'Ink'

[My play report on the current Broadway première of Ink is considerably longer than my usual reports.  The extra length—over half the post—is attributable to the review survey I always include at the end.  Ink attracted so much press attention when it came to New York City, more outlets covered it than I commonly find on the ’Net.  Review outlets that had given up on theater. reviewing. came out to play, including. the Daily News and the (Murdoch-owned) Post; I also hadn’t seen NY1 or WNYC post notices for a while..  Several websites I haven't seen in months  or years, like TheaterScene.com, also appeared on the scene.  I wonder of this is in response to a play about newspapering? 

[Rather than reduce the selection or trim the quotations, I decided to let the reporting of the critical reception exceed my self-imposed maximum length.  Though I don’t endorse it, ROTters may choose to stop after my performance evaluation.  I recommend you stay with the report, however, and see what the published reviewers had to say about this play.  ~Rick]

When Diana, my usual theater companion, agreed to partner with me in getting tickets for James Graham’s Ink, the British import about Rupert Murdoch’s precipitous entry into the London newspaper world, I had concerns.  I was leery about seeing the play because I was afraid I wouldn’t like it because I have such contempt for Murdoch’s politics and business practices that I was afraid I’d hate the character.  Oddly, for reasons you’ll see in a moment, I didn’t end up hating the Rupert Murdoch of the play—I did, however, dislike the play for dramaturgical reasons.

I’ll be brief on Ink for now: it’s long, it’s a mess, and I disliked it a lot.  For once, Diana and I agreed: it accomplishes nothing (and does it pretentiously).  I can’t figure out why the Manhattan Theatre Club would want to bring Ink to New York; I assume the theater actually sent someone to see it and didn’t just rely on London reviews. 

(The Evening Standard declared, “Hold the front page: a huge hit” and the Telegraph reported, “Once again finding a play for today in what looked like yesterday’s news, Graham has surely penned a super, soaraway smash.”  Even the London Times, now also owned by Murdoch, said that Ink is “a broncobuster of a play and Rupert Goold, the director, mostly lets it run riot, creating the feel of a newspaper office, organised chaos at the best of times.”  I glanced at Show-Score, and I was a little surprised that the New York City mounting of Ink got an average score of 80 and that 84% of the reviews were positive.  Given how both Diana and I felt, that’s very high.)

Ink was commissioned by London’s renowned Almeida Theatre and débuted there on 27 June 2017 for a limited run.  The world première was directed by Rupert Goold (King Charles III, 2014 – also at Almeida, where he’s artistic director) with Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch and Richard Coyle as Larry Lamb.  The production closed on 5 August and transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End, opening on 19 September 2017, also for a limited run, closing on 6 January 2018.  The production was nominated as Best New Play for both a 2017 Evening Standard Award and a 2018 Olivier Award.  (Carvel won the Olivier Award for  Best Supporting Actor in a Play.) 

The play transferred to Broadway under the auspices of the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2019, starting previews on 2 April at MTC’s Broadway house, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 47th Street, west of Broadway; the U.S. première of Ink opened on 24 April and Diana and I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 7 June.  Originally scheduled to close its limited run on 9 June, the production has been extended three times (as of 12 June), first to 16 June, then to 23 June, and finally to 7 July.  Jonny Lee Miller (2012 Olivier Award for Best Actor, shared with Benedict Cumberbatch, for Frankenstein; CBS’s Elementary, 2012-19) took over the role of Larry Lamb from Coyle; Carvel remains as Rupert Murdoch.  The rest of New York company is largely made up of U.S. actors.  Ink was nominated for six 2019 Tony Awards, including Best Play, and won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play (Carvel) and Best Lighting Design of a Play (Neil Austin); the play also received nominations for five 2019 Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Best New Broadway Play.

A description of the plot, such as it is, of Ink would be confusing and misleading, since the events that are depicted on stage aren’t literally what the play seems to be about.  Over two hours and 40 minutes (plus one intermission), Graham (Finding Neverland, 2014; Privacy, 2014) recounts Murdoch’s purchase of the failing Sun from Hugh Cudlipp (Michael Siberry), Chairman of the Mirror Group of newspapers, the holding company for the Daily Mirror and its companion papers, in January 1969, at a bargain-basement price.

                                                                                                            

Murdoch (Carvell), who’s 37 at the time the play begins, brings in Sir Alick McKay (Colin McPhillamy) to be to be his Deputy Chairman and hires 39-year-old Larry Lamb (Miller), the former northern editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester, to be the first editor of the new Sun. 

Lamb, irate at having been passed over for promotion at the Mirror, where he’s a working-class Yorkshireman among Oxbridge toffs, demands a free hand if he takes the job, and Murdoch readily agrees.  In November, Lamb puts out the first edition of the Sun as a tabloid (like the Daily Mirror; the Sun had previously been a “stuck-up broadsheet,” like the London Times) and launches the new paper with radical changes in its format, coverage, and layout intended to appeal to a working-class readership.  The Daily Mirror was London’s best-selling daily paper at the time with 4.7 million readers and Murdoch makes it his priority, and therefore Lamb’s, for his new newspaper, with the nation’s lowest circulation—50,000 readers and going down—to catch up to the Daily Mirror’s circulation numbers within a year of his taking control.

The first part of the play is devoted to the obsessive make-over of the paper.  There’s a whirlwind of scenes—on film, it would be a montage of quick cuts—of his hiring writers and staff for the paper (“the spurned, the spited, the overlooked . . . a ship of undesirables,” in Murdoch’s words), holding brainstorming sessions to determine the kind of stories the new Sun will cover—such as sports, sex, crime, gossip, celebrities, the royals, and “the telly,” which, Lamb points out, people watch while most British papers ignore it as competition—and the best layout to catch the eye of the working man and woman.  Give them what they actually want, insists Lamb.  (The word for that is ‘pandering.’)

As act one unfolds, Lamb and photographer Beverley Goodway (Andrew Durand) shoot a topless Stephanie Rahn (Rana Roy) as the first “Page 3 Girl,” a regular feature of the Sun (which continued until 2015).  This episode is given greater prominence in Ink than any other aspect of the make-over, and it also gives Graham the opportunity to depict Murdoch’s discomfort with the gimmick as Lamb brushes his employer’s reservations aside.   As the act ends, the Sun is gaining on the Daily Mirror in circulation.  (In reality, the Sun didn’t catch up to the Mirror until 1978.)

The darker act two comprises the depiction of the paper’s coverage of one story, a gruesome crime saga that is close to home.  On 29 December 1969, Sir Alick’s wife, Muriel (Tara Summers), is kidnapped, mistaken for Anna Murdoch (Erin Neufer), Rupert Murdoch’s wife at the time.  Until this point, Sir Alick hasn’t been a major character in the play—and even through act two, his importance is down-played. 

The Sun’s sensational headlines on the front pages, reporting every grisly detail and presumption for the delectation of the readers, may even have hastened Lady McKay’s possible death.  Her body was never found, but the Sun reported that the authorities believed she was killed shortly after her abduction and her remains were fed to the pigs on the farm of the two kidnappers (a pair of Muslim Indo-Trinidadian immigrant brothers).  Graham’s Murdoch also makes ineffectual objections to covering this story, but Lamb argues that it’s what the Sun is meant to be.

Near the end of the play, Murdoch tells Lamb he’s on his way to New York.  “I’m thinking about buying a TV network over there,” he explains.  It may be the most ominous pronouncement Graham makes in Ink.

I can’t think of anything affirmative to say about the play or the production.  Ben Brantley was particularly high on the performances of the two leads in the New York Times (Carvel is “balletically precise” and Miller is “terrific”), but I was unimpressed, and in the case of Bertie Carvel, I found his performance of Rupert Murdoch oddly mannered, especially his voice.  It was either a strange casting choice (assuming that’s Carvel’s normal speaking voice—he’s often described in reviews as “chameleonic”) or a strange acting/directing decision (if it’s put on).  Both Diana and I had the same reaction.  The play opens in dim light and we were sitting above in the mezzanine, so we were looking down on the actors—that is, we couldn’t see the faces at that point, just the tops of heads.  When Carvel spoke, we both thought it was a woman on stage!

The play includes several elements of stylization, including the set (Bunny Christie, who also did the costumes), the lighting (Austin), and the fact that the actors break into song and dance for no apparent reason (Lynne Page is the choreographer and movement director and the sound design, including the period music selection, was by Adam Cork)—Ink’s not a musical—and in what’s supposed to be parts of the Sun newspaper offices, there’s an upright piano, complete with piano player (Kevin Pariseau, a member of the cast who also portrays a union worker in the pressroom and a TV interviewer), sitting down left.  (Don’t all newsrooms have pianos?  I have it on good authority that the New York Times has a baby grand.)

Anyway, that all smacks of stylization of some sort—non-Realism—but director Goold went with perfectly naturalistic performances from the cast.  That, aside from the odd break-out moments which seemed to have no dramatic or theatrical purpose, made Ink appear to be a straight history play about how Murdoch changed the face of newspapering, first in Britain and then in the rest of the world.  Except that that’s not really a two-hour-and-40-minute story, so there’s a lot of padding and very little revelation.  I mean, it’s not like no one knew what Murdoch did; it was no stealth mission!  

There are also a lot of actors (18, not counting understudies), including many who play several roles—so there are quite a few characters (22, plus “extras”).  Except for Murdoch and Lamb, however, none of them seems to have much to do.  We learn nothing about them as people—even Lamb and Murdoch—and they’re mostly there to do the newspaper work—there’s a linotypist, a printer, a copy boy, a photog, a few writers, and so on—but they aren’t characters in the drama, they’re employees of the paper (if you follow my distinction).  They don’t advance the plot, they get the paper out! 

That means there’s a lot of frenetic activity—the driving plot device is Murdoch’s vow for the Sun to outsell the Mirror within a year.  There are lots of scenes of layout changes, format changes, content changes—all to appeal to the working-class reader so it’s crass and low-brow, like Lamb’s invention of the Page 3 Girl, the topless woman in a photo that had no connection to any news story, just cheesecake).

All this activity takes place on a mountainous set that looks like a corner of an Aztec pyramid made of office furniture.  The desks, filing cabinets, work tables, and office chairs are all entirely naturalistic from the era of hot-lead typesetting, mostly gray metal and dark wood, but Christie has them stacked in receding levels up the up-stage right corner of the stage’s back wall.  The actors clamber up the stack—Lamb’s desk is at the very top level—and perform small scenes from there.  It’s like a monkey house at a zoo with a constructed “environment” for the specimens to caper on for our amusement.  

A relatively small space down-center and down-left is left free of clutter as an acting area (the piano is also located here) and a trap door with an elevator brings up set pieces for other locations such as the press room, a restaurant, and so on.   Behind all this is a wall of video screens that project bits of news stories, headlines, photos, and other visuals to underscore what’s happening in the script.  (The projection design is by Jon Driscoll.)

Austin’s film-noir lighting veers from dim and hazy (everyone smokes and there’s a bottle of booze—I imagine Scotch, given the play’s setting—is on every desk) to dark with bright spotlights on individual actors, like that opening scene I described earlier.  Like Christie’s scenic elements, her costumes are also utterly naturalistic and perfectly appropriate. 

Graham portrays Murdoch as a softie—he squirms at the Page 3 Girl feature and some of the coverage (such as “Knickers Week”), with Lamb as the guy who actually comes up with all the sleazy tactics that make the Sun a circulation giant (and simultaneously lowers the tone of newspapering on Fleet Street and beyond; as I reminded Diana, it led directly to Fox News, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, and Roger Ailes).  Murdoch’s conquest of Fleet Street is presented as a success story, not as a cautionary tale (though we may infer that meaning—especially when the newly minted press baron seems to foresee social media by predicting a world where consumers produce their own content and bids farewell to Lamb by telling him he’s off to New York because there’s a TV network there in which he’s interested.  (Rupert Murdoch purchased the Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986; in 1985, he bought an interest in 20th Century Fox; and launched Fox News in 1996.)

The problem is, I don’t buy it.  A man who did what Murdoch did could not have had such a delicate constitution and a media mogul who meddled so heavily in his outlets’ editorial policies and practices could not have been as hands-off as Ink makes him out to be.  I don’t buy it for a New York second!  One question I had after the play was how much, if any, of the script is based on research and fact and how much is sheer invention.  

In a YouTube interview on the Almeida website (which I transcribed myself), Graham addressed this matter, though not definitively.  “I love history.  I love the process of researching historical events, meeting . . . interviewing people from the past and finding my way structurally and narratively through . . . these periods is great fun,” said the playwright.  “I probably had about two, three weeks of intense research—memoirs, interviews, documents—and then I started structuring, I started plotting and writing.”  So he did consult sources, though he doesn’t specify whether they provided Murdoch’s exact words or his demeanor in any given conversation.  In addition, Graham said he talked “to some Fleet Street people who were there around at the time and got them to check certain facts . . . .”  Then the actors put their oars in, too.  They “did a lot of research without me and watched clips online and read autobiographies,” recounted the playwright—and then they took off on their own, turning the parts into “characters and not real people.”

Furthermore, though Graham insisted, “I think reality will always be more interesting than anything you can make up,” he acknowledged, “I’m a great believer that . . . audiences aren’t stupid, that they’re very sophisticated and they know that this is a fictionalized representation; it’s not a factual presentation of anything.”  When the unidentified interviewer asked about addressing characters like Rupert Murdoch, about whom audience members might have preconceived opinions, the dramatist replied:

Personally, I think it’s my job to humanize these people, even people we strongly disagree with or people, as you say, we might come with a huge amount of baggage or prejudice or assumptions about someone—especially someone like Rupert Murdoch or a newspaper like the Sun . . . .  So I do think it’s my job and I enjoy the side of the work which plays devil’s advocate with that and tries to come at things at a weird angle, or come at people from a different angle.  And, of course, ultimately, someone can—and probably should—write a play that really goes hard for Murdoch and calls him to account.  That’s not gonna be my play.  I have more interest in trying to understand what motivates him—his vulnerabilities, his weaknesses, his flaws, his strengths even: that to me is what excites me as a writer.

Dominic Cavendish, the reviewer for the London Telegraph, spoke of Graham’s “interweaving of fact and fiction” in telling the story of Rupert Murdoch and the Sun, but the playwright emphasized his commitment to factuality in writing Ink: “For this play, which is about how the truth can be weaponized and fictionalized for political gain, I felt a very keen responsibility to not misrepresent the truth,” he said in another interview in New York’s Back Stage trade paper. 

Irrespective of any of this, however, no one wrote about Murdoch as a sweet guy with no agenda.  (Brantley called him “Mephistopheles”—which would make Lamb Faust—though the Financial Times said “not quite.”)  He’s universally portrayed, even in Ink, as an outsider—an Australian in Britain, seen as an interloper in the Fleet Street old boys’ club, “ignored by his fellow newspaper barons in the leather chairs at the London Press Club, who mock ‘The Aussie Sheep Farmer’ behind his back.” 

His interest wasn’t in journalistic standards or accurate reportage, but in making a profit.  “The numbers are what matter,” says Murdoch in the play.  A TV interviewer in the play remarks, “The news business then, for generations seen as a noble pursuit, [is now] no different from that of hawking soap, or shaving cream on a market stall, it’s solely about shifting volume.”  Graham makes Murdoch out to be skittish, even prudish, when it comes to covering certain subjects, but he’s ravenous when it comes to selling papers.  I still wonder it that dichotomy is accurate. 

James Graham was born on 8 July 1982 (he’ll be 37 next month) and grew up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in northern England (coincidentally, less than 50 miles from the Yorkshire town in which Larry Lamb had been born and less than 70 miles from Manchester, where he’d been northern editor of the Daily Mirror).  The incipient playwright studied drama at the University of Hull in Yorkshire.  Aside from the Almeida Theatre, his work has been staged throughout the United Kingdom and around the world, at theatres including the Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre in London; Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Wales; the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Public Theater and, now, the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City (the latter the playwright’s Broadway début). 

A cursory look at Graham’s oeuvre reveals that he often writes about politics and political issues in his plays and films.  Ink might seem to be an exception; even though Rupert Murdoch is well known today to use his media outlets to campaign vociferously for policies and candidates he supports—popular opinion is that the victory of the Conservative Party and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 was greatly aided by Murdoch’s support and the endorsement of the Sun—the play doesn’t cover this aspect of the mogul’s rise to influence.  Graham has acknowledged, however, that part of his inspiration for writing Ink was his observation of the press coverage of, first, Brexit, which Murdoch backed, and then Donald Trump’s candidacy for President of the United States in 2015 and 2016.

(The Murdoch-owned New York Post endorsed Trump in the New York State Republican primary and, though it withheld its endorsement in the general election, the conservative tabloid gave the candidate pages of positive coverage throughout the campaign—and bashed his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, as often as it could manage.  The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch’s News Corp also owns, eschews political endorsements—it hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928—but it did generously cover Trump, a businessman, after all: the Journal’s target audience.)

Graham’s first professional play, Albert’s Boy, was produced in 2005 by the Finborough Theatre in London, where Graham became playwright-in-residence.  His first major play, This House, was commissioned in 2012 by the Royal National Theatre, where it was critically and commercially acclaimed, transferred to the larger Olivier Theatre, and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best New Play.  This House, a play set in the latter half of the 1970s and depicting events surrounding the House of Commons, was revived in 2016 and ran for two years, first in the West End and then on a national tour.

In 2018, Graham won his first Olivier Award, for Labour of Love, the story of a Labour MP over 25 years in office, as best new comedy (Ink was nominated in the same year).  He wrote the book for the Broadway musical Finding Neverland (2014), and his 2014 play, Privacy, like Ink, came to New York City, produced by the Joseph Papp Public Theater at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in 2016.

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Graham’s debut feature film X+Y (renamed A Brilliant Young Mind) premiered in 2015, and he has written numerous British television dramas, including the TV films Coalition (which won the Royal Television Society award for Best Single Film; 2015) and Brexit: The Uncivil War, which aired on Channel 4 in 2019.

In June 2018, Graham was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its 40 Under 40 initiative.  In January 2019, the writer’s life and work were the subjects of a documentary as part of the Imagine series on BBC One.  In May 2019, This House was voted Play of the Decade in Bloomsbury Publishing’s “60 Years of Modern Plays” public survey.

As I’ve indicated, Ink’s critical reception in London, both at the Almeida and then in the West End, was largely enthusiastic.  In New York, Show-Score (as I hinted above) showed that the press here was of a similar disposition.  I reported earlier that the site gave Ink an average rating of 80, based on a survey of 50 published reviews.  I also reported that 84% of the New York reviews were positive, but the rest of the breakdown, as of 14 June, was that 12% were mixed and just 4% were negative.  There were seven 95’s (amNewYork, New York Stage Review, and the U.S. edition of the Financial Times among them), Show-Score’s top score, followed by eight 90’s, including CurtainUp, Gotham Playgoer, and NY1 television news, among others.  The two low scores on the site were Time Out New York with a 40 and The Wrap with 45.  My round-up will cover 28 notices.

In amNewYork, Matt Windman described Ink as “a fast-paced and provocative thriller brimming with rowdy comic banter and prescient social commentary” and Goold’s production as “gripping.”  Windman reported that the “production moves fluidly and is consistently, engrossing, entertaining and disturbing.”  In the end, the amNY reviewer, whose notice was one of the highest scorers on Show-Score with a rating of 95, dubbed Ink, a “magnificent new English drama.”  Barbara Schuler wrote in her “Bottom Line” in Long Island’s Newsday: “A fascinating look at how Rupert Murdoch went about building his media empire.”  She described the play as “engrossing” and declared, “If ever a story was ripped from the headlines, it’s this one.”  Schuler pondered a question he found personally (and professionally) significant:

It’s challenging to review a play that lays bare the inner workings of your profession.  Will anyone care about the intricacies of coming up with the perfect front-page layout or the machinations of creating a lead printing plate for the nightly press run?  Turns out in the right hands, it’s all kind of fascinating, especially when you add in spot-on, mile-a-minute performances from Bertie Carvel . . . and Jonny Lee Miller . . . .  Besides, as the two men on a mission frequently point out, it’s a darn good story (that being the primary answer to the question we started with).

“The large cast, directed with an energizing touch of theatrical fantasy by Rupert Goold, does a fine job portraying the assorted editors and writers,” reported the Newsday reviewer, though she  found “their occasional breaking into song is a touch unrealistic in my world (unless you count the annual holiday party).” 

The Times’ Brantley prefaced his review with an portentous question: “Did you hear the one about the guy who sells his soul to the devil?  How about the story in which an entire country does the same thing?”  Assuaging his U.S. readers, “[D]on’t worry, uneasy Americans, it’s not about you,” the Timesman went on, “These cautionary tales intersect to highly invigorating effect in James Graham’s ‘Ink.’”  He felt that Goold staged the play “with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap” that “turn[s] the cast into a (sometimes literal) conga line, wriggling to an infectious, forward-moving beat that obviates doubts and scruples.”  The Times review-writer found, “The largely American, multicast ensemble deploys varyingly confident British accents.  But it does well in sustaining the play’s propulsive momentum.” 

In New York’s Daily News, a paper from whom we haven’t heard much with respect to theater, Chris Jones wondered who Rupert Murdoch really is.  He proclaimed that “as they like to say at Fox News, the new Broadway play ‘Ink’ mostly reports the facts. You decide, dear reader, you decide.”  Jones added, “At least you will have fun doing the deciding” as he compared Ink with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Front Page (see my report of a 2016 revival, posted on 16 November 2016), noting both plays’ “humorous relish.”  He called Ink a “gloriously nostalgic catnip for a vanished era of newsprint,” which Goold “directed with palpable if unsubtle joy.”  Comparing Lamb to Icarus (the mythological Greek who flew too close to the sun with wax wings), the Daily News reviewer labeled Ink “a bit of a morality play.”  (In a compound error no one apparently caught in editing, Jones kept calling the playwright James “Gresham” and the director Rupert “Gould.”)

Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch, as Oleksinski disclosed, and awarded a score of 90 on Show-Score) called Ink an “exciting new play,” a “down-and-dirty dramedy,”  and “unexpectedly seductive.”  The Postman added that “nothing about” Ink “is ever less than rousing,” and the production “is hoisted even higher by director Rupert Goold, doing his best work since the similarly irreverent ‘King Charles III,’ by mixing in music and dance for a raging party vibe.”  In the end, Oleksinski concluded, “‘Ink’ is way more than just a bit of fun.”

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, another notice scored at 95, Max McGuinness asserted that Ink “evokes the demise of a deferential, collectivist social order and the emergence of a brash, individualistic culture epitomised by the rise of Margaret Thatcher.”  Dubbing the play a “political allegory” and “mesmerisingly accomplished,” it “is directed by Rupert Goold with characteristic razzmatazz.” 

Labeling Ink as “a big, loud, aggressively funny play that turns the newsroom clock back to 1969,” Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal (also owned by Murdoch) links it to the “newspaper movie [which] used to be an established genre in Hollywood, and a consistently popular one,” naming several classics from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.  The genre’s passé now for the most part (Teachout sort of ignores The Paper, 1994; Spotlight, 2015; The Post, 2017, and the granddaddy of recent newspaper films, All the President’s Men, 1976—plus a few others in the past 25 years), but the Journalist suggested that their passing is a good reason that “anyone who knows anything about the raffish history of print journalism will delight in James Graham’s ‘Ink.’”  Teachout reported that the play, “[s]taged at a headlong hurtle . . . and featuring excitingly raucous performances by [Bertie] Carvel and Jonny Lee Miller . . . ‘Ink’ moves at so brisk a gallop that the intermission break will catch you off guard.” 

Teachout had a similar question about the portrayal of Rupert Murdoch to mine:

It’s no secret that the real Mr. Murdoch (who is the executive chairman of News Corp, which owns both the Sun and this paper) is widely regarded by Britain’s chattering classes as the devil incarnate.  This makes it downright flabbergasting that Mr. Graham has portrayed him with seemingly genuine sympathy in “Ink.”  How is such a thing possible, especially given the fact that the British stage, like the American stage, is a monoculture in which pretty much everyone lists to the left?

The Journal’s review-writer’s explanation?

The answer is that “Ink” is not so much about politics, or even journalism, as it is about the British class system, and specifically about the proclivity of bowler-hatted toffs in old-school ties to sneer at the lesser breeds who read, write, edit and (ahem) publish tabloids. 

“That’s what makes ‘Ink’ so surprising,” affirmed Teachout:: “It cuts sharply across the lines of traditional politics, foreshadowing the 21st-century explosion of populist rage that is convulsing parties of the right and left.”  The actors, the reviewer reported, “generate enough energy among them to mostly overcome the structural weaknesses of ‘Ink,’ which succumbs to melodrama in the second act, followed by a coda whose sum-it-all-up sanctimony sits uneasily alongside the brash vitality of the first act.”  He concluded, “What we have here, then, is a refreshing piece of intelligent, mostly unpreachy entertainment, a commodity that’s grown steadily harder to find on Broadway in recent seasons.  Not only is ‘Ink’ fun, but it’ll make you think—if you let it.”

Christopher Kelly of the Newark Star-Ledger, called Ink an “exuberant and entertaining drama” on NJ.com and determined that it “does something very canny: it makes a largely liberal Broadway audience root for conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.”  (Clearly it didn’t work for me!)  Kelly complained that the play’s “overlong and occasionally baggy, and its ultimate unwillingness to take a moral stand on its characters’ actions feels like a cop out.”  He continued, “As directed by Rupert Goold . . ., it’s tricked out with gimmickry that distracts more than it enhances—” wondering, “I’m really not sure, for instance, we need a quasi-musical number to show us how Lamb assembled his editorial team.”  On the other hand, the New Jersey reviewer found, “That ‘Ink’ keeps and at times rivets our attention is because . . .  it turns the details of the business world into the stuff of rip-roaring melodrama.” 

“Graham effectively turns the formation of the paper into a battle of working-class lads and lasses against the stuffy, champagne-liberal establishment,” David Cote characterized Ink in the New York Observer.  This, reported Cote, enables “the audience to suppress its collective gag reflex at the thought of rooting for Murdoch and his cronies.”  The production is “directed with nonstop gusto” and this all “makes for an entertaining first half,” but “the play grows moodier” after the Sun sees circulation success.  The Observer reviewer complained that “Graham churns out meaty dialogue and keeps things moving, but there’s a sense that he’s often rushing to check off the next journalistic milestone.”  He added, “The action seldom slows down long enough to dig into any of the characters’ back stories.”  In his final analysis, Cote found, “Still, due to Goold’s brassy, athletic staging and a fine ensemble, Ink is never boring.”  He concluded:

Still, too much of Ink wants to dazzle and seduce; it strenuously avoids passing judgement on what Murdoch’s revolution would bring about 50 years later, keeping its prime villain almost in shadow.  The cover grabs you with buzz words, grisly photos, and 72-point screaming headlines.  But turn the page, and you find yourself wanting more news, less flash. 

Calling Ink “exciting” in the New Yorker, Hilton Als demurred slightly and added that “more specifically,” it “should excite something in the audience, if only a greater understanding of how certain genres work, or don’t.”  The he complained that “‘Ink’ is your fairly standard slice-of-life drama, but one that’s been tricked out to feel more contemporary than it really is.”  Als concluded his opening statement by stating: “How the playwright, James Graham, and the director, Rupert Goold, achieved this effect accounts for what’s interesting about the nearly three-hour drama—and for why it fails.”  The New Yorker reviewer identified two “problems” with Ink; the first is that “it’s filled with allusions and references to the British character and news culture that don’t translate to the U.S.” and the second “is that Graham never really tells us who Murdoch is, so we’re left to rely on what we’ve read.”  Als wraps up his assessment of Ink by concluding:

Graham gets as close to his characters as he can, but those wily, bullheaded subjects weren’t fashioned from his bones.  Perhaps he’s too intelligent for them; his piece certainly builds nicely, weaving into a traditional narrative little asides about the show-business aspect of tabloid life.  One could make an easy argument for “Ink” as a treatise on the rotten rise of celebrity culture, but its intellectual properties aren’t that expansive.

On Vulture, the website for New York magazine, Sara Holdren felt that Ink serves as “an interesting . . . case study” of “self-made giants of the market.”  It “use[s] humorous, highly structured writing to pick apart the hubristic growth of a modern moneymaking empire” and is “unashamedly built to be [an entertainment].”  Holdren warned, however, that “that task can get easily sidetracked.”  She continued, though: “Ink, though it resists moralizing, is at least interested in asking moral questions,” adding, “And as directed with plenty of pop and fizz by Rupert Goold, and driven by the compelling performances of Bertie Carvel and Jonny Lee Miller, it’s both playful and thoughtful—not, perhaps, a kick-in-the-guts play, but an energetic, respectable handshake.”  Holdren felt that “Ink is perhaps on the back-heavy side, with all of the play’s weightiest, densest episodes shoved into Act Two”; the first half “is dedicated to the amusing, Ocean’s Eleven–like assembling of The Sun’s ragtag team.” 

When a show doesn’t know what it’s about, it starts asking itself existential questions,” cautioned Helen Shaw of Time Out New York, in the review that rated lowest (40) on Show-Score.  Shaw expanded on this point: “‘What makes a good story?’ a character might ask another character, portentously.  This is exactly the moment the theatergoer should start worrying.  The word story is to bad plays what the word family is to bad action films: a sign of vapidity taking itself seriously.”  In the play, the woman from TONY pointed out, the answer Lamb gives to that question is the journalistic standards, conventions which he and the Sun will pretty much ignore or distort; what Shaw’s answer was is: “A good dramatic story, though, has more than the newsroom basics.  It has pressure, argument, surprise, suspense.”  Then she asked, “So why is there no drama here?”  She explained that “although Graham labors hard to humanize Lamb with shadows of self-doubt, this psychological element is oversold and unconvincing, and we’re left with a long show about a foregone conclusion,” continuing:

Taken-from-the-record plays often have this problem: We know how things turned out.  We know what a Murdochian world looks like because we live in it, and once the show has answered the question of how did we get here (they did it to sell papers), there’s still two hours and 20 minutes to go.

“Director Rupert Goold knows that Ink needs ginning up, and boy, he ladles on the gin,” the TONY reviewer determined.  “This production is loud, and it’s lit like a rock show.  It has the chiaroscuro intensity of a C. S. Lewis morality play about the Devil.”  Shaw felt, “Goold may think he’s rescuing a dry procedural by turning it into hyperactive, overamplified children’s theater for adults, but he’s actually administering the killing blow.  His dynamic control is shot.” 

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney used his “Bottom Line” to label Ink as “The Decline of Western Civilization for Dummies.”  He began his assessment of the play with a critique of the director’s style:

Rupert Goold is the king of bells and whistles.  The English showman rarely resists the urge to infuse a text with kinetic energy by drawing from his ample bag of dynamic stage tricks.  That can work to a production’s advantage . . . .  Elsewhere, though, the gilded Goold touch can expose the shortcomings of a mediocre play.

This, Rooney contended, is the case with Ink.  The HR reviewer characterized the play as “basically a semi-dramatized Wikipedia page with two satisfyingly fleshed-out characters in a crowded field, and two correspondingly compelling performances competing for attention with a load of directorial froufrou.”  Rooney, however, does acknowledge, “For anyone with a nostalgic interest in the bygone days of print journalism, there’s lots to enjoy in Goold’s imaginative presentation of the nuts-and-bolts process of putting out a daily paper. . . .  Everything from editorial content to headline-writing to layout and even distribution is depicted with rollicking energy and humor.” 

The review-writer also found, “There’s entertainment value in the glee with which Larry and his team rip into the noble traditions of establishment print journalism” and “Goold stages it all with a putting-on-a-show adrenaline rush, even if it’s somewhat undercut by lack of character shading in the newsroom figures.”  He admitted, “The goal of hurdling the Mirror’s circulation lead in a year provides the drama with a ticking clock.  But the overlong play spends too much time spinning its wheels.”  Then Rooney affirmed, “The juicy element that finally livens up the sluggish second act is a shocking development likely to be unfamiliar to most American audiences.”  

He was referring to  the coverage of the kidnapping of Muriel McKay, which “also strikes at the dramatic crux of the matter—how uncomfortable ethical questions were brushed aside for the sake of sales figures.”  He asserts, though, that “this is also where the structural imbalance in Graham’s writing becomes problematic,” explaining that “going from such a chilling crime to a drawn-out scene agonizing over the decision to introduce topless ‘Page 3 girls’ just seems anticlimactic.”  Rooney concluded by asserting that “Graham’s storytelling instincts too often get dulled here, and Goold’s frantically busy direction can’t disguise that.”

Frank Rizzo labeled Ink “[g]arish, lurid and brash” in Variety, pronouncing the plays “the theatrical equivalent of its subject.”  In explanation, Rizzo wrote, “Like the tabloid, it feels unsubstantial, rushed and icky.”  The review-writer warned that

those expecting a psychological study of a titan, deep analysis of the marketplace, or personal stories resulting from an industry’s seismic shift will find the play lacking, as it favors boisterous pronouncements and mythologizing over the human touch.  Think of it as “Network” for ink-stained wretches.

“‘It’s all about a good story,’” reported Rizzo in Murdoch’s words, “and it’s a dandy one here that whizzes to its conclusion in a staging directed with deadline urgency by Rupert Goold.”  He continued, “In the early scenes there’s a ‘Front Page’ energy, verve and cheek to proceedings,” and found, “At first the David-and-Goliath story is fun to watch as it unfolds, upsetting the tut-tutting press powers.”  But then, “the underdog turns rabid, [and] James Graham’s play comes up short, and instead of digging deeper into the story, Goold and company simply crank up the speed and volume.” 

In the electronic media, things were much the same as the print outlets.  On NY1, the 24-hour all-news channel for Spectrum cable subscribers, Roma Torre asserted that Ink “makes for a fascinating study” of Rupert Murdoch’s “earliest days as a wannabe newspaper publisher.”  Torre, whose notice scored a 90, Show-Score’s second-highest rating for Ink, described the play as “a sprawling, heady, hilarious David and Goliath story that may just make you root for the giant.”  Graham “resists turning Murdoch into a villain,” explained Torre.  “Rather he portrays the mogul as a smart businessman with a chip on his shoulder and a ruthless underdog streak.”  As for the production, director Goold’s “vision for the play is an inspired antic Marx Brothers style romp.” 

On WNYC radio, an outlet of National Public Radio, Jennifer Vanasco reported that Ink is “beautifully directed,” though it’s also “often slow.”  The play “gets at something important: Is there a way of overturning the old order which, as Murdoch says, is designed by people in power to keep them there,  without devolving into a fascist populism?  ‘Ink’ doesn't have the answers, but it sure asks the questions.”  Vanasco felt that Ink “never explores ‘the why’”—the last of the five W’s of journalism—“either: It never examines why Murdoch does what he does.  Instead, it . . . explore[s] the moral lines journalists face and show what happens when they cross them.” 

Robert Hofler on The Wrap, the website that got Show-Score’s second-lowest rating (45), begins his notice with a cautionary statement:

If you don’t already appreciate “Citizen Kane,” the unnecessary first act of “Ink” will make you marvel at Orson Welles’ economy and wit.  Kane’s creation of a tabloid is fun, insightful and, most important, Welles tells the story quickly.  Graham, on the other hand, shows Lamb handpicking each staff member, and each portrait of these hardened journos is a cliché.

“Much more tiresome,” added Hofler, “is Graham’s need to show how newspapers were printed in 1969.”  Even Goold’s “flashy musical-comedy direction can’t disguise the fact that there’s no drama in the first act of ‘Ink.’”  Hofler continued: “Act 2 is an improvement because a story finally emerges . . .  and Lamb plays it up big.”  The reviewer concluded: “To use a newspaper term, ‘Ink’ is a puff piece.”  Calling the play “frequently exciting, if overlong,” Samuel L. Leiter labeled Goold’s staging “strikingly distinctive” on Theatre’s Leiter Side.  Leiter included, “Ink overextends itself, and could use some editorial trimming.  That, however, is not to deny that it remains “a good fuckin’ story.”

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer characterized Ink in another 90-rated review, as “one of the most entertaining and fun to watch plays that London has sent our way.”  She affirmed, “To his great credit, the playwright has managed . . . to tell a ripping good newspaper story” and, continued Sommer, “Thanks to . . . Rupert Goold, . . . [the] play has been staged with stupendous originality and style and is performed with gusto by a large cast.”  The CU reviewer also found, “Carvel's interpretation” of Murdoch “is indeed fascinating and fun to watch.” 

Mark Shenton of New York Theatre Guide declared Ink “a stunning achievement, both in riveting playwriting from Graham and thrilling stagecraft from Goold,” earning his review a 95 from Show-Score, its highest rating for the play.  Shenton reported that “the cinematic dynamism and propulsion that each provide turns a play about a pivotal moment in the history of British newspaper journalism into something akin to a thriller.”  Playwright Graham “expertly marshals the human drama behind these headlines—and it is properly galvanised [sic] by a pair of towering performances” from Carvel and Miller, who are “both spellbinding.”  Shenton ended by proclaiming that Ink “makes for top theatre.”

JK Clarke on Theater Pizzazz warned potential theatergoers that “while the details of the story may be salacious, they are not as shocking or revelatory as the playwright would have you believe.”  He suggested, “Had Ink been written/produced in the 1980s it might have been more compelling.  Tabloids were going full speed and slander was considered part of the game . . . .  But the advent of the Internet has made dirty journalism seem quaint.”  The NYTG reviewer reported, “Ink is blessed with a look and feel that give it a burst of newsroom energy without it being drab.”  Then he complained, “But Goold’s staging is often awkward, with prolonged darkened breaks between scenes or odd dance numbers that didn’t make sense in the context of this play,” adding, “Furthermore, there were scenes that could have easily been trimmed or cut to reduced [sic] the overlong two hours and 45 minute run time.”  Clarke acknowledged, however, “The play is ultimately rescued by Graham’s sharp, crisp dialog performed by a terrific cast” and concluded, “Overall, it makes for a compelling and entertaining night out at the theater that may or may not teach you a thing or two.”

On the Daily Beast, Tim Teeman described Ink as “uneven, intriguing . . . with two excellent performances by Jonny Lee Miller and Bertie Carvel.”  Teeman also felt that “it also seeks to impose a measured, piquant view upon its own sepia frame.”  The DB reviewer was surprised that “that this play is more celebration than moral inquisition.”  Confessing that he worked for Murdoch’s Times of London, Teeman seems to regret that the play “doesn’t put Murdoch on trial” and that “it is a mainly sympathetic origin story.”  The review-writer pointed out, “The first half of Ink is romp-ish; a kind of ‘making the band’ as Lamb assembles his troupe of launch issue journalists.”  The second half of the play is “overwrought, . . . constructed around two early Sun flashpoints,” the Page 3 Girls and the kidnapping of Muriel McKay.  The latter event, Teeman found, “adds another structural instability to the play itself, which up to this point has not focused on Alick McKay or his wife—so why should we care?”  Both these aspects of the play “are presented as telling moral quandaries, but come across as more convenient plot padding.”

Fern Siegel dubbed Ink “a fast-paced chronicle of ambition and anger” on TheaterScene.com, “a nasty foreshadowing of what’s to come.”  Graham’s play is “a compelling, even frightening tale of anarchy and mission, but once its intentions are clear, it’s less a commentary and more first-year bio.”  Siegel found that Goold “is excellent at creating an upbeat, celebratory mood in act one” and she praised Page’s choreography, Christie’s set and costumes, Austin’s lighting, Cork’s sound, and Driscoll’s projections which “greatly enhance the experience”; Miller “is exciting to watch.”  In conclusion, Siegel thought, “It’s amazing audiences aren’t screaming stop the presses!”

“Undeniably entertaining and unapologetically theatrical, Ink slaps a new headline on an old chestnut,”  asserted Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania, continuing with the question, “but will its viewers emerge from the darkness . . . enlightened about a process that still blindsides so many?”  Stewart characterized the “jittery drama” thus:

Much of Graham’s restless script plays out like every American sports movie from the past half-century: An aggrieved but talented coach assembles a ragtag team of misfits that, through unconventional methods, improbably comes from behind to win the championship. . . .   Broadway audiences might roll their eyes at this formula, but it constitutes a powerful and dangerous myth—the kind that destroys industries and topples governments.

Goold’s production “is unsubtle and gets the point across,” asserted Stewart.  “The production is the real star,” declared the TM reviewer, naming the entire design team for compliments.  “This is theater for the age of Twitter, in which there is always something shiny and outrageous coming down the feed,” added the review-writer.  Stewart characterized Ink as “a timely, if not particularly original, new play.  That’s fine: Some stories bear repeating until we finally hear them.”

James Wilson of Talkin’ Broadway labeled Ink “dazzling and gripping” and “considers the collateral damage of” Murdoch’s “philosophy” of giving the readers what they want and ultimately letting them produce their own content.  “Unfortunately,” Wilson found, “the play stumbles somewhat in the second act as it pursues the ramifications of this precis.  The narrative gets bogged down with a bit too much moralizing.”  Otherwise, “Ink is crackling good theatre.  It is a smart, expertly constructed play and infused with rapid-fire dialogue reminiscent of a 1930s comedy.”  Under Goold’s direction, “the production is stunningly theatrical.  In addition to the excellent ensemble of actors, there are eye-popping visuals by a team of designers.” 

(Just a note of congrats for Wilson.  Among all the other reviews I read, most writers compared Murdoch and Lamb to Mephistopheles and Faust or a pair of Machiavellis.  David and Goliath came up, but that was for the Fleet Street classists and Murdoch-the-Outsider.  Wilson was the only reviewer I saw who used Sweeney Todd, that other demonic denizen of Fleet Street, and Mrs. Lovett for his analogy.  Not inaptly, either.)

Once again, New York Stage Review posted two notices.  Elysa Gardner stressed “Graham’s sharp, rapid-fire dialogue” and “Goold’s characteristically flashy direction (a good fit for the subject matter).”  Praising the “superb cast,” NYSR Writer A concluded, “If it’s too late to kill the beast Murdoch has nourished over decades, Ink at least encourages us to reflect on its growth—and, if we’re fair, our own accountability in that.”

In the other NYSR review, which was another of Show-Score’s 95’s, Steven Suskin asked, “Can Graham, and director Rupert Goold, expect us to root for [Murdoch]?”  Suskin decided, “No, they don’t expect us to; they more or less force us to.”  The playwright, observed Suskin, “is interested only in the beginnings, and it makes a roisterous tale.”  NYSR Writer B labeled Graham’s play “spectacularly dynamic” and Goold’s “production team is all-round superb.”  At the end of the play, Murdoch tells Lamb, “It’s a good story.  People like stories.” Suskin affirmed, “It is, and we do.”

On TheaterScene.net (not to be confused with TheatreScene.com, quoted above), David Kaufman dubbed Ink a “smart new play” which “establishes its sly sense of humor in the . . . opening scene, when Lamb asks Murdoch if he likes ‘Rules’ and Murdoch replies, ‘So long as I’m the one making them,’ only for Lamb to say that he’s referring to the oldest restaurant in London, called ‘Rules’ where they’re having dinner.”  Kaufman cautioned readers, “Despite its concerns with newspapers and newsrooms, Ink is nothing like other journalism plays, such as The Front Page”—a play to which many other reviewers compared Ink.  “Graham’s otherwise realistic script takes on elements of performance art whenever director Rupert Goold has his many players . . . suddenly dancing with choreographed movements.”  The TS.net reviewer reported in his final assessment, “In the final analysis, Ink is too swift and too slick for its own good—or should I say, for our good?”  He complained, “Even if you know some of the details it traffics in, they zoom by at such a rapid clip, that it’s sometimes hard to follow.  Director Goold is to be faulted for the pace, no less than the playwright, Graham.”  Kaufman admitted that “some of [the play] was lost on this particular reviewer.”

'The Little Foxes'

There are some plays that, when I read they’re on the boards somewhere in New York City, I seriously try to get to a performance.  Waiting for Godot’s like that; Jitney was; Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night are, too.  Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is definitely one of those must-see plays for me—so when I read that Manhattan Theatre Club was producing it on Broadway with two sterling actors, Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon, alternating in the two lead female roles of Regina Giddens and Birdie Hubbard, I knew I had to try to see it.  Hellman (1905-84) is one of the great  playwrights of the 20th century, one of the United States’ most accomplished women dramatists, and Little Foxes is generally considered her masterwork.

I’d seen a production of Little Foxes on Broadway before—with a rather illustrious cast.  It was back in July 1981 and it featured a very famous actress in her stage début: Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) played Regina Giddens.  The production was an experiment of sorts—not so much to see if movie-star Taylor could do a stage part, but to see if audiences would buy a production starring a movie actress (among a cast studded with other film and TV names, though ones with previous stage credits).  The producer, Zev Bufman, and Taylor were contemplating launching a repertory program of great plays on Broadway starring actors from the world of film, to be called the Elizabeth Theatre Group.  The Little Foxes played 126 regular performances and eight previews, completing its limited run (with an extension). 

(The rep program, however, flamed out.  Bufman and Taylor had plans for productions of Noël Coward’s Private Lives (starring Taylor and Richard Burton), Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (with Cecily Tyson), Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (with Taylor), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, and even more challenging fare, including Shakespeare plays (with Taylor—and why not, if Marlon Brando and Mickey Rooney could do it, albeit on film).  In 1983, Bufman presented the Coward and the Emlyn Williams, but the project went no further.  Dealing with movie and TV stars—not Taylor, by the way—turned out just to be too . . . ummm, “difficult.”)

The Little Foxes premièred on 15 February 1939 at the National Theatre (now the Niedlerlander), directed by Herman Shumlin, with Tallulah Bankhead as Regina Giddens, Frank Conroy as Horace Giddens, Charles Dingle as Benjamin Hubbard, Carl Benton Reid as Oscar Hubbard, Dan Duryea as Leo Hubbard, and Patricia Collinge as Birdie Hubbard.  The play ran for 410 performances and in 1941 was made into a film by Samuel Goldwyn Productions under William Wyler’s direction.  The cast was largely the 1939 Broadway company, with Bette Davis taking the role originated by Bankhead.  Productions followed across the country and abroad, but there were major revivals in New York City as well.

In 1967-68, the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center presented Little Foxes under the direction of Mike Nichols, with Anne Bancroft (Regina), Richard A. Dysart (Horace), Margaret Leighton (Birdie), E. G. Marshall (Oscar), Austin Pendleton (Leo), Beah Richards (Addie), George C. Scott (Benjamin), and Maria Tucci (Alexandra).  Then came that Bufman production with Taylor at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1981, directed by Austin Pendleton (who’d played young Leo Hubbard in ’67-’68), with Tom Aldredge (Horace), Joe Ponazecki (Oscar), Dennis Christopher (Leo), Maureen Stapleton (Birdie), Anthony Zerbe (Benjamin), and Joe Seneca (Cal).  A new resident company at Lincoln Center, the Lincoln Center Theater, revived the play in 1997 under the direction of Jack O'Brien, with Stockard Channing (Regina), Kenneth Welsh (Horace), Frances Conroy (Birdie), Jennifer Dundas, Brian Kerwin (Oscar), and Brian Murray (Benjamin).  In 2010, the New York Theatre Workshop brought avant-garde Belgian director Ivo van Hove in to helm a new staging. 

The Little Foxes was presented on the Philip Morris Playhouse (CBS radio) 10 October 1941.  The radio adaptation starred Tallulah Bankhead.  In 1949, the play was adapted by Marc Blitzstein as an opera entitled Regina.  It premièred at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway on 31 October 1949.  George Schaefer produced and directed Robert Hartung’s television adaptation of Little Foxes on 16 December 1956 for the Hallmark Hall of Fame on NBC.  The cast included Greer Garson as Regina, Franchot Tone as Horace, Sidney Blackmer as Benjamin, E. G. Marshall as Oscar, and Eileen Heckart as Birdie.

The MTC revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway started previews on 29 March and opened on 19 April.  Diana, my usual theater companion, and I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 3 May; the production is scheduled to close on 2 July (extended from an 18 June closing).  The production has garnered six Tony nominations, announced by the American Theatre Wing on 2 May for 2016-17: Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance of an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play: Laura Linney (Regina), Best Performance of an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play: Richard Thomas (Horace), Best Performance of an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play: Cynthia Nixon (Birdie), Best Costume Design of a Play: Jane Greenwood, Best Direction of a Play: Daniel Sullivan.  (The 71st Annual Tony Awards ceremony will be held on 11 June.)  MTC’s Little Foxes has also received nominations for seven Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Play Revival; six Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Broadway Play; and three Drama League Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Play. 

The idea to cast two actresses to switch roles was Linney’s, who’d already been signed to play Regina when she suggested to Sullivan “this crazy idea.  What if we asked another great actress, say Cynthia Nixon, and we rotated parts?”  Both Sullivan and Nixon—who, like Linney, had always wanted to play Regina—were excited by the notion.  The two actresses alternate every four performances of the eight in a week.  (The original idea was to switch off every two shows.  Sullivan extended the rehearsal period to give the cast time to get used to playing opposite two different Reginas and Birdies.)  In an article on the MTC production, theater writer Lonnie Firestone compared two actors swapping roles this way to an older, but now uncommon theater practice:

[It’s] a cousin of sorts to repertory theatre, in which an ensemble cast performs different plays on alternating nights.  Both offer an opportunity for actors to showcase their mastery of more than one part.  But sharing roles within one play adds another element—namely, it heightens the antipodal relationship between two focal characters. 

The theater invited journalists to see the show twice, once for each pairing, and many did—but most paying theatergoers will only see the play once (as Diana and I did), so we can only conjecture how much different the performance will be when the actresses switch roles.  Neither Linney nor Nixon thought there’d be an immense difference between the alternate portrayals.  “I think some things will be similar, just because the play is so well written,” said Linney back in mid-March.  Nixon responded, “They aren’t the roomiest characters.”  Of course, one of the beauties of live theater is that even when the same actor is playing the same role, every performance is different, and each actor’s performance affects every other actor’s performance.  It’s one of the most exciting aspects of doing theater as distinct from film and TV.  The tiniest changes have immediate repercussions, so switching actors has to have an effect—and many of the reviewers described the often subtle distinctions between Linney’s Regina and Birdie and Nixon’s portrayals of the same characters. 

None of the three artists had ever done this kind of performance before—and it is rare in high-profile productions, but it’s not unknown.  In a 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet at the New Theatre in London’s West End’s (now the Noël Coward Theatre) John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier alternated as Romeo and Mercutio.  In a 1994 production of Sam Shepard’s True West at London’s Donmar Warehouse, Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko alternated the roles of the brothers Austin and Lee, and in 2000, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly repeated the casting stunt at the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway.  As recently as 2011, Danny Boyle directed an adaptation of Frankenstein by Nick Dear at London’s National Theatre in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternated as Victor Frankenstein and his monster (sharing an Olivier Award for Best Actor that year).

The Little Foxes is an old-fashioned family melodrama—on steroids.  The title, reportedly suggested to Hellman by Dorothy Parker, comes from the Song of Solomon 2:15 in the King James version of the Bible: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”  The Hubbard siblings do a bang-up job of spoiling the vines and everything else.  As Addie (Caroline Stefanie Clay), the Giddens’s maid (and a former slave), says: “There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it. . . .   And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.” 

In 1900, brothers Oscar (Darren Goldstein) and Benjamin Hubbard (Michael McKean) join forces with their sister, Regina Giddens (Laura Linney at the performance I saw) to raise money to establish a cotton mill in their small Alabama town (identified in Another Part of the Forest as Bowden, a fictional place) in partnership with Chicago industrialist William Marshall (David Alford).  The brother’s are counting on Regina, who as a woman had been left out of their father’s will and has no money of her own, to get her wealthy banker husband, Horace, to contribute a third of the capital.  Birdie Hubbard (Cynthia Nixon on that Friday evening), Oscar’s gentle and sensitive wife, considered Southern aristocracy by the parvenu Hubbards, doesn’t approve of the Hubbard greed and urges Alexandra (Francesca Carpanini in her Broadway debut), Regina’s 17-year-old daughter, to escape the avaricious plotting of the family—and to avoid the plan to marry her to her cousin, Leo Hubbard (Michael Benz), Oscar and Birdie’s 20-year-old son.  Horace Giddens (Richard Thomas) is under treatment for a heart ailment in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. 

After Regina’s and the Hubbards’ letters to Horace fail to bring the necessary money, Regina sends Alexandra to bring her father home on the train.  Weakened by the trip, Horace, about 45, denies the money his wife wishes.  Leo, a feckless and ineffectual boy who works for his Uncle Horace, steals Union Pacific Railroad bonds worth $88,000 ($2.4 million today) belonging to Horace and gives them to his father and Benjamin; the brothers cut Regina out of her share of the scheme.  Horace soon discovers the theft and when he tells his wife the stolen bonds will be her inheritance from him, she becomes enraged.  The revelation of Regina’s true character causes Horace to suffer a heart attack; Regina withholds the medicine necessary to save his life, and watches as Horace dies.  Regina confronts Oscar, Benjamin, and Leo with the theft of the securities, demanding 75 percent of Hubbard Sons and Marshall, Cotton Mills, in return for not exposing their crime.  In the last scene, Alexandra bids her mother goodbye, unable to bear any longer the greed and selfishness of the family.  The MTC production runs two hours and 35 minutes, including two intermissions. 

(In 1946, Hellman wrote a prequel to Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, whose Broadway début the playwright herself directed.  The nouveau-riche Hubbard family is shown here in 1880 and patriarch Marcus Hubbard, 63, dominates his conniving son, Benjamin, 35, and his weaker son, Oscar, in his late 20’s, with the tyranny that’s made him a rich and powerful man in the small cotton town of Bowden, Alabama, and surrounding Rose County.  He’s reduced his sensitive and religious wife, Lavinia, around 60, to a neurasthenic.  Only his beautiful, 20-year-old daughter, Regina—played by Patricia Neal in her first Broadway outing, winning both a Tony and a Theatre World Award—whom he worships, can control Marcus, which she does for her own selfish purposes.  She wants to marry John Bagtry, a 36-year-old Confederate army veteran, who only felt useful during the war and longs to go to Brazil to join the forces of the military, conservatives, and landowners fighting to preserve slavery there. 

(The Bagtrys have become land-poor, and John’s cousin, Birdie, 20, has appealed to Benjamin for a loan which would salvage Lionnet, the family’s cotton plantation.  He arranges the loan to benefit his family’s business and himself, but when Regina learns the money would make it possible for John to go to Brazil, she thwarts the transaction.  Oscar brings Laurette, about 20, the local prostitute with whom he’s become enthralled, to the Hubbard house for one of Marcus’s musical evenings; Benjamin purposely gets her drunk and she creates a scene.  Marcus orders both sons to leave home, but when Benjamin learns from his mother that his father’s fortune was made from profiteering off his fellow Southerners and an act of deceit and treachery during the Civil War, he blackmails Marcus into giving him control of the family funds.  Now Benjamin becomes the new tyrant of the family, forcing Oscar to marry Birdie and Regina to give up John.  Regina turns her attentions to Benjamin, even though she hates him, to further her own desires.  Just as he’d destroyed others, Marcus is a broken and lonely man at the end of the play, the victim of his own greed.)

MTC’s promo for The Little Foxes says “the play has a surprisingly timely resonance with important issues facing our country today.”  There are, of course, issues of race and gender that sadly have a contemporary ring: the casual racism with which Cal (Charles Turner) and Addie, the black servants, are treated—though Hellman portrays them with both great dignity and independent spirit.  (In Another Part of the Forest, Hellman informs us that Oscar rides with a group of nightriders and that the Hubbards have clashed with the local Ku Klux Klan.)  But for Hellman, a communist and anti-capitalist who was haled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), it’s the depiction of American business that’s most pointed.  As Nixon puts it:

One of the things that the play says is that—and this is very in evidence nowadays—we think of people who amass huge fortunes as just being “good at business.”  But what that phrase sometimes conceals is that there’s a lot of cutthroat maneuvering in many different kinds of businesses for people who want to get ahead.  And there are many different kinds of bending of rules—cheating and violence and backstabbing and more.  A lot of the fortunes that were amassed in this country have that at their base.  This is something that the African-American community has been saying for a long time.  There is so much corporate malfeasance and these people almost never go to jail.  There are these two parallel worlds at the bottom and the top of criminal behavior; one group gets heavily prosecuted and one barely even gets perused.

I can guess whom the actress had in mind.  (If I’m right, I have the same thought.  How about you all?)  The same association arises when Linney addresses a question about whether she thinks the Hubbards are “evil”:

We see this behavior now a lot.  It’s not rare.  I think people will recognize a lot of people they know in the Hubbards.  I don’t think it’s that hidden anymore.  That behavior used to be a little hidden because it was seen as in bad taste and people had a reputation, and now people don’t care.  Now there’s strength in behaving badly.  So there’s a different perspective that America is in now.  It’s also sort of a warning—it’s a play of warning, I feel.

Near the end of the play, Benjamin tells Regina that “throughout the country there are hundreds of Hubbards,” and “they will own this country some day.”  Several reviewers reported a shudder rippling though the audience at those lines, and, indeed, that day may have come.

The Little Foxes Diana and I saw is absolutely excellent!  First of all, I sort of like all those old-fashioned plays, especially by writers like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Hellman, Clifford Odets, and William Inge—top-flight craftspeople.  Second, companies like MTC, Signature, Primary Stages, Second Stage, the Public, Lincoln Center Theater, and others, do such good work on their productions—especially (but not limited to) their casting—that it’s a joy to watch the work that’s been done—design, directing, acting, the whole nine yards!  Third, perhaps to repeat myself, the acting is terrific, especially (but again, not limited to) Nixon and Linney.  Even though I know the situation and circumstances are contrived, the actors make it look so natural that I’m convinced it is.  While Sunset Boulevard was not worth the ticket price, Little Foxes is, and then some.  What a great evening!

This is easily one of the strongest ensemble casts I’ve ever seen, up there with the Jitney company last winter (see my report on 24 February) but not many others.  Still, the roles of Regina and Benjamin are the movers and shakers of the story, followed closely by Horace (who doesn’t appear until the middle of act two).  Linney’s Regina is focused like the proverbial laser beam on her goal—getting out of her house, the little southern town, the marriage she hates and resents, and getting to the wide world represented by Chicago.  To do that, she needs money of her own.  That she fails to achieve this aim doesn’t diminish Linney’s steely resolve to get there—it only makes her ending more devastating—and more deserved.  Because Linney’s usually a softer actress, more emotionally vulnerable, playing the resolute, unbending Regina makes the performance both more surprising and more edgy.

Conversely, Nixon, who usually plays stronger, less pliable characters, gives a more precarious performance as the brow-beaten and dismissed Birdie.  We get to glimpse what she might have been had she not married Oscar and come under the sway (in Another Part of the Forest) of his father, a nastier bully than even Benjamin.  Nixon’s Birdie pulls some of this back out again when she takes her niece aside and warns her to get out from under the Hubbard curse—and acknowledges that she doesn’t really like her own son.  That’s probably the last anyone will ever see of that entombed spirit, but Nixon’s portrayal will pull your heartstrings to the breaking point.  As Benjamin, Michael McKean gives a frighteningly believable portrait of a ruthless, soulless, conscience-less money-chaser.  Winning is all that matters, or indeed means anything; there’s nothing left to him but greed for its own sake.  It sounds one-dimensional, but in McKean’s hands, it has shades and variations—all in pursuit of one goal: to beat the other guy (or, in the case of his sister, gal—Benjamin is an equal-opportunity predator).  Richard Thomas almost makes Horace likeable—or maybe it’s just his contrast with Regina and her brothers.  It’s certainly partly a product of Thomas’s stage persona—Diana and I saw the same quality in the actor’s portrayal of von Berg, the Austrian aristocrat in Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (see my report on 16 December 2015)—but there’s still a bright streak of cruelty and meanness in Thomas’s banker.  If the Hubbards are the bulls of this menagerie, Horace is the snake.  Thomas may seem like a harmless garter—but he turns out to be a viper.

The other members of the ensemble, from Darren Goldstein’s Oscar and Michael Benz’s Broadway début as Leo to David Alford’s Yankee industrialist, William Marshall (another Broadway début), display nuances and personality gradations that individualize each of them and together they provide the matrix in which the Hubbard fungus grows.  Some are abettors and others inhibiters, but they all contribute to the agar.  What they grow together is reprehensible—but the process is miraculous to see.

Scott Pask’s faded elegance of the Giddens’s parlor perfectly fits the tone of the play and Sullivan’s production.  I could almost smell the must hanging in the air of the house, aided by Justin Townsend’s soft lighting that evokes the spring evening in the deep south.  Nothing, however, could render the material and chronological atmosphere of Hellman’s play better than the costumes devised by Jane Greenwood.  It’s no wonder that she was singled out from the design team of Little Foxes for Tony recognition: the clothes for the production are as telling—of character and status—as any of Hellman’s dialogue or the behavior of any of the actors.  The difference between Regina and Birdie?  Look at what they wear.  The kind of men Benjamin and Oscar are?  Their clothes may not make the men—but they damn sure reveal them.

Daniel Sullivan’s staging is so realistic that I might have thought the actors were improvising if I didn’t know better.  But more than that, he guided the cast to performances that perfectly reveal who these folks are, what they want, and how they see themselves.  As directed by Sullivan, The Little Foxes is just an extremely well-mounted production of a well-written modern classic that hits all the bases.  Acting students, directing students, and theater students all should be assigned to see it! 

All the award nominations for Little Foxes are deserved and the nominees are legitimate contenders for the awards.  This is not a case of needing to fill out a bracket or not having enough competition in a category (as a few reviewers claimed in the case of Glenn Close’s 1995 Sunset Boulevard Tony), or a sop to a vet or a “critics’ darling” (to invoke William Goldman’s The Season again as I did in my Sunset Boulevard report).  This production earned its nominations.  Day-um!  (I haven’t been this high on a performance since I can’t remember when.  It’s exhilarating.)  Kudos!!

On Show-Score, based on a survey of 56 published reviews, The Little Foxes received an average rating of 85.  The website included in its tally several out-of-town outlets, which I usually discount, so I’ve recalculated Show-Score’s numbers for 53 local or national reviews:  the adjusted average is 81; the notices are 98% positive, 2% mixed, and none negative.  The highest scores are three 95’s (including one for Variety), with 18 90’s (including the New York Times, the Village Voice, and the Hollywood Reporter); the low score is 60, backed by three 70’s (New York, Talkin’ Broadway, and NJ.com/Newark Star-Ledger).  I’ll be surveying 26 notices for my review round-up.

The New York Times’ Alexis Soloski, calling MTC’s Little Foxes a “nimble, exhilarating revival,” wondered “Is the play too tidy, too well made, too clear-cut in its morality to fight for a place in the first rank of American theater?”  Soloski continued, however: “Maybe. But it comes pretty close.  And very well armed.”  The Times review-writer reported, “Mr. Sullivan’s confident production doesn’t deny melodrama, but it prefers psychological and social detail over Southern gothic fripperies.”  In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz dubbed the production a “crisp and taut revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 acidic and darkly humorous Southern potboiler.”  Dziemianowicz assured readers, “Under Daniel Sullivan’s sure-handed direction, the show satisfies no matter who’s playing Regina,” adding that the “production's good-looking.” 

The Little Foxes’ “lessons are none too subtle,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Edward Rothstein, describing the play as a “melodramatic classic.”  Noting that Linney and Nixon are “two accomplished actresses,” Rothstein reported, “Under Daniel Sullivan’s direction, the rest of the cast is remarkable (and flexible).”  Characterizing the play as a “costume melodrama” in a “zesty Broadway revival,” Matt Windman asserted in am New York, “Although ‘The Little Foxes’ calls attention to a lot of serious issues (including economic inequality, corporate greed, spousal abuse, racial prejudice and alcoholism), at heart, it is an unapologetic soap opera with over-the-top characters and unbelievable machinations.”  Windman felt, “Director Daniel Sullivan approaches the play with a “let’s just roll with it and have a good time” attitude, leading to a simple but effective production full of old-fashioned theatricality.”  While the amNY reviewer found that Linney and Nixon were “fine” in both roles, he affirmed, “The fullest performance actually comes from Thomas.” 

In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” was: “Strong revival, delicious alternate casting.”  She opened her review with the declaration, “The next time anyone challenges the need to have nonprofit Broadway houses alongside the commercial theaters, I’m going to shout out, ‘The Little Foxes.’”  Winer characterized the revival as “strongly cast” and said that Sullivan approached “what is generally dismissed these days as a melodramatic old potboiler” with “crackling seriousness.”  After seeing more plays about Hellman than productions of her work over the last 20 years, Winer “was struck by the snappy, tight writing and the psychological truth in the people who gather in the Giddens’ parlor (beautifully designed by Scott Pask) to manipulate life, death and money.”  Calling Linney and Nixon “sublimely intelligent actors,” the Newsday review-writer added, “The rest of the cast is far more than background, especially the ever-challenging Richard Thomas as Regina’s decent, dying husband and Michael McKean as the smoothest of the mean relatives.” 

For the Newark Star-Ledger, Christopher Kelly called The Little Foxes “a ripe melodrama” presented in an “effective, but straight-over-the-plate production.”  (One of the few reviewers to disparage the double-casting gimmick, which he observed “tends to be a lot more interesting to actors and theater insiders than to audience members,” Kelly stated, “One pretty good version of one pretty good play seems like more than enough.”)  Like Diana and me, the Star-Ledger writer saw Linney as Regina (he didn’t go back for the other pairing), and he found, “For the most part, Linney resists the high-camp dudgeon that Davis brought to the movie, opting for a more psychologically grounded Regina.”  Kelly’s caveat, however, was: “But while that’s a laudable choice, it also drains the proceedings of some potential electricity—a matter compounded by Sullivan’s steady, but restrained pacing.”  In the end, while he found the set and costumes “predictably handsome,” the production “never quite gets the pulse racing.”  In the Record of New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County, Joseph Cervelli labeled the play “venomously delicious” which is “being royally revived” by  MTC.  Praising Sullivan’s “expert” direction, Cavelli affirmed, “There is not one false move or miscalculations in this revival which is one of the highlights of the season.”

Tara Isabella Burton of the Village Voice dubbed the play “sumptuously sour” and the MTC revival “brilliant.”  Burton wrote that “the production invests us as much in the pain and suffering behind the mask-stiff moral carnivores as it does in the victimhood—or, more often, Hellman suggests, cowardly paralysis—of those they’re chomping on.”  According to the Voice reviewer, director “Sullivan’s genius is not to contort the play into a funnel for banal message-making, but to let a team of virtuosic actors loose onstage and let them battle as viciously for our sympathies as they fight one another.”  In summation, Burton asserted, “It would be easy to reduce The Little Foxes to a good play about terrible people.  Nobody gets off scot-free in Hellman’s script, or Sullivan’s staging,” she pointed out.  “But in the constant dynamic juggling of our sympathies, The Little Foxes is something so much better—and so much more affecting: It’s a fantastic play about flawed human beings.  Spoil the grapes the foxes may, but we want to watch them do it.”

In New York magazine, Jesse Green called Little Foxes a “breakneck melodrama” that’s “busily slapping down shibboleths and exposing hypocrisies” in a “handsome” but only “good-enough revival.”  In Green’s words, “The play isn’t subtle; it’s just delicious.”  He felt that “the acting opportunities are juicy from top to bottom,” the man from New York found, “It’s largely in the calibration of the men’s roles that the production falters.”  He argued with the casting of the “aggressively likeable” Thomas and thought that “under Sullivan’s somewhat grandstanding direction,” McKean’s and Goldstein’s “pacing and affect suggest something too close to comedy.”  What the production “gets right,” Green felt, and is “powerfully effective, . . . is Hellman’s dissection of (and shocking prescience about) the way a systemic lack of power can turn into manipulative fury.”  But the final notion that the Hubbards of the world will take over the country is “a swift kick in the American grits, and worth the price of admission, whichever Regina is proving him right.”  In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer described the play as possessing “a Greek tragedy’s implacability and the taut plotting of a film noir” and the MTC revival is “traditional in every respect but one”—the casting gimmick.  Each actress “brings very different shadings to Regina” and the anonymous writer recommends seeing both pairings.  “Hellman’s incisive storytelling, her razor-etched insights into women’s limited options in a patriarchal society, are largely good enough to withstand the scrutiny.”

David Cote of Time Out New York called Little Foxes a “potboiler” directed “with a crisp vigor that smooths over its melodramatic bumps.”  The man from TONY deemed, “The cast is uniformly strong, and outstanding work comes from the leading ladies.”  Though it “may not command as high a prospect in the pantheon of American drama as more poetic work by Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill, . . . it’s cunningly built and packs a punch.”  Cote noted that he hadn’t been able to see both the two actresses in both roles, but admitted, “This is such a richly satisfying revival, I’m going back for seconds.”  In Variety, Marilyn Stasio described the play as a “brilliant, blistering indictment of a rapacious southern family in post-Civil War America” on which Sullivan “has done brilliant work.”  Stasio continued: “His casting is flawless, his team of designers couldn’t be better chosen, and the technical detail that has gone into the production is amazing.” 

David Rooney’s “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood Reporter was “A class act X 2” and the HR reviewer noted, “Daniel Sullivan's impeccable production for Manhattan Theatre Club never overstates that modern-day relevance; he simply lets the play's rock-solid construction and lucid themes speak for themselves via a first-rate cast and exemplary design team.”  Because the play wears its message on its sleeve, perceived Rooney, it doesn’t bear “stripped-down surgical re-examination” of the kind wielded by Ivo van Hove (who staged the recent NYTW revival) or Sam Gold, but “served straight, with the right actors, it's a crackling good yarn.”  In addition to his analysis to the various strengths and surprises of the double casting of Nixon and Linney, Rooney asserted, “This is a superbly cast production with incisive character work” from the supporting actors.  “This is a production as classy as it is smart,” declared Hollywood journalist, “shining a spotlight on a playwright who . . . is too seldom revived on Broadway.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Isabella Biedenharn declared, “It’s . . . a treat to watch these masters [Nixon and Linney] at play” in the MTC Little Foxes, “along with the rest of the vibrant cast.”  Scott Pask’s set “is a sight to behold” with “Justin Townsend’s disconcertingly naturalistic lighting.”

Michael Dale called Little Foxes a “backstabbing family drama” on Broadway World and Sullivan’s staging a “classically mounted revival, designed with stately beauty.”  With compliments for all the cast, Dale commented on the double casting, saying that “personal taste” will determine which pairing “audience members prefer.”  He concluded, “Fortunately, The Little Foxes is a fascinating play and Sullivan's superb production is easily worth a second visit.”  On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart declared, “Under the scrupulous direction of Daniel Sullivan, Linney and Nixon prove that there is more than one way to skin a fox, with two highly contrasting interpretations that change the way we look at the play.”  Stewart, however, felt, “The Little Foxes is guilty of romanticizing the slaveholding gentry of yore in its condemnation of the greedy bourgeoisie that has taken its place.”  Still, he acknowledged, “at least this revival points out the absurdity of that contention.”  Stewart wondered in the end, “[A]re the Hubbards really worse than the self-styled lords and ladies of Dixie?  Why is inherited wealth somehow purer than wealth attained by scratching and clawing like little foxes around a vineyard in bloom?  Those questions remain with us, no matter who is playing what role in this must-see revival.”

On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell labeled the MTC revival of Little Foxes “engrossing” and even deemed the double casting of Nixon and Linney “ a smart, appealing gimmick.”  Linney and Nixon “shine . . . brightly” at the head of “a supporting cast full of stand-out performances” in this “fierce” production enhanced by the “elegant set and the sumptuous costumes.”  Matthew Murray on Talkin’ Broadway asserted that “the guiding force behind Daniel Sullivan’s . . . production of The Little Foxes” is: “Certain distances may seem large, but can in fact be very small: between wealth and poverty, for example, or between importance and meaninglessness, or between being somebody and being nobody.”  Director Sullivan “pays careful attention to mores and appearances with his staging,” but “the physical production lacks that dedication to detail.”  Murray praised, especially, Linney as Regina and Nixon as Birdie—he was less pleased with the alternate combination—and affirmed, “The other actors are no less than satisfying.”  Though the TB reviewer found “Sullivan’s spin might be on the weighty side; . . . the action is definitely more slow burn than all-consuming crackle,” he concluded, “Either way, this is a fiery play that’s a definite hot spot for the season.”

Declaring Manhattan Theatre Club’s Little Foxes a “riveting revival of” Hellman’s “powerful psychological melodrama” on Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter described the play as “an example of old-fashioned but still magnetic playwriting: a tightly constructed play with crystal-clear exposition . . ., sharply defined characters, a theatrically colorful time and place . . ., and a powerful, anticapitalistic theme, as resonant today as during the Depression.”  Leiter cautioned, “One can sometimes hear the creaking of the dramatic wheels,” but found that the production is “a theatrical humdinger” nonetheless “when given the kind of solidly believable performances such as it mostly gets here under Daniel Sullivan’s shrewd direction.”  He found no fault with any of the cast, but singled out Thomas and McKean for special praise, concluding, “This is one skulk of foxes that still has its bite.”  Theater Pizzazz’s Michael Bracken dubbed the play a “paean to avarice thicker than blood” and labeled the production “a thrilling revival . . . under the expert direction of Daniel Sullivan.”  He called the alternating casting “Gimmicky,” adding “but it works.”  Bracken concluded that “Daniel Sullivan’s direction brings it all together, with meticulous attention paid to detail for a very satisfying whole.”

Elyse Sommer characterized Little Foxes as “an old-fashioned, smartly scripted and structured melodrama” and an “uber-dysfunctional family drama” on CurtainUp.  Sommer affirmed that “Daniel Sullivan has assembled a fine group of actors” and that “Scott Pask’s opulent set is . . . something of a character in its own right.”  On Stage Buddy, Emily Gawlak characterized Little Foxes as “a play that marries the stylized drama of southern gothic with the wit of a comedy-of-manners.”  She asserted that “it’s easy to sink into the play, which, though two and a half hours long, passes swiftly over sharp dialogue and growing intrigue” and that director Sullivan “commands a fluid ensemble performance, stretching great drama out of heated arguments and pregnant pauses alike.”  Gawlak complained, however, that “it feels like a stretch to call show timely.  On the contrary, it feels a bit antiquated.”  Our stage buddy summed up with: “In 2017, The Little Foxes feels a little bit like elderberry wine and tea cakes in the afternoon—a superfluous indulgence, but an intoxicating, transportive treat, nonetheless.” 

New York Theatre Guide’s Tulis McCall dubbed the MTC revival a “delicious production” in which “intrigue is presented like so many layers of a French pastry.”  Director Sullivan had staged the production “with style and precision” resulting in “a crisp evening of deceit and calculation.”  The cast is a company of “very fine” actors, and the “result is an ensemble that is having a devilishly good time.”   The NYTG reviewer reported, “Everyone is up to something, and you don’t want to take your eyes off any of them for a second,” concluding that there are “more than a few reasons to catch this show.”  On Broadway News, a new site I’m adding because the reviewer is a familiar name whose voice has been absent from the critical scene for some months, Christopher Isherwood (late of the New York Times) called the MTC production of Little Foxes a “succulent new Broadway revival” that “cannot erase its tints of both moralizing and melodrama.”  He added, though, that “it proves once again that Hellman’s 1939 drama is also redoubtably enduring entertainment, a theatrically effective indictment of human greed and its destructive power.”  With the double casting, Isherwood asserted, “both actors give rewarding performances in both roles,” and furthermore, “Sullivan’s production has been cast in such depth that even the formidable leading ladies, each worth watching in pretty much anything, are by no means the whole show.”  This “crackerjack production shines with professional polish and acting of sharp intelligence and theatrical acuity.”  The Broadway Newsman observed that Little Foxes “probably does not rank among the greatest of American plays.  But with its vivid portrait of a family trampling all over good manners and upright morals in order to maximize their, er, net worth, it might be seen as a play peculiarly suited to the current national moment.”  (I wonder whom he’s thinking about . . . .) 

On WNYC radio, Jennifer Vanasco pronounced Daniel Sullivan’s production of Little Foxes “thrilling” and said she was “struck . . . hardest [by] how rounded these characters are.”  Vanasco characterized the Little Foxes as “a compelling play about power and its abuses” and concluded, “This is one you shouldn’t miss.”  Robert Kahn and Dave Quinn of WNBC, the television network outlet in New York City, labeled the MTC revival as a “powerful and chilling interpretation” of Hellman’s “Southern family drama” in “Sullivan’s exciting staging.”  The reviewers felt, “Both [actresses] prove to be equally effective in either role—a sign of each actress’ talent and the production’s overall perfection.”  They reserved praise, too, for the rest of the ensemble.  (I usually include the cable news station NY1 in my survey, but David Cote is a stringer for the channel and his television review is essentially the same as his TONY notice, cited above.)

(I didn’t report all the comments of the reviewers concerning the double casting of Linney and Nixon.  Nearly all the writers agreed that it’s an interesting gambit, and most in my survey found that the better pairing is Linney as Regina and Nixon as Birdie—but the difference is small and all the reviewers acknowledged that if a theatergoer can’t see both variations, seeing either one would be more than satisfying.)