Every ticket for Julia Roberts on Broadway is sold out, so if you haven't got yours already, you probably won't get one. Rest assured that you will miss nothing.
Oscar-winner Roberts made her stage debut last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, in a 1997 play by Richard Greenberg called "Three Days of Rain."Verdict on Roberts: The star of "Pretty Woman" and "Erin Brockovich" and "Closer" is an appalling stage actress.
She registers a zero for stage presence. Her line readings ring consistently false. And she isn't even capable of doing a Southern accent (though she comes from the South). Verdict on the play: Pretty lousy.
Greenberg, the Tony-winning author of "Take Me Out" (the nude baseball play) may be the most overrated playwright on Broadway. The director is Joe Mantello, who won a Tony for directing "Take Me Out."Yet, of course, people are flocking to the Jacobs to see the movie star.
Interestingly, the audience at the last preview before the opening failed to give Roberts even the customary standing ovation. People are leaving the theater disappointed. This phenomenon causes us to ponder how someone who has achieved such dizzying heights of fame in the movies can be such a dud onstage.
Whenever she isn't speaking, Roberts simply disappears. Maybe it as to do with how small a performance must be to be captured by the camera. And how big a stage performance must be to register with the audience.
I didn't see the original production of this play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, but the dual role Roberts has now was played by Patricia Clarkson, an actress who started onstage and made a successful transition to the movies (and voice-overs for ubiquitous BMW commercials). Those who saw Clarkson said she was memorable.
Roberts appears with two male co-stars, Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper (of the movie "Wedding Crashers"). Rudd especially, who has a stage background, blows Roberts away whenever he shares the stage with her.
The play is a convoluted affair about two generations, both portrayed by the same three actors. Act One, set in 1995, deals with the aftermath of the death of a famous modern architect named Edmund Janeway.
In an abandoned downtown loft, the dead man's two children are reunited. The crazy brother Walker (Rudd) missed the funeral but is back for the reading of the will. His sister Nan (Roberts) is mad at him for disappearing.
Enter Pip (Cooper), the son of Janeway's business partner, Theodore Wexler, also dead. He is a handsome soap-opera star who seems free of the Janeway children's neurosis. He's in a perpetual good mood.
"Being in a good mood," he tells Walker, "is not the same thing as being a moron." (Greenberg does occasionally turn a phrase.) Reading an old journal of his father's, Walker thinks he has figured out the man who was so taciturn with his own children. The big issue in the will is who will inherit the two architects' masterpiece, a modernist house "in the desirable part of Long Island."
Act Two transports us to 1960. The two men plays their fathers, and Roberts plays Lina, the wild Southern dame who started out with Theo and wound up with Ned. Lina, Walker tells us early on, is "sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald's less stable sister." Hers is the craziness she passes on to Walker.
Roberts gets through the first act looking petulant. She misses the second-act characterization completely, failing to manufacture that Southern accent and not giving the slightest impression of an incipient madwoman. It's true that such a role isn't easy to do — the charming fruitcake can so easily turn into a bore — but Roberts never even comes near it.
The second act really centers on a misinterpretation of one phrase in Edmund Janeway's journal, which seemed to imply that Wexler was the creative genius of the team. In reality the phrase refers to the stolen girlfriend, a fact of which all the children were apparently ignorant. At least I think that's what it is about, for confusion seems to reign over the disgruntled audience. Greenberg seldom marries his verbal acuity to a truly decipherable plot.
Roberts isn't helped by costume designer Santo Loquasto, who keeps her buttoned-up in a raincoat for most of Act One, and dresses her in huge bell-bottom pants (unheard of in 1960) for Act Two. Loquasto also designed the loft, which looks just like the '80s loft in Lanford Wilson's "Burn This."It does rain real water, though, for what seems like three days. The people who sit in the first few rows come out all misty. But not for the right reasons.