The Pitmen Painters Broadway Reviews

Here it is, only the beginning of a new theater season, and Broadway already has a feel-good -- make that a feel-great -- hit in 'The Pitmen Painters.' Scribe Lee Hall draws on the same inspirational themes that served him so well in 'Billy Elliot the Musical' with this heartbreakingly funny play about a group of Northumberland coal miners who in 1934 sign up for a union-sponsored art appreciation course and become the darlings of the U.K. art set. Max Roberts' helming is flawless, and bully for Equity for preserving the extraordinary ensemble of character actors from the original British production.

It is truly our good fortune that the entire original English cast has traveled with the Max Roberts’ detailed production to Broadway. They are all individually excellent and make for a fiery and passionate ensemble.

Still, Hall gets enough right, and by the end, it's practically impossible not to root for 'The Pitmen Painters' -- both the show and the characters.

'The Pitmen Painters' comes to New York after a rapturous reception in England and high expectations here because of its playwright. It may not be 'Billy Elliot,' but, in it's own way, it dances.

Lee Hall's 'The Pitmen Painters' is a bit like the art made by its characters: Whatever it lacks in technique it more than makes up for in expression. If the characters are sometimes too predictable and the sentiment a bit thick, that doesn't prevent the two-and-a-half-hour play from being thoroughly entertaining.

The play is less mawkish than its premise might suggest. Hall, who delved into related terrain in Billy Elliot, does not overly sentimentalize the working-class men at the core of his story (even if, as in Billy Elliot, he takes a few cheap shots at the fancier characters). Directed with lovely balance by Max Roberts—and acted by a fine British ensemble, led by Christopher Connel as the most sensitive of the pitmen—the play presents the miners’ works without evading the question of whether they were, in the judgment of art history, mostly minor work. It’s a well-crafted and thoughtful evening of theater, and Hall ends the show on a sober note of socialist disillusionment.

There’s another dimension to this story that adds to the 'Pitmen' lore. All eight actors in the show hail from the same mining region where the play is set. And they've stayed with it since the play debuted there three years ago. And each of these loyal performers, like their characters, are phenomenal talents. They're also astute critics because they knew they had the makings of a masterpiece on their hands.

Even if the story of a chance to elevate one's self from a dangerous, working-class life through art sounds a bit too much like Billy Elliot, Hall's other current Broadway offering, The Pitmen Painters is a far superior piece with a strong emotional pull; its heart pumping primarily from the sensitive Oliver Kilbourn (the excellent Christopher Connel), the most talented of the bunch, who is timid about this new world that is not only accepting him but is offering an opportunity to become a benefactor's fully-supported resident painter. Though there is much of the expected fish-out-of-water humor, especially when the boys first encounter modern art, Hall also develops a good deal of empathy as their skills, as well as competitiveness, develop. Since this is a British play, issues of class and labor threaten to bog down the darker second act with its heavy-handed presentation; the time might be better spent showing the early artistic progress of the group (they seem too good too soon) and exploring more of their day-to-day lives in the mines.

Some liberties are taken by Hall in telling his story. The initially unsophisticated miners are in virtually no time well versed in artistic parlance and technically proficient with the paint brush. Such poetic license in telling a story that spans some 14 years is expected. And while the working class miners are generally portrayed with respect, there are the perfunctory 'fish out of water' jokes throughout the play.

Touching predictable bases, Hall tells his story jumpily, as if more anxious to declare his sentimental allegiance for the old-left dogmas inherent in it than to make it dramatically pertinent today. Despite the glibly drawn characters, the all-English ensemble, under Max Roberts's crisp direction, performs with stirring conviction, particularly Christopher Connel as the most gifted of the lot, Deka Walmsley as a perpetually grouchy union official, and Ian Kelly as the group's uneasy mentor.

The Pitmen Painters is the sort of play that the British turn out regularly, but that has trouble getting arrested on these shores: a straightforward, almost artless docudrama, grounded in true-life events and contemporary issues, wearing its sociopolitical message on its sleeve.

There is a lot of high-minded talk throughout the play — is art an elitist pursuit or truly for the masses? — but it yields little in terms of dramatic tension or surprise. And for such a fundamentally didactic show, the takeaway seems rather simplistic. It's like a paint-by-numbers exercise in extolling the virtues of art.

The language can suddenly switch from country bumpkin to a level of sophistication well beyond the credible, as when Harry, a Marxist, says one moment, “Nebody’s deing what we de”; at the next, “This is just the start. This place’ll be an academy. In years to come it’ll be teeming with artists in here.” And George proclaims, “They’re not ganna leave yer Shakespeare and Goethe just for the upper classes now -- it’s ganna belang to us.”

Fairly absorbing in content, Hall's patchy drama about plain blokes transformed by art is somewhat by-the-numbers in its episodic construction, complete with a comedy scene involving a nude model (Lisa McGrillis). If the story at times is predictable and the conclusion doesn't resonate, Hall's realistic, frequently humorous writing is agreeable although some passages about art and allegory get a bit thick.

You may have guessed that I didn't expect to like 'The Pitmen Painters,' which by all rights should have been ludicrously heavy-handed. Sometimes it is, but more often Mr. Hall has rung fresh changes on his familiar formulas, and the result is a satisfying piece of entertainment that makes its points without leaving you too badly bruised about the head and shoulders.

It’s the individual personalities who sparkle here, and make Pitmen more than just a good-hearted, Geordie-accented lecture series. Christopher Connel turns in a deceptively modest performance as Oliver Kilbourn, the group member most torn between life in the mine and the promise of weightlessness offered by the beckoning art world. David Whitaker, as dim, avid Jimmy, brings unexpected depths to a mostly comic role. (He’s tasked with the perhaps inevitable “Titian”/”Bless you” gag and reacts to modern art with the classic “How much did you pay for it?”)

There are uniformly stellar performances from the terrific cast, who reprise roles for Manhattan Theatre Club that they played in 2007 in Newcastle and a subsequent run at London's National Theatre. Director Max Roberts' assured staging is crisp and clean, with noisy blackouts that are reminders of the men's dangerous, backbreaking jobs. Large projections of their paintings used throughout the 2¼-hour production smartly underscore the transformative and expansive nature of art in any life.

How they come to express themselves on canvas at the urging of a local art professor (Ian Kelly) is a livelier dramatic springboard than what happens after their work is discovered by the press and some wealthy patrons. So the first half of this enjoyably acted piece, directed by Max Roberts, is the better one. Still, there is enough intriguing biography here to justify the production's having landed on these shores from its starting point in England's North.

Oliver's scenes with Lyon and Helen tremble with a yearning and awkwardness, infused with a crippling class consciousness and a subliminal eroticism that dare not identify itself. In those moments 'The Pitmen Painters' stops being an 'on the one hand/ on the other hand' lecture; it becomes excitingly ambiguous, in-the-moment theater, as rich and intriguing as Art (as we are told here) is meant to be.

The work, which began at the same area's Live Theatre in 2007 and became a London hit with the original actors and company director Max Roberts, has come to Broadway to tell another inspirational story and to be one. At least, that is the script with a happy ending. Unfortunately, despite fine performances, 'Pitmen Painters' is mild-mannered, talky and scattershot. Instead of firing up what should be a compelling chunk of art and social history, Hall weighs it down with dull exchanges, repetitious statements about the meaning of art and, ultimately, a confusing message about the significance of the group.

Suffice to say that Shaw, this ain't. Hall fairly bludgeons us with his populist message, and the characters can border on cartoonish in their conformity to broad, familiar stereotypes. Still, the actors are game and adroit; standouts include Michael Hodgson, wryly appealing as a wisecracking socialist, and Brian Lonsdale, who does deft double duty as the unemployed young man and an effete painter.

In Pitmen, the characters, as written by Lee Hall (who knows of what he mines, having also written Billy Elliot), are mostly just mouthpieces, and Mr. Hall's writing is simplistic, often hokey.