Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2016 7:11 pm
Just doing some new year's purging of magazines and came across a tribute to Mike Nichols in the October 2015 issue of Vanity Fair - the one with Zuckerberg on the cover. It's a lengthy article with plenty of photos and a lot of quotes from people who have worked with him during his career. Nothing from Daniel or Rachel, but there is one from Rafe:
RAFE SPALL (actor, who appeared in Nichols's staging of Betrayal):
He really, really wanted [the 2013 Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's] Betrayal to be a success. It was very important to him. And we got a bad review in the Times [by New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley], and it really upset him.
It's a funny thing for me because I come from a theater landscape where you get a great review in The Times [of London], a bad on in The Telegraph, and a medium one in the Evening Standard, and it's even. There's not one guy with a monopoly on whether something's good or not. It became-though it's been beaten out since - the highest-grossing Broadway straight play [for a single week] in history. But everyone was really upset by the Times review.
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I imagine that this left Daniel bitter and his vow not to return to Broadway because people are over 50 and tickets cost so much. I found that to be a really awful remark about Broadway. It was obviously Rudin, with the actors, who commanded the high ticket prices, and not many 20-somethings can afford tickets like that. The two go hand-in-hand. They could have sold those tickets at the onset for normal prices, but they didn't.
But it's a shame about the bad review. It was for one performance, and that night's performance was not their best of the run.
RAFE SPALL (actor, who appeared in Nichols's staging of Betrayal):
He really, really wanted [the 2013 Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's] Betrayal to be a success. It was very important to him. And we got a bad review in the Times [by New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley], and it really upset him.
It's a funny thing for me because I come from a theater landscape where you get a great review in The Times [of London], a bad on in The Telegraph, and a medium one in the Evening Standard, and it's even. There's not one guy with a monopoly on whether something's good or not. It became-though it's been beaten out since - the highest-grossing Broadway straight play [for a single week] in history. But everyone was really upset by the Times review.
--------
I imagine that this left Daniel bitter and his vow not to return to Broadway because people are over 50 and tickets cost so much. I found that to be a really awful remark about Broadway. It was obviously Rudin, with the actors, who commanded the high ticket prices, and not many 20-somethings can afford tickets like that. The two go hand-in-hand. They could have sold those tickets at the onset for normal prices, but they didn't.
But it's a shame about the bad review. It was for one performance, and that night's performance was not their best of the run.