Did Gabriel Byrne in Poet Touch Broadway Critics?

Gabriel Byrne has returned to Broadway in A Touch of the Poet, a lesser-known work from the Eugene O'Neill canon. The production, directed by Doug Hughes, opened its limited engagement at Studio 54 on December 8. Were critics touched by the staging?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "Scenes that might flow from reverie to revelation, particularly in the drawn-out second act, are instead prone to wobble. And certainly the play's final, transfiguring turn is more satisfying conceptually than emotionally. A Touch of the Poet may best be enjoyed as a sort of landlocked sea shanty--a well-told tall tale about a tarnished hero and the women who loved him too much."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "Mr. Hughes's production, a much-tightened version of the original script, begins with atmospheric promise. Santo Loquasto's bleak, cavernous set is an appropriate battlefield for O'Neill's titans of domestic discontent… Yet when the cast members arrive, they seem dwarfed by their surroundings… [Dearbhla] Molloy seems exceptionally hale and sane… [Emily] Bergl registers mostly as a pouty, petulant and thoroughly contemporary teenager… When the play moves from exposition to action, after the intermission, Mr. Byrne comes into his own, hitting the notes of agony and ecstatic illusion he sounded so penetratingly in the Broadway revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000… But as glorious as Mr. Byrne is in these scenes, a great Con-or to be exact, half a great Con-does not a great Poet make."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "A wild flash of acting and we're off to the races with a magnificent Gabriel Byrne very much in the saddle in Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet… The play really depends upon the actor playing Major Melody. From his first posturing and preening, all given the shrewd distancing of an alcoholic glaze, through to his final, bloody and vainglorious defeat, Byrne never puts a note in the wrong place, or casts a glance in the wrong direction. This is superb acting that represents Broadway at its rarely exalted best."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "Director Doug Hughes has led a splendid cast, headed by Gabriel Byrne, in a revival that makes the seldom-revived Poet seem one of O'Neill's richest and most satisfying plays… Byrne does an astonishing job of conveying Melody's vainglory without sacrificing our sympathy for him."

David Rooney of Variety: "Self-deception proves a cruelly corrosive state of mind in Gabriel Byrne's haunting interpretation of Cornelius Melody in Touch of the Poet. By the time Eugene O'Neill's slow-burning drama about the troubled union of the old world with the new has played out, the dreams of this deluded romantic have dissolved, reducing the prideful man to a ghoulish clown. While it feels initially as stodgy as the rhetoric-spouting, alcoholic windbag driving the action, this distinguished production builds into a commandingly theatrical experience as director Doug Hughes and his cast patiently uncover the play's majestic mournfulness."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "The cast, under Doug Hughes' reverent but spirited direction, ensures that the emotions and history binding these characters are as vivid as the dynamics threatening to tear them apart. Byrne's fully fleshed performance allows us to understand why the Melody women still harbor sympathy and affection for Cornelius. As faded rose Nora, Dearbhla Malloy gives us glowing proof of inner pluck, and guilt, that have survived years of repression. Emily Bergl reveals the tenderness underlying Sara's haughty, and heartily deserved, indignation."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "The drama--completed in 1942 but not staged until five years after the great playwright's death in 1953--is less a discovery than a long day's journey in a long hairshirt of a script. Despite Doug Hughes' conscientious and handsome production, we can feel the hard work from the start. Before Byrne finally enters as Con Melody, the grandiose owner of a shabby inn outside Boston in 1828, a clanking old machine of an exposition tells us everything Con's family did back in Ireland, and everything he did while drunk the previous night."