language is always key when it comes to the Bard. But Sullivan's excellent production finds eloquence between the lines, too, in two silent scenes. One imagines Shylock's conversion to Christianity as an act of brutal violence. The other is a final tableau of Jessica, seated at water's edge, and Portia, again, in a tower but not camera-ready as she considers her life. The uncertainty etched on their faces speaks says it all; things won't be picture perfect.

But a lot of smaller pieces have been smashed in the move; key moments, including the once-haunting conclusion, dangle mystifyingly. Numrich's new Lorenzo is a gentler bloke than Bill Heck's more loutish version. His relationship with Jessica now plays as the tender unsteadiness of newlyweds, not as the frightening transactional rape Sullivan staged at the Delacorte. This has a devastating effect on the play's epilogue, which was written as an eleventh-hour return to light-comedy, but which Sullivan has reinterpreted as an ominous coda, full of fatal regrets that can't be bought off or kissed away. The creepy pathology at the heart of Lorenzo and Jessica's unhappy union was the key to making this slant work. Without it, we're simply watching a bunch of sighing young yuppies, aridly dissatisfied, sitting around a reflecting pool--hell, we might as well adjourn to the local Marriott.

Yet Pacino has gone bigger, unnecessarily turning up the volume since the summer, and losing subtlety in the process. Looking bedraggled, his shirt half hanging from his shapeless pants, Shylock makes a pitiful figure next to the Christian establishment, haughty tormentors in crisply pressed suits and spotless spats. That Shylock would channel his humiliation and disappointment into vengeful rage is understandable, if not excusable. But does it need to be so obvious?

Courageously, director Daniel Sullivan avoids making the revenge-thirsty moneylender more assimilated and sympathetic, or the duplicitous Christians less anti-Semitic. Essentially, we have here a comedic Jew, as the playwright no doubt intended him, in a part that today comes close to the tragic.

Both Al Pacino's Shylock and Lily Rabe's Portia, sadly, seem less effective in their new context. Pacino, now more businesslike and less cringing, has lost the deepening fury that grew, last summer, beneath the cringe. Rabe, having just suffered the tragic loss of her mother, seemed forced and harsh; hopefully time will ease that. Meanwhile, it's still The Merchant of Venice, not a common sight on Broadway, and therefore worth having.

Well, dear readers, I regret to say that I broke my rule and went to see the new Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare's problematic play about a Jewish moneylender who asks for a pound of the borrower's flesh in the event of default on a debt of 3,000 ducats is, as you have by now realized, the third play on my 'thumbs-down' list; but the excited word-of-mouth among my critical peers (though not nytheatre.com's own David Gordon, whose assessment of the earlier incarnation of this production last summer is here), plus the chance to see a pair of actors I respect (Al Pacino and Lily Rabe) in classic roles they seemed suited for, made me decide to break my rule and give Merchant another chance. I left at intermission.