Theater: Ethel Barrymore / 243 West 47th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Arthur Miller's Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Death of a Salesman, in a new production directed by eight-time Tony Award® winner Mike Nichols and starring Academy Award® winner Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, Obie Award winner Linda Emond as Linda Loman and Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, The Amazing Spider-Man), making his Broadway debut as Biff Loman.
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March 15, 2012: The curtain rises, and the floodgates open. How could it be otherwise? Because suddenly it’s all there before you: that set, that music and, above all, that immortal silhouette — the shadowed figure of a stooped man with sample cases, heavy enough to contain a lifetime’s disappointments.
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March 15, 2012: Attention simply must be paid to a 65-year-old play that can keep a Broadway audience spellbound for almost three hours. It's been 13 years since Arthur Miller's 1949 masterwork was seen on the Rialto, so Gotham was primed for this revival, masterfully helmed by Mike Nichols and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Miller's all-American fall guy, Willy Loman. While "Death of a Salesman" remains the definitive fathers-and-sons drama, its social themes are universal and painfully timely, especially in this powerful, compassionate take. So can we just call this the greatest American play ever written and be done with it?
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March 15, 2012: Elia Kazan is reputed to have said that 90 percent of directing is casting, and the other 10 percent is fixing the mistakes made in casting. I don’t know if Mike Nichols subscribes to that theory, but inappropriate casting has blown a hole in his loving revival of Arthur Miller’s classic drama “Death of a Salesman” (originally helmed, of course, by Kazan, in 1949). It’s not that rising film star Andrew Garfield lacks theater chops; it’s clear from his earnest performance that he can hold a stage. What the exceedingly youthful 28-year-old can’t do, alas, is bring the requisite dried-up boyishness to 34-year-old Biff Loman, the rebellious elder son of the title character. Garfield is much more convincing as a 17-year-old in the play’s many flashbacks. In the present he barely seems to have aged, and Biff’s disillusionment comes off as whiny self-pity. As the character is the work’s antagonist, this affects all the main players. Without a compelling Biff, you haven’t got a show, and though Miller’s masterwork still has power, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre that power is diluted.
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March 15, 2012: Let's get this out of the way at the top. Philip Seymour Hoffman is too young and soft to be the standard-issue iconic Willy Loman chiseled on the Mount Rushmore of American drama. Andrew Garfield seems too delicate and sensitive to be the Biff we know as the curdled former high-school quarterback and big Willy's golden-boy son.
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March 15, 2012: The Great Recession is the unbilled star of Mike Nichols’ Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — the scene-stealing specter, invisible but ever-present, that gives the production its ferocious relevance more than 60 years after the play’s birth.
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