THE RIVER : Official Reviews ( SPOILERS!)

[jo]

Here's the blogger's full review, Hughmanity

Review: An Evening on “The River”
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By Steven Biscotti on November 30, 2014 Reviews, Theater

Review: An Evening on "The River" The River. A remote fishing cabin. A man, a woman, and a moonless night. This is how Jez Butterworth’s new play is promoted. Is it a ghost story? Maybe a mystery? “The River” is intimately a touch of both and is 85 minutes more revealing and prophetic than most of Broadway’s current offerings. It stars Hugh Jackman, Cush Jumbo, and Laura Donnelly and is playing in “Broadway’s most intimate theater”, Circle in the Square.

Jez Butterworth’s “The River” is a story of a man, a woman, and a moonless night. The man takes his new girlfriend (Cush Jumbo) to a cabin located between St. Crispin’s and the Long Pool, a remote area in England. He’s an avid fly fisherman and on one August night he plans a special evening of trout fishing for the two of them. Longing for the passion and rush that comes from catching fish as opposed to sharing a magical moment of watching the sunset with her, they head out to the stream, and return for a night that will change them forever. “The River” is one of, if not the most, enigmatic and mysteriously written and staged of shows. The hook of Butterworth’s play simply cannot be revealed as the whole show would come undone.

“The River” was first produced by the Royal Court, London at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, from October 18, 2012 to November 17, 2012. The North American production, directed by original show helmer, Ian Rickson started previews on October 31st and opened November 16th of this year. On this Saturday afternoon and over 30 performances since its debut, this “River” crackled and sparkled in silent theater of 650 attendees. “The River” is as intimate and direct as its 45 page play and is only aided by its narrow in-the-round stage that allows all patrons to be a part of the show. It’s easily one of the best productions of the year and is a teasingly sensual and dark performance with a magnetic appeal. Due in large to the fact that Hugh Jackman is back on Broadway, the new play by Jez Butterworth is sure to excite fans. Yet it must be cautioned that the man Mr. Jackman plays is far from his heroic turn as Wolverine or the flamboyantly entertaining Peter Allen. The Man is a hauntingly crafted and intriguing character played with amazing nuance by Jackman. It’s his attention to the technical theater taught skill of an actor that draws the audience in with his charming smile and masculine appeal. But it’s his terrific instinct as an actor that creates a strangely poetic man that we immediately recognize from scene one. We feel safe with him and if given the opportunity to go trout-fishing, we’d most surely go. But it is on the river that we learn that every man and woman must face their reflection of who they are and who they’ll be.

“The River” is a beautiful production and poignant reflection of all of us. Butterworth explores the themes of love gained, love lost, and of love recaptured. He adeptly crafts a story that operates at a smart level; that never dumbs itself down for the audience. Much like an elusive fish that slips away far too quickly after being caught, the truth being told through Jackman, Cush Jumbo, and Laura Donnelly’s performances are a rarity. “The River” is so much more than the reflection of a remote fishing cabin, a man, a woman, and a moonless night. Just as Donnelly’s character, The Other Woman says “I wonder what else this water has reflected.”

“The River” gets five out of five stars. And not just for the much talked about scene where The Man (Hugh Jackman) prepares, cooks, and serves a real trout with fennel, lemons, and leeks. After the show Mr. Jackman, ever gracious, took to the diverse crowd engaging with New York natives, two women from Brazil, and an extremely energetic group of people. Then there was the auction to raise money for the terrific non-profit AIDS fund-raising and grant making organization Broadway Cares that included his performance worn t-shirt, his socks and towel; ending with him volunteering everything but his pants, Jackman was able to raise a little more than $10,000 from the audience. Thanking the audience, Jackman wished everyone a happy thanksgiving and then walked off, leaving the 650 group of people in warm spirits.

The River is playing now until February 8, 2015.

[jo]

What did I appreciate for the first time today --

When Hugh was delivering the third century poem about fishing, I was taken out of the set of The River and was totally imagining how Hugh would be good in a classical play. I loved how he delivered his lines, as if he were speaking the Bard's language!

Also, I am more convinced now that the most important line from the play on the overall is "But we are not really sure what love is!"

Jo

[hughmanity]

Thanks, Jo!  I'll work on my technical skills!  

[jo]

Newsday's quote is quite descriptive of the play, although it suggests more of the romantic angle without the introspection of The Man.

[jo]

Chris Jones of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, who wrote a very insightful review on THE RIVER, once again lauds the play in his list of 2014 best Broadway plays --

www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/broadway/sc-best-broadway-shows-2014-column.html#page=1

Best of Broadway 2014: A year to trust the paying customers

Chris Jones

Chicago Tribune

cjones5​@chicagotribune.com
Follow Chris Jones


December 11, 2014, 11:52 AM


Here's one striking truth about Broadway in 2014: There was an unusually rich correlation between quality and commercial success. This runs counter to a lot of the things often said about Broadway audiences. They're fickle, we're told. They won't pony up their money without a star on the marquee, it is declared, and not without great reviews and a familiar title above the door. But in 2014, the paying customers of the Great White Way ignored many of those rules, much of the time...



And then there was Hugh Jackman, who lent his heft to the beautiful Jez Butterworth play "The River," an oblique study of relationships and existential anguish that confounded critics a lot more than audiences, many of whom immediately grasped that the play is about entering into a relationship and realizing you will always have competition. Sure, Jackman is the bait. But the play is the hook....




Sometimes it takes the people a while, but they're normally to be trusted. Unlike a certain Wall Street Journal reviewer who recently and incredibly trumpeted her love of walking out at intermission on her freebies, they're the ones voting with hard-earned cash. They're the ones with skin in the Broadway game.

[jo]

From THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE --

www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/a-man-and-a-woman-are-one-a-man-a-woman-and-a-sea-trout-are-one/

A Man and a Woman Are One. A Man a Woman and a Sea Trout Are One.

By Noah Millman • December 15, 2014, 8:57 PM




You know those guys? The ones who point out that if you take the twist ending of “The Sixth Sense” seriously, then the entire film that went before makes no sense (particularly the behavior of the mother)? The ones who say they were kind of annoyed rather than thrilled by “The Usual Suspects” because Verbal’s “con” makes no sense (starting with the fact that his “short con” is never convincing, and proceeding to the fact that at the end of the film the cops have his picture). These stories don’t have integrity, these guys will say; they are a con of the audience, who are tricked into believing they are involved in a story only to discover that the author views “story” as just a higher form of audience manipulation.

I’m one of those guys.

I understand the opposing perspective. These stories are about revealing that story is a form of manipulation; about exposing the mendacity inherent in story construction because that process is a process of seduction, and seduction is, inherently, about lies, about deception.

But see, I’m just not that cynical. I think there’s nothing so seductive as truth, because there’s nothing so seductive as vulnerability. That vulnerability may be withdrawn – and hearts may be broken in consequence. But the fellows who set out to be stone-cold seducers, who think they have “game” – even a very sophisticated version of it – probably come off as creeps more than not.

Which brings me to Jez Butterworth’s latest play, The River, now on Broadway at Circle in the Square, starring Hugh Jackman as “The Man” (yes, “The Man”) and Cush Jumbo and Laura Donnelly as, respectively, “The Woman” and “The Other Woman.”

I can’t actually talk any further about this play without spoiling it utterly – that’s the problem with writing about these bits of twisty business. But the thing is: I really do believe that if the play or movie or novel doesn’t work once you know the twist, then it’s an inferior work. “Fight Club,” for example, is an exception to my rule of not liking these kinds of twists, because the movie is even better on second viewing. But even so, there’s still some value to not knowing the first time, so you can have that experience of revelation. So if you plan to see The River, and don’t want the experience spoiled, you might want to stop reading this write-up now.

The play is set entirely in a fishing cabin where The Man has brought The Woman for a special weekend. This is a moonless night in August, after a rain, and the sea trout are running. There will never be a better night (so he says) for landing these peripatetic princes in the midst of their migration from river to sea and back. And she has been chosen especially to share this experience with him.

Except, she hasn’t. He’s done this before, with the Other Woman, who makes her appearance about fifteen minutes into the play, taking over for The Woman whom we met initially.

There’s no indication that we’ve moved backward or forward in time, so at first I wondered whether I was in a version of “That Obscure Object of Desire,” if these were supposed to represent one women, two women, all women – Woman with a capital “Wuh.” Certainly the lack of names encouraged such an interpretation. But they seemed like specific people with distinct personalities and histories – personalities that get teased out by Jackman’s Man, who is both a lyrical talker and a pretty darn good listener. He seems genuinely fascinated and delighted by their stories, and genuinely eager to tell them about – well, mostly about fish. Plus he can cook. (He prepares one of the trout on stage, gutting it and baking it with lemon on a bed of fennel and onion. His knife skills are more fluid than mine, I can tell you that much.) He is, in other words, a hell of a catch. Any woman would see that.

But (here’s the big spoiler) he’s not about to be caught. He’s the one fishing. He’s lured them here, made it seem that he really loved them, made them feel like they might love him. And all in order to . . .

Well, that’s the question we’re left with at the end. It’s all too much effort just for sex, and besides, he can only play this particular trick on a moonless night in August – i.e., once a year. Maybe that’s enough for a sea trout – but for Hugh Jackman? His parting words to The Woman throw her own words back at her – “I’m not sure I know what love is” – saying these are the only true words either of them have spoken the whole weekend. But if that’s true, then what exactly is he after?

Laura Donnelly’s Other Woman seems to think he’s looking for some kind of feminine perfection, or for an image of woman that he had and lost. Cush Jumbo seems more on her guard from start to finish, more aware of and more wary of both the games he might be playing and whatever the truth might turn out to be. She never really gives herself to him – and then he lets her go with that parting shot. So: did he catch her? What exactly is the game?

I don’t really know – which, personally, I found quite irritating. Even Jackman’s entirely convincing and beautifully restrained performance can’t cross that final rubicon, because there’s nothing on the other side, nothing for him to play. When he is wooing, he manages to be seductive while still conveying that nothing has really been revealed. When he is caught out on the myth of eternal recurrence that he’s enacting, he is suitably ashamed. But when he fires his parting shot, I honestly don’t know what it means – emotionally. He’s cold. But what is the source of the chill?

What with the no-names policy and the over-extended fishing metaphor, I sense that Butterworth is trying to say something essential about Man and Woman and their perennial dance in the moonless night. But I wound up feeling he was saying more about himself as a playwright, and his relationship with the audience.

And I don’t fancy myself a fish to be hooked.

Nonetheless - The River runs through February 8th at New York’s Circle in the Square theater.

[jo]

www.theaterscene.com/THERIVER.html

By David Schultz

What can the typical theatergoer expect when seeing the new play entitled The River ? That’s presuming one can snag a seat for this hotly desired play. It features actor Hugh Jackman in the lead role. Lets check off a few boxes and see what is in store. Vivid poetic riffs on fly-fishing. Check. Characters entitled “The Woman”, “The Man” and “The Other Woman”. Check. An atmospheric, cabin in the woods near a lake. Check. Vegetables sliced and diced, gutting a dead Fish, Cooking And Eating It. Check. A Mystery Wrapped Up In An Enigma. Check. A non-linear fragmented style of writing. Check.



I hope I haven’t lost you yet, but this new work by Jez Butterworth is all that and more. The Man, a sexy fisherman (vividly portrayed by Mr. Jackman), has brought a potential romantic partner AKA The Woman (Cush Jumbo) to his rustic cabin in the woods. It’s close to his boyhood lake and he has plans to share his fishing expertise with her, before he beds her down, natch. They flirt and have equally awkward moments, this being a first date, and not knowing where the evening may lead. The atmospheric lighting darkens and the scene shifts to the couple fishing in the midnight hour by the lake. Suddenly The Woman disappears and The Man desperate to locate her seems to have lost her in the rocky cliffs near the lake.




A scene shift, hours later, she reappears at the cabin with a huge trout under her arm. Unlikely it seems, this being her first attempt at fishing. So far the play has moved along in a slow, methodical manner. The Woman retires to the bedroom to shower and change clothes and shortly thereafter returns to the living room. But who enters the room? Why The Other Woman (Laura Donnelly), this is the same woman who just returned from the shower a moment ago. Or is it? The continuous repartee and relationship that has transpired in the previous scenes commences as if nothing has changed. The Man does not notice any difference between the two women. This female transference occurs throughout the play. Every few scenes the “Woman”, and her “Other” flip back and forth. Mr. Butterworth is up to something of course. For the savvy theatergoer it is easy to see where he is heading.

Both actresses bring distinctly different personalities to their roles, Ms. Jumbo essays a wide-eyed eagerness mixed with a sly undercurrent of playfulness. Ms. Donnelly displays a sad eyed wistfulness to her portrait. This is the same character, but it’s not, at the same time. This work is not unlike a Rorschach test for the audience. Who is who, and what seems to be occurring in real time at any given moment is up to question. The play moves slowly forward and perhaps backward in time simultaneously. The River is a tricky animal to discuss in full; least I divulge the enigma and mystery at its core. The aural soundscape

Windchimes, crickets, owls and nature sounds, mixed with lightly menacing soft winds, designed by Ian Dickinson and composer Stephen Warbeck add immeasurably to the production. Set designer Ultz works wonders with the tiny, catwalk plank of wood that serves as this cabin that juts out into the audience, dimly illuminated by Charles Balfour. Everyone onstage acquits themselves with a commitment to their character and emotional sense of unease. Mr. Jackman in particular underplays and creates a fully complex creation, with more than a hint of an emotionally destructive past. His portrait is also filled with mystery. Is he potentially violent? Was there an unspeakable moment in his past with “The Woman”, or “The Other Woman”? The play moves in fits and starts without giving any concrete answers. There are many moments of poetic musings on fishing…. Many moments. A heavy atmosphere of portentousness bogs down the production. There is a mesmerizing monologue spoken in reverent tones that details “The Man” describing his younger self fly fishing in the lake. It ends with a long fought battle catching a trout. He does, finally catch the Holy Grail in his fishing rod, but by some slip of fate loses it back to the lake. It swims away, from a near death experience. This in some way seems to be a metaphor for “The Man” in retrospect. The females, singular, plural, in his life seem to mirror this existential aspect of his adult life.

The last ten minutes of the play seem to reveal exactly what has been happening. But, in this dense and ultimately unsatisfying slog of a play, it still is up for interpretation. It would read better as a short story in “The New Yorker”. It’s much more interesting to think about in retrospect, thinking about the structure of the piece, the angst, the existentialism of the characters, the morphing of space and time. Maybe there is more to the play than I thought…. maybe not. Perhaps the Emperor has no clothes. One thing the play has going for it; in one word…. make it two. Hugh Jackman. If he were not starring in this meandering play, it would have had a very brief shelf life. Now that it is the hottest ticket on the boards for a straight play, it must say something. I just wish The River provided more to digest intellectually.

Circle in the Square
50th Street, West of Broadway
[phone]
85 min. No intermission
Extended through February 8th
$35-$175. Telecharge.com

[jo]

Mark Shenton, the UK critic and theatre blogger revisited THE RIVER --

Mark Shenton @shentonstage
· 3m 3 minutes ago
.@realhughjackman, @cushjumbo & @donnellylaura1 give THE RIVER a seamless flow of hyper-realism: they feel utterly truthful & real.



Mark Shenton @shentonstage
· 8m 8 minutes ago
THE RIVER proceeds as a series of encounters between a man and the women in his life; it plays with a sustained sense of hovering unease.



Mark Shenton @shentonstage
· 11m 11 minutes ago
Hugh Jackman (@realhughjackman) may be the draw for @theriverplay - he gets entrance applause - but @cushjumbo is the revelation.




Mark Shenton @shentonstage
· 13m 13 minutes ago
Just re-visited Jez Butterworth's THE RIVER (@theriverplay) on B'way - a play of deepening & engrossing mystery at the Circle in the Square.

[jo]

An interesting article on critics, focusing on Linda Winer of Newsday, posted on ATC --

www.clydefitchreport.com/2014/12/critical-i-linda-winer-newsday/

Critical I: Linda Winer, Newsday

Posted Dec 27 2014 by CFR Staff in Critical I, Featured

We live in a time when it is fashionable to debate the importance of cultural criticism. More and more, this debate involves dueling, inexact, contradictory versions of what criticism is; who is and is not a “critic”; who is or is not the audience for criticism; what is or is not proper critic(al) comportment.

We believe critics themselves must not be sidelined from this debate.
So we ask for their stories — and their views.

Our seventh interview in this series is with Linda Winer of Newsday.
(Which critic would you like to see profiled? Email us and let us know.)



Newsday’s Linda Winer.

Please provide a personal statement of +/-150 words beginning as follows: “Linda Winer is…”
Linda Winer is chief theater critic and arts columnist of Newsday, which she joined in 1987. She has taught critical writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts since 1992.

She also was the host of the “Women in Theatre” series on CUNY-TV from 2002 to 2007 and hosts its “Women in Theatre” DVD. She reviewed classical music, then was chief theater and dance critic of the Chicago Tribune from 1969 to 1980. She also covered the arts at the New York Daily News and USA Today. In 2013, she was named Distinguished Alumna by Northeastern Illinois University, where she delivered the commencement address.

She teaches frequently at the critics’ program at the Eugene O’Neill Center and has judged the Pulitzer Prize for drama nine times, four times as panel chair. She has been a vegetarian for most of her life and once lived happily with 18 cats. She is married to Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Martin Bernheimer, who covers New York music for the Financial Times. (There must be a sitcom in that.)

Which city do you live in? Where were you raised? Name your favorite place on Earth.
I live in Manhattan. I was born and raised in Chicago. I have two favorite places on earth — in the theater before a play begins and riding my favorite horse on the beach in St. Martin in the morning.

As a critic, name your main area of expertise? How did you acquire it?
My primary beat is theater, but my degree is in music. From 1968 to 1970, I had a Rockefeller Foundation grant for the training of music critics and, in 1970, was a fellow at the first dance-critic training program at the American Dance Festival. I’m not sure a real critic is created by lectures and classes. But it certainly helped to be at the right place in a time when journalism and culture were considered important — and to work closely with critics who did the job as well as I wish I could.

In which year was your first professional review published? What was the publication?
My first published review was in the Chicago Tribune in 1969.

Which areas of cultural criticism have you not covered but wish to try? Why?
I’ve covered just about every form of art and entertainment, but I’m still drawn to the time at Newsday — basically from Mapplethorpe through 9/11 — when I wrote columns about the politics of culture. I love context.

Can anyone be a critic? Why or why not?
Everyone can vote people off the island, so I guess that means everyone is a critic. This is positive. The more critical thinking we have in this complicated world, the better. To me, the definition of a good critic is a critic with an interesting mind. I do worry, however, about a society that, increasingly, seems to view expertise with suspicion.

Which living critics, in your own or other field(s) of expertise, do you admire? Why?
I guess it would be unseemly to list Martin Bernheimer.

Which dead critics, in your own or other fields(s) of expertise, do you admire? Why?
I miss Jack Kroll, whose weekly criticism in Newsweek invaluably put theater within a big picture without losing its deeply personal humanity. As far back as my early career in Chicago, I always looked forward to Walter Kerr’s theater columns in the Sunday Times. He could describe a performer he had seen the previous week with such exquisite detail that the image expanded into profound observations. And, of course, when I lose faith in my ability to see theater in fresh ways, I go back to Kenneth Tynan.

Name one review in which you were dead wrong, and why.
I was wrong when I initially dismissed Edward Albee’s The Goat; or Who Is Sylvia? as a highbrow barnyard joke. When I saw the play a second time and realized how badly I had blown it, I wrote a Sunday column which some brilliant headline writer titled “Now She Gets His Goat.”

Name a case in which most critics were wrong and you were right.
Oh, come on. My opinions clash so often with my colleagues that my husband sings “The cheese stands alone” to me over the newspapers at breakfast. (Yes, we still get five papers delivered to the door every morning. Someone has to keep print alive.)

If you weren’t a critic, what would you be? Why?
I was born wanting to be a veterinarian. These days, if you were to wake me up in the middle of the night and say I could be anything, I’d be an animal rights lawyer. I would be insufferable and very good.

What is very wrong with contemporary cultural criticism?
There isn’t enough of it. And most of us don’t get to write long enough these days to get beyond the winning/-losing, hit-/flop mentality that reduces the arts to ad blurbs and contests. Also, there isn’t enough diversity in the (employed and paid) voices. I was the only women working as a first-string theater critic at a major New York daily for far too many years. This is changing, but what took so long?

What is very right with contemporary cultural criticism?
Even as culture coverage disappears from publications around the country, passionate Internet coverage proves that people still care.

In no more than 150 words, review yourself as a critic.
I believe in the middle voice, even if raves and pans get more attention. And if a critic makes a fascinating event for 500 people into a boring report for 50,000 people, this is a crime against the art.

In up to 140 characters, please review yourself as a critic.
I don’t even know 140 characters.

In a haiku, please review yourself as a critic.
It is not the yes
It must be more than the no
It’s always the why

In five words, review the kind of person who’d ask you to review yourself in haiku.
By asking, you already know.

And this is how she reviewed THE RIVER --

'The River' review: A powerful, mysterious Hugh Jackman

Updated November 16, 2014 8:29 PM
By LINDA WINER [e-mail]


REVIEW

BOTTOM LINE: Mysterious drama, powerful Jackman.

WHEN/WHERE: Circle in the Square Theatre, 1633 Broadway, Manhattan


There is something poignant and daring about Hugh Jackman as he triumphantly challenges both his action-movie and flamboyant-Broadway fan bases in "The River."

This is Jez Butterworth's taut 85-minute mystery about a sensitive he-man who brings a woman -- or is it women? -- to his isolated cabin to fly fish on the one moonless night a year when the wild sea trout are running. The three-character drama is emotionally exposed and intensely inconclusive -- a poetic, lusty puzzle that rivets one moment, exasperates another, and is destined to keep theatergoers arguing about its meaning all the way home, if not all season.

It is delicately and passionately staged by Ian Rickson on a narrow runway that keeps the audience close enough to flinch as Jackman, called The Man in the program, guts a big fish and lavishes it with olive oil. The plot is a minefield of spoilers, twists and curves that are best left undisclosed here.

Suffice it to say that Jackman, with his feral-sweet face and biceps that appear to have their own biceps, makes us care about a seeker with romantic, mystical ideas about luring and hooking beautiful creatures and a man/nature bond that sets the bar awfully high for his relationships with women.

It is possible to bristle that Butterworth ("Jerusalem") thinks that women are interchangeable. It may be just as possible that, for all the quoting of Ted Hughes and ballad singing to W.B. Yeats, the British playwright could just be saying that dating gets disillusioning when you have to keep repeating the same stories to make women love you.

But let's not linger on this. On the very positive side, Butterfield creates women who, besides being gorgeous, are strong, independent and opinionated. Cush Jumbo, identified as The Woman, plays the quirky one who first claims she doesn't want to go fishing because the Virginia Woolf book she's reading "is just getting good." Laura Donnelly, the only remaining actor from the play's 2012 premiere in a 90-seat theater at London's Royal Court, actually plays ridiculously stoned without being ridiculous as the seemingly more conventional Other Woman. Not incidentally, much is made about the fish she brings home being female.

But truth is as slippery here as the first trout The Man almost caught in a life-changing moment when he was 7 (and presumably called The Boy). "Like catching a lightning bolt," is one of many ways he describes the thrill.

But what is real? Is anything ever not a lie? Butterfield writes profoundly about the feeling of love. His observations -- the water is "gin clear" -- transcend nature clichés and nature's cruelty lurks outside as well as in. Also, the theater configuration means we watch Jackman's butt at times when we would rather see his face. Or maybe that's just me.

[hughmanity]

An excerpt from a very "late to the game" review just published today
britishtheatre.com/review-the-river-circle-in-the-square-3stars/

His Wolverine fans will no doubt be delighted by the tight T-shirt he wears and the bulging muscles on display. But Jackman brings a cool intensity to everything he does here which brings to mind his work in the television series Corelli. He manages a level of mysterious non-engagement with the women in his life; yet, suggests, fundamentally, and perhaps deliberately jarringly, a hunger for company, for love, for ideal companionship. His recounting of the story of his father’s use of the shack is delicious – and ambiguous. Is he following his father’s footsteps or fishing in his own river?

His performance is taut, virile and full of unspoken menace. He keeps you guessing as to what is really going on – but it is never clear whether that is because of real skill or because what is really going on is unknown.

[jo]

Where did he understand that the older man in The Man's life was his father, and not his uncle?

[jo]

ravereviewsnyc.com/2015/01/21/the-river-and-its-loveshack/

The River (and its loveshack)

RaveReviewsNYC / 4 days ago


The River

Those of you who follow this blog know that I like to fish. So when I read that there was a fishing theme to this play I was predisposed to like it before I even sat down. I also like Hugh Jackman, whose larger than life presence and quiet demeanor hook you right into this intimate play, made even more so at the Circle in the Square Theater.

There’s a Man, two Women and a fish.The man has a cabin on a river that is a special place for him. It’s where as a young boy he caught his very first fish, only to lose it. The rush of excitement of catching this fish is a feeling that he tries to explain to the women he brings to the cabin. But now the cabin has become something more. It’s a place where the man brings girlfriends trying to recapture the rush he felt from his first love, before that too was lost.

The staging is clever. The Man is on stage with Woman #1. She goes to the back of the cabin to get something and another Woman comes back in her stead. It’s not a parallel universe as in Constellations, it’s a history that keeps repeating itself with different women. Can the man ever learn to enjoy what he has in hand or will he continue to fish for what has been lost? Jackman reels you in and you can sense his struggle as he tries to land the “big one”. LAR

Circle in the Square Theater: 1633 Broadway (at 50th Street)

Ticket price: $25-$175, most seats $95 (keep in mind that all seats in this theater are good)

Runs thru: February 8, 2015

Running time: 85 minutes

2.5 STAR 1 MONEY BAG

2.5 of 3 stars

[jo]

A blog on the show.


www.travelincousins.com/entertainment-reviews/hugh-jackman-in-the-river

Hugh Jackman in The River

1/29/2015




By Elisa Levine

The River is intense and well written with a superb trio of actors, including Hugh Jackman in his fourth Broadway production. Jackman, who last graced the New York theatre stage three years ago in Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway, returned to Circle in the Square this past November to portray a passionate trout fisherman in this psychological, dark, drama by Jez Butterworth, in a performance that is magnetic.

Originally debuting on the London stage in 2012, The River features Jackman along with two proficient and skilled actors from the London cast in this 90-minute production. Laura Donnelly and Cush Jumbo, give stunning performances exhibiting prowess for comedic and dramatic execution.



Butterworth, nominated for a Tony in 2011 for Jerusalem is successful in creating a three-character, somber story, powerfully captivating, drawing the viewer into the emotional depths of each person. He is adept at intertwining time and space to exhibit a relational pattern on the part of the Jackman character, who is psychologically tortured and stuck.

The story takes a number of twists and turns growing progressively more deep and morose and the author's use of repetition can at times be confusing, but overall, drives home the Fisherman's inability to let go and live in the present.

Director, Ian Rickman's use of dim lighting to cast a weighty mood and interjection of music to convey the evolving perceptions of the characters is very effective. Stage direction adds further to the poignant melancholy that eventually engulfs the characters.

In spite of the dynamic and haunting performances, and Jackman's ability to reflect a stoic and concealed sadness, the storyline leaves the viewer with a kind of vacuous uncertainty. The plot, which moves back and forth in time, leaves the audience questioning the true reason for the Fisherman's disconnect. However, this too is a rather brilliant technique as the reason for Jackman's character's profound anguish becomes discernible long after the play is over.



Waiting at the stage door for the cast to exit, audience members looked rather unsettled, with conversational chatter, attempting to make sense of the previous 90-minutes. There was an overwhelming sense that The River did not tie up the ending with a neat bow, but instead, left a cloud of ambiguity and confusion. All agreed, however, that it was riveting and worth seeing and the cast was superb. The River is a limited engagement in New York City, with its final performance on February 8th.

[jo]

I was reading VULTURE'S Jesse Green's very negative review of the revival of SUNSET BOULEVARD ( only extremely negative one, so far) and had wondered how he viewed THE RIVER. It seems we did not catch that one, but it is still online --

www.vulture.com/2014/11/theater-review-the-river.html

November 16, 2014 9:00 p.m.
Theater Review: Hugh Jackman’s Manly Charms Are on Display in the Haunting The River
By Jesse Green


What with The Last Ship, Disgraced, and seminude Bradley Cooper all on the boards this fall, Broadway is more testosterony than usual, full of scruff and blowtorches, beefcake and wife-beating. But nothing beats Jez Butterworth’s new play The River for manliness: It’s got Hugh Jackman, Wolverine himself, romancing some ladies and gutting a trout. Whether manliness is next to goodliness is a different question, one the play itself — riveting, troubling, thought-provoking, unsatisfying — struggles to embody and never really answers. 
Not that it needs to; the damn thing is already stuffed to the gills for most of its run, with even the $95 “riverbank” benches and the $30 standing room spots at capacity the night I attended. By and large, that’s a good thing, because Jackman, who alternates between camp and murk in his Broadway appearances, is nothing if not ambitious. In choosing to star in The River, a West End hit two years ago, he is promoting the work of a Major Serious Playwright, bringing it to an audience that might be just as happy if he brought them Moose Murders. So all credit to Jackman for making a difficult, highbrow work — the kind that namechecks Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and Yeats but does not name its characters — commercially viable.


I don’t mean that as backhanded praise; he’s also great in it. But his performance is almost beside the point. The experience of seeing The River is deeper and also more confusing than anything the actors do, even though it begins, on the August evening when the sea trout run in the river abutting a country cabin, like a Men Are from Mars rom-com. We meet The Man (Jackman) hurriedly gathering his fly-fishing gear while The Woman (Cush Jumbo), on her first country outing with him, tries to make him watch the sunset instead. There are misunderstandings, laughs, soulful stares. But just as we understand that the pair are at a hinge-point in their relationship, Butterworth makes his first unhinged move: The girlfriend is replaced by a different one, who picks up just where the last one left off. From here on, their stories will alternate, intersect, and possibly merge, with no signal from the performers or the playwright that anything non-naturalistic has happened. And so, as the onstage tale proceeds conventionally — nothing more threatening than a splinter happens in it — the story in the audience’s head gets very dark fast. Is The Other Woman (Laura Donnelly) a “real” other woman? Someone The Man dated previously? Or is she in fact a different incarnation of the same woman? (He tells each that she is the first he’s brought to the cabin.) Is she a ghost? A murder victim? Or, worse, an archetype?


Whatever else she is, she’s a brilliant playwriting trick, forcing the drama onto a second track within the viewer’s imagination, and imbuing every subsequent action with dread. The problem, for me at any rate, is that my imagination does not want to be the playwright. I understand that we are in the spooky territory of large existential failings, a territory that Butterworth, like a sadistic or negligent tourguide, enjoys abandoning us in. I found this thrilling in his previous Broadway play, Jerusalem, which was both pot-eyed and mythopoetic, as if Jack Nicholson had wandered into a William Blake watercolor. And Parlour Song, his Cheever-on-LSD tale of suburban adultery and despair, was sad and satisfying. The River shares with those plays its liminal surrealism and brawny stance: Butterworth’s characters aren’t petty victims; they are done in by only the very largest and most intractable human truths. But here you don’t know which truths to blame because so many are engaged, or at least suggested.


On the simplest level, The River dramatizes the question “How many women have you tried that line on?” On another, it’s a cautionary tale about the impossibility of “landing” one’s ideal mate. (The Man never catches a trout, either.) Butterworth also stirs even larger issues into the mix: Is every human expression, like an elaborate fly on a fisherman’s line, a trick and a lie? And isn’t the theater therefore a lie as well? When the action is done, The Man puts away his tools: the wineglasses and candles and other props with which he’s seduced the women, and us. There is always a next “performance.”


Well, life is overdetermined, and Butterworth seems content to let this psychosexual gloss on Groundhog Day be too. But the effect of letting The Man start over and over this way — an effect enhanced by Jackman’s sheer likability — is that he is never really called to account for whatever he did or did not do. He’s let off the hook, much as is the cocky protagonist of Jerusalem, who may be having sex with a 15-year-old girl. (He does get beat up for it, but not by the playwright.) Except as the cause of men’s dilemmas, Butterworth doesn’t seem to characterize women very well, which is not a negligible problem, no matter how harrowing the manly prose. Ted Hughes, indeed.


But, let’s face it, if you’re going to get gutted why not by the best? Jackman is no lightweight; he’s fully committed to the character’s unstable layering of charm and menace. Listening to The Woman read him a poem, he somehow causes his only-slightly-deflated action-hero body to betray the rapture of a little boy. Jumbo and Donnelly match him, moment by moment. (Jumbo, a Halle Berry beauty, is especially good at the girlish reflexes and subsequent self-critiques.) The direction by Ian Rickson and the scenic design by Ultz, which makes an advantage out of Circle in the Square’s awkward thrust, are unimprovable.


Still, I couldn’t help feeling that Butterworth, who says he had writer’s block trying to complete this play, never solved the problem of its intellectual bait-and-switch. There’s even a warning about it as you enter the theater: “Please note scent is used during this performance of The River.” Spoiler alert: It’s something fishy.

The River is at Circle in the Square through January 30.
*This article appears in the November 17, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

That seems like a fair review, even complimentary (even if somewhat dissatisfied to some degree), on the nature of the enigmatic play. Hugh gets passing marks, too.

Which is not the case with his review of Glenn's supposed " woeful" performance and a vicious critique of the music and libretto of SUNSET BOULEVARD!

I guess we do not have the same prism of appreciation -- he is a critic and I am just a member of the audience ( whose reactions will have more heft on the emotion side rather than the intellectual side ). But it is the lady who's paying


Jo

[jo]

I never saw this article on THE RIVER. Not all review... but more of impressions/behind-the-scenes look of the staging!
,,,

www.playbill.com/article/playbill-on-opening-night-the-river-is-a-puzzlement-com-335620

Opening Night

The River — Is a Puzzlement
By Harry Haun
Nov 17, 2014

A behind-the-scenes look at Jez Butterworth's new play The River starring Hugh Jackman, Cush Jumbo and Laura Donnelly.

Hugh Jackman in The River Richard Termine

Hugh Jackman Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

"I don't really understand this one," Jez Butterworth blithely confessed to press Nov. 16 right after his new play docked at Circle in the Square. The River runs through it, transforming the space into Circle in the Rectangle. A gangplank playing-area stretches across the center of the stage, surrounded on both sides by audiences, who, as barely lit by Charles Balfour, pass plausibly for rolling waves of black water.


The setting seems to be a fishing lodge deep in a very unspecified woods, and those "children of the night" — unsettling and uncitified animal sounds — are omnipresent, giving you something to think about when the actors slide into idle. (Thank you, Ian Dickinson, for the artful audio ambience; no sooner did the Tony Awards committee dump the Sound Design from its roster than you show up with a counterargument.)


Butterworth's previous Broadway beachhead, Jerusalem, another Royal Court transfer that settled into the Music Box, was also a wooded area — this one on the outskirts of Flintock, Wiltshire, England, where trailer-trash had pitched their tents and Winnebagoes — a modest roost ruled by an unruly, Tony-winning Mark Rylance.

"When we did Jerusalem," Butterworth recalled, "at the end of that, it felt like everything was dealt with in the room. This new play feels like you're going to have to take it home with you, and you're just going to have to deal with it on your own. "I sorta aspire to haunt in that kind of way where someone will come along, see this, maybe read about it and think about it in a way they can't ever square away."


The River is the only play Butterworth has written since Jerusalem four years ago, and he has no other on the horizon. This is not writer's block. This is Butterworth: "I only write plays when they have to happen. I can't choose to write one."

Wearing his signature hat (which Rylance was fast to emulate), the playwright likes the Broadway upgrade. Previously, he was presented Off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theatre Company, who did quite well with his Mojo, The Night Heron and Parlour Song. His sixth play, The Winterling from 2006, has yet to swim to these shores.



The casual observer or the uninitiated might think the cabin is rocking with a ménage a trois — but no such luck. Butterworth loves to fool around with time zones.


The favorite game going on with the press waiting to do their interviews was creating their own storyline to what happened on stage. You have centerstage The Man (well cast in tight jeans and Serious Acting Mode with Hugh Jackman), around whom swarm like dog-fighting planes, two women. The Playbill identifies Cush Jumbo as The Woman, but you know Hugh; she could be The Woman of The Moment. The Other Woman, Laura Donnelly, is identified as such, but she could just as easily be All The Other Women of The Moment. At any rate, there is a major emotional fallout about gold earrings and a scarlet dress that one of the above has left behind. Oy!


This is The New Hugh, without a song (or, some would argue, a character), but he acts his lines with shading and feeling. "There's far too few new plays being done on Broadway these days, and to be in something like Jez's new play is a thrill," he insisted. "It's a play about authenticity and being alive — truly alive — as an actor. What else do we want in life? What does anyone else want? To have a vehicle that's this beautifully written — with such wisdom and such heart — is really wonderful."


The playing area pleased him as well. "I've actually never done that kind of configuration before. There's an intimacy to it. There's something very egalitarian. Sometimes in the theatre, you know some people sitting way back there, and you feel it's a different experience for them, but I know in this space — whether it's the front row or the back row — everyone feels the same way. We all feel we're in this together." Lead producer Sonia Friedman curtseyed accordingly for finding the right spot. "We looked at a lot of theaters on Broadway — and the moment we walked in here, we knew this was the right space," she said. "Then, we re-configured it so that the seats were right on top of the stage. We even put in extra seats. It's very intimate."


Ian Rickson, who directed the original London production, seconded that motion: "I think it's a gentle, dark, soulful experience. How can you create a dynamic with an audience — with 700 people — that preserves that intimacy? There's something lovely about the busiest, most distractive, dynamic city in the world as a home for a play about presence and being there. Can you actually make contact? I love that idea.



Cush Jumbo Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

"I want the audience to have gone through something with this play. The River is really about reflection — where do they look at themselves, where do they think about their own losses and loves, and how challenging it is to be truly present?"
Before she became The Woman, Jumbo was Mark Antony to Harriet Walter's Brutus and Frances Barber's Julius Caesar in Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Warehouse all-female production that played to raves St. Ann's Warehouse last October.

"I feel so privileged that I was able to come with Julius Caesar and do that play in Brooklyn," said the actress. "It has been such a different experience in doing this play on Broadway. I was working with a lot of girls then, and now I'm working with a tiny cast. It's been utterly different, living in Brooklyn and living here."

here seems to be better. "People keep asking me, 'What is it like to have your Broadway debut?' "What is it like? What is it like?' Honestly, it feels like completely the right thing. Our director has made the experience so small and intimate and fun. We're like a family living away from home. The whole thing has been completely enjoyable and not stressful or nerve-racking or pressurized. It's just been fabulous."

As for her character's back-story (or even her front-story), "I didn't see the play in London at the Royal Court, which I think was good in the end. But I automatically thought she was a woman who had a sense of humor — very witty, very intelligent, but actually was a quite sensitive and vulnerable person — and perhaps did something back in London, maybe something where she was helping other people to complete things all the time and get things done but never for herself and was never really making enough time for herself and desperately wanted this real love for herself from somebody. And she found this guy who seems also to have that. "So she comes to this cabin with an open mind to come fishing, and she was kinda on a quest, on the lookout, searching for complete truth in her life, which she thinks is eroding, really. It's a play that can go in so many directions at any point."



Rest assured, The Other Woman has her side as well, and Donnelly treats it all as a multiple choice. "It's really up to me to decide," the actress contended. "It's not written into the play as such, so I just made my own decisions about things like what I think that she did for a living, where she has come from and all the things that have formed that she feels is right at this point in her life when we first meet her."

Laura Donnelly Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

The only original cast member, Donnelly, did her London fencing with Dominic West of "The Affair." So contrast, discuss. "They brought very different things. One of the wonderful things about Dominic is that he doesn't take himself seriously at all so he brings a real humor to everything he does. He's a lovely man to work with, a kind person. Hugh brings a sensitivity and a depth to it that I hadn't seen before. And he brings something new every single night so he keeps me on my toes, absolutely!"


The opening-night guest list seemed like it might have been drawn up by Jackman himself: Donna Karan and Russell James, Vogue's Anna Wintour, soccer's Gary Winston Lineker, Carol Kane (who's of "Gotham" and Tina Fey's new series), Ellen Burstyn (fresh from doing The Cherry Orchard at Actors' Studio "just for fun"), Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann, director Michael Longhurst and playwright Nick Payne (who are transplanting their hit London Constellations into MTC's Friedman Theatre Jan. 18), Ivanka Trump, director-choreographer Rob Ashford, Jerry Seinfeld and wife, director Matthew Warchus, Harvey Keitel and clan, Luke Evans, Zoe Wanamaker, Sally Field and Rob Howell.

Broadway's Tony-winning costumer Ann Roth, who missed the excellent "CBS Sunday Morning" segment that was done on her earlier in the day, lingered around with the press after the show so she could give her Hugh a huge hug. Catherine Martin went out of her way to meet Roth, a longtime idol. Martin has won four Oscars for designing costumes and sets for husband Baz Luhrman's films. The Luhrmans will be back in the spring to shoot a TV series that is set in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Roth found it was worth the wait. Hugh hugged her like a favorite grandmother!
The River, Starring Hugh Jackman, Opens on Broadway; Red Carpet Arrivals and Cast Party

The River...
The River, the new...
53 PHOTOS

How true -- the setting and sounds were very atmospheric. And because you can practically physically reach/touch the characters if you were seated on the "riverbank", it gave the audience a feeling of being fully enveloped in the night. As if you were watching through a window into the cabin where the characters expose their characters!


Very underrated play -- not explosive but more thoughtful and even enigmatic! Hugh seems to reach out to his dramatic training background when he exposes the character within The Man!


Jo

[jo]

More interesting than the review on VARIETY itself are these readers comments --

The review --

variety.com/2014/legit/reviews/the-river-review-hugh-jackman-broadway-1201357833/


And the reactions --

Sandra Patrice says:
November 23, 2014 at 2:13 pm

I am so sorry that the reviewer is clueless about the meaning of the play. It is quite beyond fishing and girlfriends, but you have to listen closely and have literary and spiritual touchstones to get it. Man represents all of us in search for meaning/ love/ redemption in life. The closest he gets is when he is 7 ( a number associated with the Divine) and let’s a silver sea trout escape. He searches for it but comes up with a stone that he keeps. The stone represents his heart and poor substitute for the fish, the way each Woman character represents the poor substitute of the unshown first girlfriend. The silver sea trout originally started as a brown spotted trout but is one if the few fish to seek deeper waters. It becomes transformed in Iceland and returns to the river and spawn and not die like the brown spotted trout when it spawns. Man, the name of the main character, is like that brown spotted trout, unable or unwilling see in the darkness or even his true reflection in water. He seems to be forever trapped in a cycle of his quest for Truth and Love, but still hoping, shown by Woman 3. Various spiritual symbolism can not be missed. The cooking of fish, that was “once real;” the reference of To a Lighthouse; the poem by Yeats; the mention of eternity, the red dress; the bird set free; the sunset; water; darkness; the priest knife.

It is really on great play, but unfortunately it’s meaning may be lost on viewers who are unwilling to or unused to seeking depth.

Sigma60 says:
November 19, 2014 at 3:31 pm

I found the play hauntingly memorable. As you get older, you tend to engage in similar patterns in affairs of the heart. Are you consciously or subconsciously trying to recreate a past experience, either accurately or as you prefer to remember it? When you are opening up to another, to what extent is it honesty or artifice? Are you revealing yourself in a certain way because that’s who you are, or because it has worked effectively with past partners? I kept thinking about this play long after it was over.