The Real Thing Broadway Reviews

The first time 'The Real Thing' came to Broadway, it won the Tony Award for best play. The next time it arrived, it won for best play revival. This time it just may sneak away with the trophy for best musical revival. A thoroughly excellent and tuneful version of Tom Stoppard's brilliant play about love and fidelity opened Thursday at the American Airlines Theatre, directed by Sam Gold and featuring a dozen songs, both sung onstage by the actors between scenes or wafting out of record players...Some may grouse that they may be a little too on-point for such a slippery play, but the actors integrate them well...The seven-member cast is first-rate...McGregor rarely lets his mask down, but when he does -- moaning alone or quietly sobbing -- it's heartbreaking. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Annie...with a fierce opaqueness, her face decorated with a clever, knowing smile or a cool standoffishness. Gyllenhaal telegraphs her character's unease and real desires with aching subtlety...If this play is almost 30 years old, its age wasn't visible.

Thirty-two years after it premiered in London, Stoppard's comedy, which involves people of the theater, still raises questions about love and art that are as fascinating to ponder as they are difficult to answer. In the new Roundabout Theatre Company production (* * * ½ out of four stars) that opened Thursday at the American Airlines Theatre, they're explored -- by director Sam Gold and a starry, supple cast -- with a bracing candor that puts into sharp focus both the dazzling beauty and wit of Stoppard's language and the emotional urgency underlying it...McGregor's cunning performance shows us the extent to which irony is Henry's shield...In contrast, Gyllenhaal's Annie is grounded from the start, and radiantly comfortable in her own skin...As the more jaded Charlotte, Nixon proves a predictably, delightfully razor-sharp presence, while Hamilton's Max is by turns piercing and poignant.

Roundabout rounded up name players for this revival of 'The Real Thing,' Tom Stoppard's meditation on the vagaries of love and the elusive nature of reality. Ewan McGregor makes an impressive Broadway debut as a British playwright whose new play reflects both his own rocky relationship with his cool and distant wife (Cynthia Nixon) as well as his affair with the vivacious wife (a radiant Maggie Gyllenhaal) of the star of his play. Stoppard is a witty brainiac who likes to tease and torment an audience, but helmer Sam Gold's mannered production is so steeped in artifice, it's almost antagonistic to the text.

Cynthia Nixon, featured at age 17 in the original Broadway production, is Charlotte now. She and Josh Hamilton as Max are quite good. Maggie Gyllenhaal gives a deeply honest portrayal as Annie. But it takes a special talent to pull off Henry's awakening. And Ewan McGregor is just the man. He delivers an array of emotions in this role, each one more real than the next. Some people find Tom Stoppard's writing not much more than brain candy but the brilliance of this eloquent writer is his ability to go beyond the head straight to the heart.

Admittedly, despite the marquee allure of Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal in their impressively comfortable Broadway debuts, this is less of a luscious showpiece than was the 1984 New York premiere with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, and has less dazzling heat than the 2000 one with Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle. But everyone...is appealing and smart. And this romantic serio-comedy -- Stoppard's most accessible work -- remains a dizzying Chinese box of unpredictable devises that express devastating compassion for that most basic yet elusive human emotion. The problem, and I'm afraid there is one, comes from the look of director Sam Gold's production, which works against immediacy by spreading the action on a set so wide and cool it invites the big theater to swallow up the intimacy. To their credit, these fine actors resist an impulse to push to fill the space.

True to form, The Real Thing (1982) is exceedingly well made, a keen and touching study of fidelity, fiction and marital love among theater folk. Its craftsmanship is so solid, in fact, it resists director Sam Gold's well-meaning attempts to improve it...With Stoppard, though, you don't need to tinker much; it's all on the page. Gold's work with the actors is perfectly sound; McGregor and Gyllenhaal are naturally charismatic, intelligent performers who deliver Stoppard's brainy badinage with nervy aplomb. It's just the sing-alongs that got on my nerves...But Gold's excavation of this element doesn't add anything, just directorial static...It's a strong ensemble, featuring a brief but memorable turn by Ronan Raftery as one of Annie's ardent admirers. McGregor makes his Broadway debut with assurance, charm and sparkle. And those juicy encomiums he delivers on intimacy and literature? He hits them, and how they fly.

Contrasting the messy way in which art imitates life in The Real Thing, this play always seems to enjoy a charmed life when revived. Perhaps it's because Stoppard at his most relatable and quotable ('If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different,' Henry muses. 'As would the history of aviation.') A terrific cast led by McGregor has triumphed with it yet again.

Gyllenhaal...absolutely grounds 'The Real Thing,' making Annie's arguments every bit as convincing as Henry's. McGregor walks on stage as if in a comedy by Noel Coward, with the style and grace to play Coward as well. He's almost flighty in his goodwill and quick repartee, and it's soon obvious that he's using his intellect to distance himself from what he really feels. It's an interpretation that's immensely entertainment, but one that might fail if not for Gyllenhaal, who always brings his character's exhilarating, often eccentric, verbal flights back to earth...Meanwhile, the world around them on stage is sometimes a bit off kilter -- and not always in a good way...Gold's directorial flourish isn't lethal, but it gets the play off to a bumpy start...This revival isn't perfect, but McGregor and Gyllenhaal are definitely The Real Thing.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, making a sensational Broadway debut as Annie, pulls off the especially difficult trick of wrangling all the messy contradictions of her character without losing her glowy sexiness for a minute...Likewise Ewan McGregor, another Broadway debutant, makes a passionate case for Henry the romantic without shortchanging his devastating verbal acuity...That the temperature of the characters is generally a few degrees warmer than in previous productions is surely the deliberate work of the director, Sam Gold, who has also made other choices to melt the ice...most significantly, he has the cast singing between every scene: lovely acoustic harmonizations of pop hits...This warmth has an odd effect though. It's pleasant but seems to undercut the cool brilliance of the writing.

McGregor is confident and sexy, using badinage as a bandage over wounds he'd rather not examine too closely. Nixon...is a worthy foil, wearing dowdy dresses and a look of wry resignation. Gyllenhaal, a pixie-cut dream girl, has a chillier but still effective presence. But director Sam Gold's fussy production blurs the distinction between scenes with a single drab set and cast-sung interludes of '60s pop. Not only is it harder to follow the tricky plot (and its plays-within-plays), but the songs suggest a kumbaya solidarity among the characters that undercuts the show's message about the challenges of forging connections. B+

In the first scene, you watch Nixon and Josh Hamilton, both of whom are playing actors, stage a scene about infidelity. You think you're watching the real thing, but it's really just a play within a play. But while the play centers on two couples who work in the theater (we witness the real-life relationships of the actors we're watching at first), the creative professions on display actually are secondary to the needs of these poor, over-educated souls as people - ordinary, dumb people.

Do not be misled by the title. Authenticity is conspicuous only by its absence in the tinny revival of 'The Real Thing'...Evidence of real feelings, real chemistry and real life in general is dishearteningly scarce in this interpretation of Tom Stoppard's 1982 comedy...Despite a talented big-name cast...this Roundabout Theater Company production is one of those unfortunate revivals that make you wonder if the play in question is worth revisiting...This latest version, though, never acquires a pulse beyond the rhythmic thrust and parry of bandied bons mots. As directed by the estimable Sam Gold...'The Real Thing' often feels as teeth-grindingly brittle as a summer stock production of a W. Somerset Maugham drawing-room comedy.

As Stoppard hints in his title, he wants to raise questions about the connections and disconnections between reality and imagination. The beauty of The Real Thing is the wit and pathos with which he achieves his end, and Stoppard achieves them despite a less than satisfying production. The ubiquitous Sam Gold directs, and perhaps it's his crowded schedule that explains what goes wrong with this Real Thing when things do go wrong. The chief problem is that he has the actors present their characters as terribly, teddibly arch. It's an off-putting approach that somehow renders banter of an amusing slant not very amusing at all. It's just tedious--with the result being that none of the four central figures are very likable.

In his Broadway debut, McGregor is too cuddly as the snobbish Henry...Sam Gold...underlines this by having his cast join in singalongs of the pop songs Henry loves so much...This gimmick actually works because Henry is obsessed with the intersection of craft, emotion and entertainment...While 'The Real Thing' traffics in big ideas -- art, love, cynicism, fidelity -- the whole feels muted. This has partly to do with Stoppard's middle-of-the-roadness, and partly with McGregor's refusal to engage with Henry's darker side. Even Gyllenhaal's feline sexiness seems overly laid-back. Nixon, on the other hand, is a standout as the cool, collected Charlotte...The star...has a haughty, coiled energy, and things flag when she's offstage for most of Act 2. Were she to stick around a little more, the kettle may actually whistle.

The play concerns the complexities of marriage and marks McGregor's bang-up Broadway debut. With no sign of struggle, he's charismatic and convincing as he plays Henry's various facets -- witty, glib, snobbish and, importantly, romantic. This Scottish actor is in good company. Fellow Great White Way rookie Maggie Gyllenhaal impresses as Annie...Gyllenhaal...makes her vibrant, sensual and reckless enough to break a heart without remorse. The pair's chemistry provide the show with a beating pulse. But this Roundabout revival also suffers from fits of arrhythmia.

Ewan McGregor makes an assured Broadway debut as Tom Stoppard's semi-autobiographical stand-in, an erudite playwright struggling to tame the slippery concept of love in his writing as well as his personal life in The Real Thing. Maggie Gyllenhaal also brings poise and sophistication to the actress who breaks up his marriage and becomes his second wife. But pretty much everything else in Sam Gold's hollow revival is a little off. That goes for a terribly miscast Cynthia Nixon, a too-literal design concept that's hard on the eyes, and sing-along scene changes that are as cloying as they are superfluous, serving mainly to yank us out of the play.

The Real Thing...has led a charmed life on Broadway -- up to this point, at least...And here it is again, this time in an only partially successful staging from the American director Sam Gold...Out of this cat's cradle comes a dissection of the byways of desire that finds neither Gyllenhaal nor McGregor ideally cast. One yearns for the over-coiffed McGregor to loosen up: the likeable Scotsman seems a tad stolid playing the so-called 'Henry of Mayfair', a role to which his lanky, rangy predecessors were suited down to the last hyper-articulate quip. Gyllenhaal has her moments, especially near the start, but she doesn't come naturally by the effortless sensuality needed to play a grown-up minx. There's good work from Cynthia Nixon as Henry's canny, crisply spoken first wife...This production has put something primally affecting about the play on mute.

Tom Stoppard's 1984 dazzler gets the matinee-comedy treatment from director-of-the-moment Sam Gold in a revival that leaves its attractive stars, both in their Broadway bows, deeply in the lurch. Glib and weirdly chilly for a literate comedy-drama about love, commitment, the sanctity of words and the enduring perfection of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling,' the Roundabout Theatre Company production is as full of ideas as the play itself -- all of them wrong.

Could it be that the production is getting in the way of the actors? Mr. Gold is an intelligent, imaginative interventionist who at his frequent best sheds sharp raking light on the plays that he stages. Here, though, his 'innovations,' such as they are, have the meretricious smack of arbitrary cleverness, and one of them, the use of the same kind of unusually wide and shallow set that he favored in his Roundabout revivals of 'Look Back in Anger' and 'Picnic,' doesn't work at all. Instead of the up-close intimacy that was the hallmark of Mr. Halberstam's staging, we are given a flattened-out, frieze-like visual perspective on a play that is notable for the layered complexity of the relationships that it portrays.

Tom Stoppard, at his best, is linguistic and philosophical fireworks. Watching an ineffective production of one of his cerebral plays, such as the Roundabout's new revival of his 1982 drama 'The Real Thing'...is not just challenging for the average theatergoer. It's hopeless...Sam Gold's production comes off as vacant and smug instead of engaging. Virtually all its comedic elements go to waste...McGregor makes a solid Broadway debut, and Gyllenhaal has great rapport with him. Nixon, on the other hand, is noticeably miscast, appearing far older than everyone else and having a poor handle on a British accent.