Did Critics Feel the Love for Everythings Turning Into Beautiful?

Music is the food of love in Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's new play, Everythings Turning Into Beautiful. With songs by Jimmie James, the two-hander about lonely musician friends in a Chelsea apartment on Christmas Eve stars Daphne Rubin-Vega Rent and Malik Yoba. Did their soul-searching songs make New York critics swoon?

Here's a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's searching, would-be soulful, insistently average new play….strikes many authentically wrenching chords—the painful material and social tradeoffs of the artist's life, the cross-purposes of men and women in sex and in love, the music industry's infamous obsession with youth—but it mostly vamps on them rather than developing a theme. It comes off as a kind of late-night jam session of the heart, but with two players who are having an emotional off-night….While the conspicuous lack of amplification is welcome in Theatre Row's intimate Acorn Theatre, it's hard to get much of a kick, let alone a point, from Jimmie James' wispy coffeehouse songs, particularly in the diffident performances offered by Rubin-Vega and Yoba. And while it's entirely credible that these two musicians would communicate this way, even or perhaps especially in moments of emotional extremity, not very much is communicated by James' lyrics, which run the gamut from laconic to opaque."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "Directed by Carl Forsman, Everythings Turning Into Beautiful is obviously intended to progress from the chill of wintry loneliness to the heat of eroticism and confrontation, as its characters shed illusions, inhibitions and clothes. But it remains stolidly at that tepid level that cookbooks mean by room temperature.... Within a framework of seemingly banal post-coital conversation, Mr. McNally managed to create affectingly real and distinctive portraits of ordinary people who have always seen themselves as losers. Though Mr. Rosenfeld clearly sets out the biographical differences between Sam and Brenda, much of what they say is interchangeable, in a pattern of emotional attack and retreat that has the rhythmic redundancy of a two-chord guitar riff…. For all the talk about honesty and sigh authenticity in achieving sigh intimacy, what these characters say usually sounds as if it comes not from the heart, or even the head, but the well-oiled tongue. 'Sometimes I just say things,' Sam admits. 'They sound good.' It is one of the few confessions in the play that feels unconditionally true."

Frank Scheck of The New York Post: "Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's play has the feel of a watered-down Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune…. Although these two fragile souls are appealingly rendered by the likable performers, the play doesn't really succeed in making their reconnection particularly interesting. Rosenfeld's mundane dialogue lacks the depth or poetry that would elevate the proceedings above the banal…. It's only when the performers deliver ragged but sweet renditions of several songs written especially for the play by downtown singer/songwriter Jimmie James that the evening takes flight. Performing a sexy number that shows off her sultry vocalizing, Rubin-Vega effectively reminds us of the talent that was so blazingly prominent in the original production of Rent."

Joe Dziemianowicz of The New York Daily News: "It sounds better than it is, though the cast does its best. The apostrophe in the title has been left off for flava's sake, but Rosenfeld no doubt didn't mean to leave out all sense of authenticity. But he has. The result may be Beautiful, but it isn't pretty."

Marilyn Stasio of Variety: "Although it's always helpful to have a plot to hang your hat on, when it comes to two-character plays, charisma can count more. Thanks to the chemistry between Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba, the charisma quotient is off the charts…. Credit scribe Rosenfeld The Writing on the Wall for finding just the right level of emotional neediness to make these characters quirky and vulnerable without turning them into freaks or losers. Their songwriting efforts may not have won this team any Grammys, but it's apparent from the comfortable way they play off one another that Brenda Rubin-Vega and Sam Yoba have earned their professional chops."

Linda Winer of Newsday: Every once in a while, mainly during one of the hauntingly melancholic songs by Jimmie James, these people rise above the banality of Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's two-character play-with-music to suggest the artistic soul that, presumably, binds them. For the most part, however, the modern romance offered by the New Group is a dreary affair, one that makes us appreciate the subtle manipulation in the similar lonely coupling of Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune…. Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi in Rent, and former New York Undercover star Yoba are pleasantly uninhibited, delivering the laughable psychobabble about fear of commitment and success as if they were sharing profundities. Carl Forsman directs the gaps between talk and music with more grace than the dialogue deserves. All the bluesy poetry in James' music, however, cannot drown out such creaky structural transitions as 'Do you want to hear my song?'"