Tonys 2008: Does 'Rock 'n' Roll' really rock?
Last year, Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" won a record-breaking seven Tony Awards. On Sunday, his new play "Rock 'n' Roll" opened to generally good, if not always great, reviews. Can this exploration of the fall of Communism in Stoppard's native Czechoslovakia prevail come Tony time next June?
This season is shaping up to be a busy one for new plays, with three more set to open this month. Emmy-winning scribe Aaron Sorkin returns to the Rialto eighteen years after "A Few Good Men" with, appropriately enough, a play about the origins of television in "The Farnsworth Invention." Early buzz is not just great, but fantastic. And two years after a best-play nod for "Shining City," Irish playwright Conor McPherson is back with "The Seafarer" while actor-turned-writer Tracy Lett debuts with the acclaimed Chicago production of "August: Osage County." Perhaps Sir Tom will have to be content with the four Tonys already on his mantle.
Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News deftly describes the plot of Stoppard's three-hour epic. "He builds the story around Max (Brian Cox), a Cambridge University professor with unfailing faith in communism, and his protege, Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Czech student and rock fan who returns to Prague in 1968 when the Soviet tanks roll in. The story traces the next two decades, until the occupation ends." For Dziemianowicz, "Cox gives heart to his barking Communist, while Sinead Cusack brings high contrast to dual roles. She morphs from searing to soft as Max's strong-willed wife and then her own hippie-chick daughter. As Jan, who might be a stand-in for the Czech-born Stoppard, Sewell paints an aptly earnest portrait as a reluctantly political man who realizes you can't play an LP without causing a revolution."
Michael Kuchwara of the AP called the show, "splendid, illuminating entertainment, chock full of ideas and high-flying arguments (could there be a Stoppard play without them?) yet resonating with an emotion that springs from several fully developed characters." And he hailed the performances, noting that Sewell, who won an Olivier last year for this role, "flawlessly captures the man's journey from young idealist to weary, apparently beaten middle-aged man" and Cusack, "is extraordinary, tackling two roles."
Ben Brantley of the New York Times says, "Writing about the political and cultural legacy of the late 1960s in his own late 60s (Mr. Stoppard recently turned 70) has, for better or worse, exposed this playwright’s soft side — mostly for better. Mr. Stoppard treats the contentious, confused characters of 'Rock 'n' Roll' with a deep, protective affection I’ve never encountered from him before, even in the supposed self-portraiture of his 'Real Thing.'"
In his four-star review, Clive Barnes of the New York Post says the play, "is funny, enthralling and, yes, it offers you something to take out of the theater you didn't come in with. Just as 'The Coast of Utopia' took as its canvas a portrait of the 19th century seen through the camera lens of a group of Russian intellectuals, Stoppard has now focused the same lens, the same dramatic process, on his own time. And it's now even more sharply focused. The camera's eye is set on what might be thought the one virtually inexplicable event of the 20th century - that now hindsightedly inevitable collapse of communism. What went wrong? Or right?"
For Linda Winer of Newsday, "At its heady living-history best, 'Rock 'n' Roll' is a direct and worthy descendent of 'The Coast of Utopia,' the nine-hour epic about pre-revolutionary Russian idealism. And in the deepest moments, the new play touches the pop-music nerve pathways of 'The Real Thing,' Stoppard's 1982 masterwork about a disintegrating marriage. Yet for a work described as Stoppard's most personal, 'Rock 'n' Roll' feels strangely distant - as if, this time, his wit and ever-dazzling erudition actually are being used to throw us off the track more than they tempt us to follow him. We do, of course, because lesser Stoppard still is better than most plays written in the past 50 years. But the thrill is more like work this time."
And Peter Marks of the Washington Post thought, "Stoppard's buoyant imagination is invigorated here by tributaries of ideas about politics and art that flow into rivers of wisdom about the nature of revolution and the human craving for free expression. It is principally, however, through the moving struggle of one person, the Czech academic, played with endearing reserve by the captivating Rufus Sewell, that the dramatist gives 'Rock 'n' Roll' its fiercely beating heart."
David Rooney of Variety was the strongest dissenter. "Would that the intellectually overburdened play's journey, or those of its mostly unengaging characters, had half the humanity packed into Sewell's wonderful performance. "Rock 'n' Roll" commands admiration simply by virtue of being unafraid to make demands on its audience, and it has an affecting central figure in Jan. But in order to get to 90 minutes of reasonably satisfying emotional drama, it first force-feeds you another 90 minutes of stodgy political-science backgrounding, made more cumbersome by awkward cross-cutting between Cambridge and Prague."
