In an age when Portillos and parliamentary correspondents are let(ts) loose in the stalls, one shouldn’t be surprised that instead of dispatching their theatre critic Michael Billington to cover Wednesday’s Broadway opening of Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain, The Guardian have simply asked their New York news stringer, Oliver Burkeman, to file a review of it yesterday. The Times didn’t splash out, either, on an air fare for their critic Benedict Nightingale, but at least they got a proper theatre writer to cover it for them, the prolific London freelancer Matt Wolf. But time was when the arts pages of The Times actually retained the services of a regular theatre stringer from Broadway.
Mind you, even the real critics weren’t sure quite how to judge this occasion: in a bizarre notice for the New York Times, the usually astute Ben Brantley went into an extended riff on the star, even admitting, “I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic.” Clearly her appearance on Broadway has brought the fans out, but also outed Ben as a fan amongst the critics. He even goes as far to admit,“Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.”
Perhaps this is, as Americans are fond of saying, Too Much Information – best left for his therapist’s ears, not his readers. But it does make for a curiously self-referential, and self-involved, critical response, and it’s only after all these confessions are out of the way that, more than half way through, he grudgingly writes, “I suppose I had better give you some plot here. (Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.)”
There’s not much they have to skip, since he soon returns to his idol and dream companion: “I found myself fascinated by the way her facial structure (ah, those cheekbones!)seem to change according to how the light hits her. In repose, her face seems impossibly, hauntingly eloquent…. On the few occasions when she smiles, it’s with a sunniness that could dispel even 40 days and 40 nights of rain.”
Enough already! But if even ‘real’ critics lose their hearts, minds and pens in thrall to a star, what hope is there for anyone else to find out about the play? Perhaps we need a news reporter to do that. And the aforementioned Oliver Burkeman hits the nail on the head when he describes the difficulty: “The right way to watch a movie star on stage, presumably, is to try to ignore the pulsating glow of Hollywood celebrity and focus instead on the acting. But that isn’t easy when the star is Julia Roberts. For a start, there are the fans who have been jamming the streets outside the theatre during previews; then there are the police on horseback, struggling to keep calm. The Broadway debut of the most bankable woman in cinema history is proving to be not so much a play as a major public order challenge.”
