Broadway Review Roundup: JERUSALEM!

JERUSALEM, the critically acclaimed and multi-award winning play by Jez Butterworth and starring Tony and Olivier Award-winner Mark Rylance (Boeing-Boeing, La Bête), began previews on April 2, at the Music Box Theatre (239 West 45th Street). The production, directed by Ian Rickson, opens tonight, April 21 and will play a limited 16-week engagement.

JERUSALEM opened at The Royal Court Theatre in July, 2009 with critics praising Jez Butterworth for his beautiful and comic elegy for a disappearing way of life in rural England and actor Mark Rylance, who was lauded as delivering one of the great stage performances of our time. The production played an extended sold out run at the Royal Court, before moving to the Apollo Theatre in the West End in January, 2010, where it received an unprecedented set of five-star reviews from 12 London newspapers. Will it garner the same reception across the pond? Let's find out!

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: "Jerusalem" could have been written in almost any year from the 1920s onward. Yet this work takes you places - distant, out-of-time places - that well-made plays seldom do. And it thinks big - transcendently big - in ways contemporary drama seldom dares...But Rylance also captures - to a degree I can imagine no other contemporary actor doing - Johnny's vast, vital, Falstaffian appetite for pleasure, for independence, for life itself.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: Although it's hard to look anywhere else when Rylance is on stage, which is all the time, Mackenzie Crook manages to turn heads with his droll perf as Ginger, the faithful hanger-on who missed last night's bacchanal and may be too strung-out for today's festivities, the St. George's Day fete that is an annual rite of spring. Under Ian Rickson's smooth helming, other colorful visitors surface from the heavy human traffic at Rooster's camp, many of them from the original Royal Court production.

Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News: But the play, which runs more than three hours, yields diminishing returns. The plot goes in circles and collapses during a contrived meeting between Johnny and Marky. Fortunately, Rylance keeps you from tuning out. He won the 2008 Tony for his hilarious clowning in "Boeing-Boeing," and in "La Bete" earlier this season, he was sheer delight as a buffoonish actor. As Johnny, a cross between the Pied Piper and Fagan, he does everything he can, including handstands, to create a vivid and ultimately touching portrait of a magnetic maniac. Johnny's stories of giants may be nonsense, but there's no denying that Rylance wows you with performances that are larger than life.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, NY Post:Just like Mickey Rourke's part in "The Wrestler," Rooster demands acting. He spits out profanities and launches into incantatory speeches. He's a boozer and a user, self-destructive yet somehow heroic. He does a headstand in a trough of water. He limps. In other words, Rooster was engineered to generate glowing reviews and award nominations. Some have pooh-poohed "War Horse" for being contrived, but in its own way, Jez Butterworth's button-pushing drama is just as shrewdly sentimental.

Mark Kennedy, Associated Press: "Jerusalem" clocks in at over three hours - with two intermissions - and is a marathon for Rylance, who does a headstand into a bucket of water at the beginning and then stumbles about, getting into fights, smoking drugs, drinking speed-laced beer and hysterically cocking his snoot at everyone the entire time. Director Ian Rickson might have made a few cuts to keep the running time down, particularly in the second act, which lags at times. Butterworth's script, often lyrical and always rooted, also has made no allowances for an American audience, so brush up on British slang for such drug-related terms as "snafflers" and "whizz."

Scott Brown, New York Magazine: Only the glorious bag-of-bones Mackenzie Crook, playing an aging forever-hometown boy in a tragic hoodie, even gets close to getting close to Rylance's Rooster. But even he can't hold Rylance's eyeline for long....the show is testament to the ever-­expanding voice and vision of Butterworth, whose mighty verbal broadsword just freakin' sings.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: It seems significant that the program for Jerusalem lists no understudy for Mark Rylance, because watching his astonishing performance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron makes it impossible to imagine anyone else ever inhabiting the role. That takes nothing away, however, from the rude beauty of Jez Butterworth's sprawling, shattering play. To borrow a phrase from Rooster, it might be described as an "alcoholic, bucolic frolic," except that it's so much more.

Linda Winer, Newsday: It has nothing to do with the Middle East, though it is about lost tribes. Jez Butterworth's fascinating "Jerusalem," imported from London to showcase the uncontainable and strenuous life-force named Mark Rylance, is set in a junk-piled clearing of an Old English woods where, just maybe, giants, elves and fairies once flourished.

Howard Shapiro, The Philadelphia Inquirer: Rooster Byron is a fascinating, partly because he's willfully extreme, partly because he's solidly comfortable in his self-deceptions, and mostly because he's played by Mark Rylance, the brilliant British Shakespearean actor who in recent years has been an equally brilliant comic actor...In fact, Jerusalem is The Mark Rylance Show, with an excellent supporting cast.

Erik Haagensen, Backstage: Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem" falls squarely in the tradition of works lionizing the charismatic nonconforming outsider whose outrageous behavior masks a pure and noble heart that by contrast proves the mendacity of the society surrounding him. Blowing into town from England's Royal Court Theatre on a gale of critical praise and starring the highly acclaimed Mark Rylance, it's very likely to repeat its London success. While nothing would make me happier than to be able to join in the chorus of hosannas, I sadly must report that I found the show to be three hours and 10 minutes of windy bollocks.

Peter Marks, The Washington Post: At the miraculous hub of the sprawling play - it clocks in at roughly three hours - is the Falstaffian performance of Mark Rylance, delivering his second steamroller turn of the Broadway season. Back in the fall (in the very same theater), he portrayed the showboating vulgarian Valere in the droll if unbalanced "La Bete." Now, he's the hyper-dynamic force of nature once again, playing a burnt-out onetime professional daredevil who lives a debauched life out of a trailer on the edge of a subdivision in the English countryside.

Matt Windman, amNY: Rylance gives a mesmerizing, thoroughly transformative performance that will leave theatergoers in awe of his spectacular physical and vocal abilities. Tony-winner John Gallagher Jr., who joins much of the original English cast, makes an excellent addition as a local youth about to go off to Australia. Ian Rickson's production is quite beautiful, depicting the exterior of Rooster's caravan against a backdrop of large trees, garbage and patio furniture.

Michael Musto, Village Voice:Rylance takes it to the max--and the mat. Rarely has an antihero been so antiheroic. His limp alone looks so real I wouldn't be surprised if he let himself get run over by a car for the proper effect...It's a real experience, and though it becomes too ponderous and hard to take, I welcome anything with a statement and the theatrical means to blare it.

Jonathan Mandell, Faster Times: In the very first moment that Mark Rylance appears on the stage and in the very last, "Jerusalem" soars from his daredevil performance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron, a fiery spirit about to be evicted from his idyllic house trailer in the English woods...If word-of-mouth might not have prepared you for the patience required to sit through some of "Jerusalem," that may be because the forgettable parts are indeed quickly forgotten, while Mark Rylance's performance, like the character he plays, won't leave.