British screen sensation, Keira Knightley makes her Broadway debut in the Roundabout Theater Company's production of "Thérèse Raquin" Oct. 29, Thursday.
Knightley stars in this Emile Zola adaptation as an adulterous lover who plans to murder his husband at sea. The ensemble also includes Matt Ryan and Gabriel Ebert in this dark tale of passion.
Acting on stage may not be an entirely new thing to Knightley as she took on some of the most powerful performances on screen, not to mention her astounding work in "Anna Karenina". But the British actress' anticipated take on the Broadway stage turned out not quite as expected by critics and audiences. Some faults are attributed to the direction, script and musical score.
Here are some reviews that got us thinking on how it might have gone bad in a few places.
- "There might have been some fun if there were a smidgen of electricity between Knightley and Ryan ... That would have offset the pervading gloom of Beowulf Boritt's uncharacteristically dispiriting sets ... and the fussiness of [Helen] Edmundson's script ... Underplaying the eroticism and showing the affair's tawdry initiation (no steamy throes of passion here), I suppose the playwright means to be true to Zola. Yet that only works when the spark leads to flame...There's a detachment between the stars I can only describe as fatal ... Thérèse Raquin is a sexless bore."
- "The show is so determined to demonstrate how destiny never relaxes its stranglehold on its characters that any sparks of pleasure are snuffed out almost before they appear ... Thérèse Raquin is curiously lacking in tension of any kind. It is steeped, instead, in a single shade of morbid resignation."
Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
- "Knightley gives it her all and she's wonderful as she goes from odd duck to lip-quivering lust ... Perhaps the show's biggest star isn't Knightley at all but Beowulf Boritt, whose set design is remarkable and sublime. Director Evan Cabnet has encouraged the humour, passion and the horror but all those elements stewing together over the two-and-a-half hour play eventually start to spoil. The horror doesn't really stay sustained, the love curdles oddly and the humor breaks the momentum of both. Some of the worst sound effects heard on Broadway don't help."
- "Although Cabnet's hammy direction of the first act does elicit uncomfortable laughter, the physical production is exquisite, and by the end of the act the performers have found the raw passion to leave the audience gasping ... Knightley and Ryan are ravishing - and articulate - as these fierce bourgeois Macbeths, undone by their own greed and passion."
