Did the Critics Celebrate Festen on Broadway?

The stage adaptation of Festen, Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme film, received such rave reviews in London, a Broadway transfer was thought inevitable. Now the piece, directed by Rufus Norris, has indeed moved to the Great White Way, where it opened at the Music Box Theatre on April 9. American actors Larry Bryggman, Michael Hayden, Ali MacGraw, Julianna Margulies and Jeremy Sisto headline the mounting. Did critics think the production was something to celebrate?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "Following the rise and fall of a family birthday gathering for a well-to-do but clay-footed patriarch, the play unfolds its primal tale of generational conflict in such a ritualistic and hypnotic way that it wouldn't be at all surprising to learn it had been adapted from a Greek tragedy, a Jacobean thriller, even a lesser-known Strindberg play… Through it all Hayden, as a wronged son seeking something tougher and purer than revenge, gives the season's most riveting performance, seething quietly, boiling over, then reaching a kind of tragic peace. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems only fitting to notice, with Easter around the corner, that one reason Festen gets such an extraordinary, almost subconscious grip on our imagination is that it's a death-and-transfiguration story. And by play's end, the tomb is empty."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "In appearance, the Broadway Festen is as unnervingly stark as it ever was. But its darkness is not the same irresistible force. How could it be when the characters onstage are no longer in thrall to it? Embodied by an eclectic roster of the famous and demifamous… the unhappy family of Festen now registers the approximate tension and testiness of vain people suffering from a collective bad-hair day. It's as if some well-meaning, misguided grown-up had walked in and switched on the lights in a blacked-out nursery that had been set up, with considerable care, as a spookhouse… The painful uneasiness of the cast members here seems to emanate less from their characters' awareness that something's rotten in this home in Denmark than from the sense of performers adrift in uncharted seas."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "Norris, the original London director, and his mostly excellent New York cast do the best they can, and in the second act the play does work up a powerful head of steam. Bryggman, looking like a small rodent at bay, is superb as Helge, and Hayden's whistle-blowing Christian, who may not be blowing the right whistle, seems both determined and disturbed. As his sister, Julianna Margulies best known for TV's ER takes the play's high point and delivers it in a marvelously emotional torrent. The rest of the cast is generally fine."

David Rooney of Variety: "At almost every point through the production, tension is diffused by actors either lobbying too blatantly for laughs or simply showing an awkward disconnect from the material… The master stroke of Norris' production is that as the truth becomes increasingly impossible to ignore with each fresh revelation, the regimented tableaux of his staging slowly dissolve into twisted disorder… But there are crucial holes in the cast that sink the production. Sisto is too manic, too untethered from his first moment onstage, apparently still in character from Six Feet Under and off his meds. In a Broadway debut that's inauspicious to say the least, MacGraw is insufficiently skilled to channel her stiffness into the character's artificial poise and deep denial. Else has only one important speech, but it's painful. The most debilitating weakness, however, is Bryggman."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Festen has opened in New York carrying a suitcase full of good reviews from London, so expectations were high. Yet its homegrown cast... proves to be a handicap. They bring a variety of open, all-American acting styles and in the case of MacGraw, not much nuance at all to a parade of Scandinavian characters who are pencil-thin in depth. Only Hayden, as the deeply troubled Christian, manages to make something out of the meager details that Eldridge's script provides… Curiously, there seems to be more vitality in some of the play's smallest supporting roles, particularly the servants, portrayed by Stephen Kunken, Diane Davis and C.J. Wilson, than in the major players."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "This is the same stunning and moody production that Rufus Norris directed at London's Almeida Theatre, recast with a large, wildly eclectic company of American actors—most surprisingly, Ali MacGraw—with a dark, wildly stylized American feel… One need not have seen a single frame of the film called The Celebration in this country to appreciate the engrossing, aching, classic-Greek inevitability of the family dynamics."