‘Death of a Salesman’ Broadway Review: Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf Beg Us to Pay Attention

Father no longer knows best in the new revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” that opened Thursday at the Winter Garden Theatre.

The reference to that famous 1950s family sitcom applies here because, boy, are the performances big, broad and occasionally very funny. Led by Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, the ensemble in this Joe Mantello-directed production acts up a storm of category 6 proportions. There’s more acting going on at the Winter Garden than the rest of Broadway combined, and that includes “Oh, Mary!”

That very vivid approach to performance makes sense for Nathan Lane, who plays Willy Loman, the King Lear of the American theater. It’s an assignment that left the indefatigable Lee J. Cobb, who created the role, physically and emotionally exhausted, by his own admission. What immediately becomes apparent in this “Salesman” is that many of the other actors deliver performances just as big, if not even bigger, than Lane’s.

Scott Rudin, the show’s lead producer, gave us a “King Lear” starring Glenda Jackson. Watching Laurie Metcalf play Linda Loman, it’s apparent that she could play Willy — and probably wants to. Arthur Miller’s female roles tend to be reactive, and none is more reactive than Willy Loman’s wife. There’s almost nothing reactive or backseat about Metcalf. When Willy runs into trouble making sales, it’s surprising that this Mrs. Loman doesn’t take over his accounts and hit the road herself. Metcalf even gives herself a Lady Macbeth moment when Uncle Ben (Jonathan Cake, being one of the few reserved actors on stage) offers his brother a great job in Alaska. Metcalf drips venom to talk Willy out of a gig that could have averted his tragedy.

In the play’s epilogue, at Willy’s gravesite, Linda Loman tells us she “can’t cry.” Which is a shocker because Metcalf has had a hankie to her nose for the last 15 minutes.

She’s not the only one in competition with Lane. Playing Biff Loman, the much-favored son, Christopher Abbott delivers an 11th-hour sobbing meltdown that screams, “Please, give me a Tony nomination!” He might very well win the Tony, since those awards always favor the most acting over the best acting.

Abbott can’t deliver a sentence – no, make that a word — without puncturing it with a major hand gesture. His arms never stop waving. He’s reaching for Al Pacino but ends up being Sylvester Stallone.

What happens when Linda and Biff are bigger blowhards and glad-handers than Willy? Metcalf and Abbott’s performances are so over the top they rob Lane’s of any tragedy. Listening to this trio go after each other for nearly three hours, you just want them to shut up.

One of the creakier aspects of this Miller classic is the role of Happy Loman. Poor Happy. When he says he’s getting married, his parents tell him to go to bed. (Lane and Metcalf milk their back-to-back zingers to receive gales of laughter for their great comic timing.) The name Biff is repeated dozens of time, while Happy gets his mentioned only twice. This younger brother also calls himself Howard and Hap, both of which are huge improvements on Happy. Is that why Willy and Linda so aggressively ignore their second son? They don’t like his nickname? In a truly bizarre bit of casting, Ben Ahlers plays the shunted, stepped over, disregarded and totally unacknowledged Happy despite this actor looking like the lead singer for the world’s hottest new boy band. Ahlers manages to take inappropriate focus in other ways: He walks around bare-chested for the play’s first half-hour. It’s easy to tell who’s getting the most selfie requests at the Winter Garden stage door.

We’re told the Lomans are a family, but Lane & Co. don’t create one on stage. They’re physically unalike to the extreme. And why do Abbott and Ahlers speak with thick Brooklyn accents, and Lane and Metcalf do not?

In a recent New York Times interview, Joe Mantello discusses his major directorial flourish of having young doppelgängers for the characters Biff (Joaquin Consuelos), Happy (Jake Termine) and their friend Bernard (Karl Green and Michael Benjamin Washington). Both Mantello and the Times reporter treat this double-casting as a novel masterstroke, perhaps unaware that no fewer than three new productions of opera warhorses (“I Puritani,” “La Sonnambula” and “Tristan und Isolde”) at the old fuddy-duddy Met Opera feature doppelgängers for the lead singers. It is this theater season’s big cliché, just as video-cam operators on stage was last season’s (and a few seasons before that) most overworked gimmick.

The double-casting does work to provide a surreal fluidity to the proceedings, greatly enhanced by Chloe Lamford’s stark scenic design (dominated by Willy’s much-beloved car) and Jack Knowles’ truly dramatic lighting. As with his direction of the actors, however, Mantello likes to pour it on gooey. Each act is introduced with Caroline Shaw’s overly somber music, reaching for but failing to achieve Philip Glass profundity. The fog machine never stops. The overkill begins even before you enter the Winter Garden. Black-and-white photos by Thea Traff (doing her Brigitte Lacombe best) feature the lead actors in stiff poses, trying hard to look terribly serious and appearing really ridiculous.

The post ‘Death of a Salesman’ Broadway Review: Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf Beg Us to Pay Attention appeared first on TheWrap.