Review by Ron Fassler . . .
In 1989, despite mixed reviews, Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men opened on Broadway and ran for over a year. Its 1992 film version, which starred Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson and for which Sorkin wrote the screenplay, was a huge critical and financial success. Opened last week at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, the play has certainly been revived because of its film pedigree and name recognition rather than its theatrical one. The overall response to the original Broadway production was best summed up by Howard Kissell of the New York Daily News, who characterized the play as “enormously entertaining” while also calling it “shallow.” Of course, back then Sorkin was a fresh-faced twenty-eight-year-old, not the established name he is today. A multiple Emmy winner for The West Wing (1999–2006) and an Academy Award winner for The Social Network (2010), he writes in a style so distinctive and well known that “Sorkinism” has its own entry in the online dictionary Wiktionary.com.
Hoping to boost the box office, LCT has put Sorkin front and center in promoting the show, tying it in with his latest film, The Social Reckoning, now in theaters. Sorkin both wrote and directed the sequel to The Social Network. There’s also a Sorkin connection in the casting of Bradley Whitford as Lt. Col. Nathan Jessup, the role Jack Nicholson played in the film. An early member of the Sorkin stock company, Whitford not only appeared in all seven seasons of The West Wing but also made his Broadway debut in A Few Good Men nearly forty years ago, as an understudy and eventual replacement in the lead role.
As someone who never saw the play and whose 1992 viewing of the film is a distant memory, I found everything new in this LCT production directed by the invaluable Michael Arden. Most of Arden’s credits are musicals, and his impeccable eye for detail serves him well in tackling the dauntingly deep and wide Beaumont stage. He and Dane Laffrey, his longtime scenic design collaborator, have created a space that somehow doesn’t swallow the actors and allows for a near-balletic fluidity during swift scene changes. Japhy Weideman’s lighting lends vitality to the proceedings, and Alejo Vietti’s crisp military uniforms add authenticity.
The plot of the play is not overly complex. A court-martial is ordered for two Marines stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 1989, who are accused in the death of a fellow Marine in a hazing incident. LTJG Daniel Kaffee (Tom Blyth), a callow lawyer who is best at plea bargaining and has rarely seen the inside of a courtroom, is recruited to defend the two men. Puffed up with ego, he is too oblivious to see that the case is a put-up job. Enter LCDR Joanne Galloway (Krysta Rodriguez) of Internal Affairs, a lawyer with a keener nose for right and wrong. Instant adversaries, they are forced to sit side by side at the defense table after an aunt of one of the defendants gives Galloway permission to act as his personal attorney. Also at the table is LTJG Sam Weinberg (Nick Blaemire), a wisecracking Jewish lawyer who offers bon mots at appropriate times. These are standard-issue characters, and Sorkin has trouble turning them into real people, something that tends to be overlooked when the roles are played by movie stars on the big screen. A play, without the benefit of close-ups, is less forgiving.
Act One is all setup and exposition, and Act Two is the court-martial, which is very straightforward. There’s a clunkiness in the stage version that doesn’t seem the result of age but of having been there from the start. Sorkin has said he’s gone in and cleaned up a few things for this production, telling the New York Times “I was very young when I wrote it, and I thought I could do better.” But the play remains overlong and underwhelming in its characterizations.
Though likable and believable, Blyth doesn’t quite hold the stage the way a Juilliard-trained actor might be expected to. I kept wishing he would settle in, something that could come with time over the course of the run (he stumbled over his lines a few times). Whitford, also a Juilliard graduate, fares better. He has swapped his naturalistic technique at underplaying for a blunter and less cerebral interpretation than the roles he’s usually cast in call for, and for the most part it succeeds. He expresses himself in stiff body language, thrusting his chest forward and leading with his chin, oozing contempt, which is fun to see from this actor. Rodriguez, saddled with an underwritten role (who is this woman?), does her best but often appears somewhat flustered. Blaemire effortlessly makes Weinberg a real person, one we can picture going home to his offstage wife and kids.
In smaller roles, Thom Sesma brings strength and dignity to a veteran Marine, and John Zdrojeski is effectively over-the-top as a zealous officer. As the defendants, Lavel Schley and Collin Kelly-Sordelet are pitch-perfect, as solid in their silences as in their dialogue. Yet another Juilliard grad in the company is Michael Braugher, son of the late, great Andre Braugher (Juilliard class of ‘88), who gives a master class in dimwittedness as a particularly galling witness. I also very much liked Miles Fowler as Capt. Jack Ross, played in the film by Kevin Bacon. He more than holds his own, and his performance sent me to the Playbill at intermission. Imagine my surprise to discover that he is an understudy making his Broadway debut. Bravo.
All told, A Few Good Men offers old-fashioned entertainment served up with the spit and polish of a good Marine. While watching it, I imagined what a good mid-1950s film it could have made, with Van Johnson as Kaffee and Humphrey Bogart as Jessup . . . oh, wait. They did make a movie about a court-martial in 1954: The Caine Mutiny, which starred Van Johnson and Humphrey Bogart. Never mind.
At the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, 150 W 65th Street, NYC. For further information, please visit A Few Good Men.
Photos by Emilio Madrid.
Headline photo: Bradley Whitford as LtCol Nathan Jessup confronts Tom Blyth as LTJG Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men.
