"Doubt" -- Ron on Broadway!!

[Duchess of Lashes]

[quote author=rducasey board=whoisyourfavoriteceleb thread=1131572717 post=1139613186[/quote]

Wow thanks for that info, Lori. Isn't that the date for the opening of Freedomland?[/quote]

Yes, February 17th - I would imagine he will be occupied elsewhere!

Speaking of Freedomland, though, I saw a very long trailer last night, one I haven't seen before, with 4 separate sightings of our Mr. Eldard. Although his role as Danny Martin may be relatively small and he doesn't get any major billing in this one, it definitely looks like he is going to be a definite scene stealer; the passion and fire, easily identifiable even in a short clip such as those shown in the trailer, is absolutely undeniable! Not generally my kind of movie, but I'll be there!

[Katryna]

mlm828 said:

Thanks very much for the info on Theater Talk. Unfortunately, my PBS station doesn't carry the program , so I hope you'll post a full report after it airs!

My PBS station doesn't carry it either. I am sure the people in the NYC area will see it, but I wonder if anyone else on the board has found out if their PBS station will definitely carry it. We need to have someone designated to give those of us who won't see it a full report!

[anna]

mlm828 said:

Thanks very much for the info on Theater Talk. Unfortunately, my PBS station doesn't carry the program , so I hope you'll post a full report after it airs!

You can get streaming audio and/or video of their programs from their website. You also can order tapes of episodes.

Last night, I watched an episode on-line. It was from last fall, and Cherry Jones and Brian O'Byrne (the former cast of Doubt) and John Patrick Shanley (the author) were interviewed. They talk a lot about their interpretations of the play. I highly recommend it. However, if you are going to see the play in the future, it might be best to wait until after you have seen it.

[bjobsessed]

anna said:

You can get streaming audio and/or video of their programs from their website. You also can order tapes of episodes.

Can you post the link, Anna? Thanks

[anna]

bjobsessed said:

anna said:

You can get streaming audio and/or video of their programs from their website. You also can order tapes of episodes.

Can you post the link, Anna? Thanks

This is the home page.

www.theatertalk.org/

The link to the streaming audio/video is in the bar at the left. The link to the page for ordering tapes is on one of the little boxes.

[bjobsessed]

anna said:

bjobsessed said:

Can you post the link, Anna? Thanks

This is the home page.

www.theatertalk.org/

The link to the streaming audio/video is in the bar at the left. The link to the page for ordering tapes is on one of the little boxes.

Thanks a lot Anna! The link is now safely bookmarked.

[bump]

This was posted by someone on a Broadway message board on Sunday:

"Ron Eldard stopped the applause at the curtain call (overwhelming applause, I might add) and thanked the audience for coming to the show during the blizzard. The cast then applauded the audience."

[anna]

Today's NYT review of Doubt:

A broad beam of light is disturbing the shadows of John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt, a Parable" at the Walter Kerr Theater. The mysteries of human behavior that until recently enshrouded this Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning drama seem somehow to have dissolved, like frost in the midday sun, leaving only glints of uncertainty. Now under most circumstances, additional illumination in a drama is as welcome as wintertime warmth. But when a play's title is aptly and unironically "Doubt," firm answers to troubling questions are not an unqualified blessing.

This surprising shift of interpretation comes with the arrival of three new cast members to Mr. Shanley's four-character play. Most notably, Sister Aloysius — the fierce, forbidding convent school principal first portrayed by Cherry Jones, who won a Tony for her performance — is now played by the sterling British actress Eileen Atkins. And Ron Eldard has replaced Brian F. O'Byrne as Father Flynn, the young priest whom Sister Aloysius suspects of molesting one of her students.

The delicate balance of power between priest and nun has shifted in ways that transform "Doubt" from an unsettling moral guessing game into a tidy topical detective story. Certainly, the production, directed by Doug Hughes, feels looser and funnier than it did when it opened on Broadway last year. (The audience with whom I recently saw the show laughed and applauded throughout as if they had been recruited for the studio taping of a sitcom.) But most of this drama's anxiety and urgency has evaporated.

Let it be said right away that a New York appearance by Dame Eileen — whose dry, commanding elegance was such an asset to the New York productions of "Indiscretions," "Vita and Virginia" and "The Unexpected Man" — automatically demands attention. And Mr. Eldard established himself as a stage actor of disarming complexity in the New York premiere of Neil LaBute's "Bash." The announcement that they would be succeeding Ms. Jones and Mr. O'Byrne brimmed with tantalizing promise.

Yet the subtlety I associate with both performers is rarely in evidence here. And somewhere along the way it occurred to me that, gender aside, the production might have been better off if each were playing the other's role. As it is, this latest version of "Doubt" underscores how much Ms. Jones and Mr. O'Byrne contributed to the play's aura of rich complexity.

Set in a parochial school in the Bronx in 1964, "Doubt" is shaped as a battle of wills between the severe, absolutist Sister Aloysius and the more doctrinally flexible Father Flynn, whose lyrical sermon on the subject of doubt begins the play. Ms. Jones played Sister Aloysius as someone who had made both an invincible fortress and intimidating weapon of her hard-won conviction. She moved through "Doubt" like a juggernaut.

Mr. O'Byrne's Father Flynn, on the other hand, exuded a melting, slightly neurotic charm that made you want to believe him, especially in the face of Sister Aloysius's unrelenting attack. Though one of the play's themes is the limitations of women's power in the Roman Catholic Church, traditional notions of masculine and feminine behavior were slyly reversed in these characters.

Dame Eileen's Sister Aloysius registers as roughly 10 years older than Ms. Jones's, and there is an attendant frailty about her. The emphatic cadences of Ms. Jones's delivery — which suggested that everything she said was read from stone tablets personally handed to her from Mount Sinai — have been replaced by a more excitable, wondering tone of voice. That Dame Eileen speaks in an Irish rather than a Bronx accent also has a softening effect. Unlike Ms. Jones, she creates a character whose belief in her own instincts is obviously not unconditional.

Not that she should mistrust herself, given Mr. Eldard's characterization. This Father Flynn is handsome, rangy, almost brutishly masculine, with a rigidly upright posture and a declamatory mode of speech that seem meant to intimidate and to conceal what lurks beneath the armor.

This rearrangement of yin and yang makes "Doubt" feel a bit like a comic thriller about a feisty little old lady out to trap a big bad wolf. Each snare that Sister Aloysius successfully lays for her prey draws the satisfied chuckles usually elicited by the deft administering of poetic justice.

The other new addition to the cast is Jena Malone, who slides effortlessly and appealingly into the part of the dewy, impressionable Sister James (first played by Heather Goldenhersh). Adriane Lenox, who won a Tony for best featured actress, remains as the mother of the boy who may or may not be the object of Father Flynn's more than fatherly attentions. Her character's scene with Sister Aloysius remains a subversive shocker, and one of the few moments that suggest the play's potential to disturb.

Otherwise, the honorable thing might be to change the title of this production, which originated at the Manhattan Theater Club, since surely no one wants to be guilty of false advertising. I would suggest "No Doubt," except that then theatergoers might think a rock concert was on offer. How about "Sister Aloysius and the Case of the Problem Priest"?

[anna]

I disagree with several of the critic's comments. In particular, Eileen Atkins was anything but frail - no way, no how. The fact that he would characterize her performance that way makes me question any other opinions that he offers. (Do I sound outraged? I am.)

I also find it interesting that, in some of the Broadway boards, audience members who saw both casts often say that O'Byrne's Flynn was angrier and more intimidating in his dealings with the nuns.

[anna]

And now, for another opinion -

Talkin'Broadway.com's review:

The poles may have shifted, but the magnetism hasn't. Taking on the most daunting challenge of recent Broadway seasons, Ron Eldard and Eileen Atkins have stepped into the lead roles in Doubt, John Patrick Shanley's thrilling (and now Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning) play at the Walter Kerr, and achieved the coup most of us didn't dare hope for.

As Father Flynn, a priest at St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, and Sister Aloysius, the school principal who believes (but can't prove) he's molested the school's lone black student, Eldard and Dame Eileen have successfully donned the most imposing vestments this side of the Vatican. The roles' originators, Brían F. O'Byrne and Cherry Jones, each gave the kind of once-in-a-lifetime performance that diligent theatregoers count themselves fortunate to see at all, but which seldom occur in the same show.

If you saw them, Eldard and Dame Eileen won't erase your memories of them. But they wisely don't try to. Instead, they approach the two diametrically opposed forces as entirely fresh creations, bound only by Shanley's infinitely layered script and Doug Hughes's superlative direction. The impact of the two roles on each other and on us has diminished little, if at all, yet the show is now entirely different.

Dame Eileen is over 20 years older than Jones and uses each of those extra years to further inform Sister Aloysius. She's now even more grounded, responding to each minor victory and setback in her quest to protect her students and her sisters with the devil-may-care certainty of one who's seen and stared down it all. Where Jones was stonily resolute and unyielding in posture and voice, Dame Eileen is a hawk: With pursed, beaklike lips and gently narrowed eyes, she surveys and instantly analyzes everything around her, responding with such habitual efficiency that when her countenance cracks it's a startling event.

This palpably heightens her contrast with Eldard, who reads younger and more personable than O'Byrne, and is thus a more formidable adversary. While O'Byrne brought to Father Flynn a mature seasoning, Eldard makes his youth and attractiveness - from his red-blond hair on down - integral to his portrayal. When he's conversing with his young male students about basketball, he relates to them on so knowing and intimate a level, there are times he truly seems one of them; you instantly understand, as you didn't with O'Byrne, the tools Father Flynn might use to draw boys into his clutches. (Assuming, of course, that's what happens.)

If Dame Eileen and Eldard occupy slightly different positions from their predecessors, the confrontations between their characters have lost none of their persuasiveness. This set-in-her-ways Sister Aloysius reacts with a horror at the length of Father Flynn's fingernails that would have been unthinkable when Jones played her. When he must stand up to her or sacrifice his career, he undergoes a number of split-second transformations from boy to man and back that underscore Father Flynn's uncertain adulthood (and uncertain guilt) in a ways the more aggressive O'Byrne didn't consider.

It's this attention to detail that continues to make Doubt such a gripping must-see. This meticulous rethinking of the characters from the roots upward, however, hasn't occurred with the action's crucial third participant, the torn-apart onlooker Sister James.

She's now played by Jena Malone, in a virtual carbon copy of originator Heather Goldenhersh's performance. But where Goldenhersh lived, anguished, in the crippling battlefield between Sister Aloysius's oppressive persecution and disgusting thoughts of Father Flynn's perpetrations, Malone views and comments on them as if standing behind a wall of soundproof glass. The depth of confliction, the implacable innocence of wanting to believe the best in everyone in a world in which evil people truly do exist, is conspicuously absent.

This gutting of the character guts the play: Sister James is a vital lynchpin for the story, our surrogate, who must choose - and live with the choice - we're able to safely observe from the audience. As Eldard and Dame Eileen demonstrate the value of new approaches, so does Malone detail the dangers of replicating, to a gesture, another actor's work. Everything that doesn't derive organically is false, and Malone's performance is thoroughly false.

To that end, I must applaud Caroline Stefanie Clay, who stepped in for an ill Adriane Lenox as the black student's mother at the performance I attended. Zaftig where Lenox is svelte, and broadening (though not too far) her capitulatory attitude toward her son's predicament into a brutalized but hopeful wife trying to make a better life for her son, she's a more-than-serviceable replacement. You don't get with Clay the full range of desperate colors you do with Lenox, and the mother's single scene becomes merely a stepping stone to the play's conclusion instead of the evening's devastating emotional climax.

But that doesn't prevent Doubt from playing superbly; it merely allows it to play differently. How refreshing that a show may morph and grow with its replacements, breathing and living anew with each successive iteration without a changing of the lines. That, as much as the text itself, brands the play as a redoubtable achievement of the contemporary American theatre, a play about the quest for truth that will always succeed when played truthfully.

Each new cast and generation of audiences will struggle to find their own answers to the show's mysteries, while pondering Shanley's timeless questions about right and wrong. The truth about Father Flynn we will likely never know. But the value of the search - and of Doubt - will only continue to grow.

[jimi]

Having also seen the Play I would have to agree much more with the reviewer from Broadway.com!!

The funny thing about the NYT review is that the critic seems to contradict themselves - they accuse Ron Eldard's Father Flynn of having a declaimatory mode of speech - Yet the reviewer themselves is so caught up in double talk and rhetoric - I can't even tell if he/she actually enjoyed the play!!!

In fact Ron's eloquent and persausive manner of speech is one of the many things that had me DOUBTING his guilt.

I can't speak for their take on Dame Atkins role as she was absent when I saw the show - her understudy went on for her instead - Elizabeth Davies if I remember correctly - she did wonderfully I might add.

No wonder so many performers don't read the reviews - the way people view things is so subjective - certainly not to be talken as Gospel - just because they happen to critique the arts for a living!!

[maggiethecat]

I gave up on Ben Brantley -- the current New York Times theater pundit -- ages ago. His reviews just make me long for the return of Frank Rich.

[Katryna]

More Doubt Links:

broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=7569

www.playbill.com/news/article/97970.html


There are pictures in the first two. There are more - lots more. Just google Doubt on Broadway. I hope these links work.

And a reminder about Ron's appearance on Tony Danza's show and ALSO on a morning news program on WB11

www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=7574

I had to modify this to take one of the links out - it didn't work. But here is a positive review in Long Island Newsday: I am not as adept as some of the other board members with transferring these articles. So I hope they work!


THEATER REVIEW
Still a thrill beyond a shadow of 'Doubt'


DOUBT.


By John Patrick Shanley, directed by Doug Hughes. Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Sunday matinee.


BY LINDA WINER
STAFF WRITER

February 15, 2006


"Doubt," which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and every critics' award within thrilling distance, remains as satisfying as it was 15 months ago when Manhattan Theatre Club unveiled the drama Off-Broadway.

John Patrick Shanley's 90-minute breakthrough still holds the stage with the fist-in-the-gut momentum its four characters nailed in its Broadway transfer last April.

If there were any uncertainty that this timely piece about the Catholic Church in 1964 could withstand the loss of its radiant original cast, that variable has been fixed in a different, but still riveting, firmament.

Eileen Atkins might seem a contrary choice to succeed Cherry Jones, the younger American treasure who first fleshed out the stern, unyielding outlines of Sister Aloysius. It should be no surprise, however, that this magnificent British actress would find her own dry, reedy, deliciously shrewd voice as the nun whose suspicions about a priest and a black boy drive Shanley's ambiguous questions in a Bronx convent and rectory.

Atkins is matched, tight fist and glove, by Ron Eldard as Father Flynn in the emotionally concise production directed by Doug Hughes. While the charismatic Brían F. O'Byrne made a slippery, charming maybe-monster in the role, Eldard brings the boyish, deceptively puppyish quality of an "Our Gang" kid who finds himself surprised to have grown up.

Beneath his playful dimples and jokey behavior, there is still a strength of self that understands how to use the indignities of the church's gender hierarchy to roil the nun's fierce moral compass. Atkins - with a long, bony finger and a pinched superiority - initially toys with the articulate wicked-witch potential in her character. But when she coils for the pounce, we are haunted by the mingling of dignity, ego and institutional impotence.

Jena Malone has much the same joyful childlike quality, mixed with reluctant disillusionment and humanity, that Heather Goldenhersh brought to Sister James, the young nun who doesn't know whether to trust what she observes. At Sunday's blizzard-bound matinee, Adriane Lenox, the only remaining member of the original quartet, was ably replaced by Caroline Stefanie Clay as the mother who knows too much to make easy judgments.

Is Sister Aloysius on a witch-hunt? Or is she a prophet before her time? Shanley, bless him, never tells.

[jimi]

Thanks for all those links Kathy!!

Its much appreciated : )

[anna]

kathy said:

And a reminder about Ron's appearance on Tony Danza's show and ALSO on a morning news program on WB11

Here is the link for the WB11 Morning News. Their schedule shows RE being on at 8:40 tomorrow. More importantly for most of us, they provide streaming video of some of their celebrity interviews, so we all may get to see it.

wb11.trb.com/news/local/morningnews/?track=nav