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This curious Peter Morgan play directed by Michael Grandage and adapted for an American audience after a successful run in London has a limited engagement at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on West 45th Street. Frost/Nixon originally premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in mid-August 2006, then moved to London's Gielgud Theatre three months later. Certainly the British audiences were keen to see how David Frost—who was already becoming a larger-than-life entertainment figure in the mid-1970s—managed to cleverly coax the most deceptive of 20th-century American presidents into revealing his innermost thoughts about Watergate. In 28 hours of interviews over a twelve-day period, Frost had tremendous difficulty in getting Nixon to speak in a straightforward and candid manner about the failures of his presidency until the final interview, and this play explores the tension and dynamics of those interviews. Yet on the New York stage, the parameters are rather different, and even augmented by an enormous backdrop of 36 vintage televisions that nicely frame the action on stage, somehow it's not entirely clear who the intended audience might be here. One assumes the Broadway audience will be captivated by Nixon's haunted mien, through exploring the agenbite of inwit plaguing Nixon in his post-White House years.
While one must resist easy attempts to compare the disarray of the late Nixon White House with the presidency's present incumbent, it's clear that Frost's failure in the bulk of the Nixon interviews to get the president to openly admit his errors has numerous parallels with the current soul-searching over manipulations of the press. In fact, there are so many parallels with the political state of the nation thirty years ago that it would seem Ron Howard's fervent desire to film Frost/Nixon makes good cinematic sense in the run-up to next year's election, despite the Weinstein company's current string of bad press as well as rumors that Warren Beatty turned down Howard for the role of Nixon. Frank Langella brilliantly captures the mood of a broken and lonely Nixon, eager to explicate his carefully-scripted and -edited story of the great successes of his presidency. Langella's gesticulations, verbal circumlocutions and rhetorical excesses indeed underscore how Nixon, in exile in San Clemente with Pat and with the bottle, keenly missed the spotlight to which he had grown so accustomed in his political life. Michael Sheen in the role of David Frost smartly evokes Frost's own successful transformation in shifting from entertainment figure (notably on Australian television) to political commentator with this expensive gamble in getting Nixon to speak in exchange for a hefty and (in this country) hitherto unheard of fee. Stephen Kunken puts in an admirable performance as Jim Reston, a bit of dynamic glue pushing the glib Frost politically left of center, while a few other figures—notably Stephen Rowe as Swifty Lazar and Mike Wallace—have cameos.
Tags:
bernard jacobs theatre, david frost, gielgud theatre, michael grandage, peter morgan, richard nixon, watergate
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Posted on 4/21/2007
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