"Frost/Nixon"

After taking the night off from theatre last night to watch The Departed, to which I felt rather indifferent (I much preferred Babel as Best Picture nominees go), I high-tailed it back up to the theatre district tonight to rush Frost/Nixon at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

This show had many promising things going for it to my mind: a script by Peter Morgan (who wrote the screenplay for The Queen), Michael Sheen (who played Blair in The Queen) as talk show host David Frost, and the legendary Frank Langella as Richard Nixon.

That said, the show was ultimately a worthwhile experience, but there were plenty of things I found lacking. The show centers around washed-up British talk show host David Frost, who hopes to revive his career by conducting a six-hour interview with former President Richard Nixon on national television. I hadn't known going into the play what a big deal this interview was at the time, especially since I don't immediately recognize the name David Frost, and it was interesting to hear what the play had to say about the impact of the interview, in which Frost gets Nixon to admit his shortcomings and failures in office and essentially apologize to the American people.

At first, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to accept Frank Langella as Nixon. I'd already seen another Nixon-themed play this year (Nixon's Nixon at MCC downtown), and the man playing Nixon in that production had a close physical resemblance to the former President. Langella has a more lanky frame and a longer face, but as the play goes along, his commitment to Nixon's intellectual and emotional misgivings, as well as his acute attention to Nixon's verbal cues, help to allow the audience to go along for the ride. He ultimately gives an extraordinarily nuanced performances, managing to transcend the label of "mimic" and tap into the pain that Nixon hid behind his defensive outer shell. He and Sheen, who's incredibly personable in the role of Frost, are the reasons to catch this show above all else.

Making the most of a drab 1970s set and overcoming the relatively distracting use of a 6-by-6 set of television screens on which short scenic segments and the interview sessions in progress are shown, the cast makes the most of a script that, after an overlong segment of exposition in the beginning, fails to pick up sufficient steam and never really transcends the level of docudrama. Stephen Kunken, as anti-Nixon writer Jim Reston, is given the role of narrator for much of the play, and, though he's an amiable enough presence, the use of this device grounds the piece awkwardly in a static, overly calculated sort of way. The play picks up steam as Sheen and Langella face off in front of the cameras, but even these more exciting sequences can't ultimately make up for the shaky start that Frost/Nixon gets off to.

Bottom line: Frost/Nixon is worth seeing if you're a fan of these actors, as they really do a formidable job in their respective roles, but it's not a play to see if one is looking to marvel at great writing.