Review Roundup: Gabriel Byrne Brings WALKING WITH GHOSTS To Broadway- The Critics React!

Internationally renowned actor and writer Gabriel Byrne returns to Broadway in his acclaimed solo show, Walking with Ghosts, adapted from his best-selling memoir of the same name. Directed by Lonny Price, the limited engagement of Walking with Ghosts opens tonight at the Music Box Theatre.

Premiering earlier this year at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre in an acclaimed, sold-out run, Walking with Ghosts went on to a smashing success at the Edinburgh International Festival, and recently had a limited run in London's West End from September 7 - 16, before landing on Broadway.

Read the reviews!!

Alexis Soloski, The New York Times: The transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete. The lively language shifts easily enough from prose to monologue, and Byrne - with his wide, serious face, his bright, worried eyes, his voice like the growl of a polite bear - is compulsively watchable. What the show lacks (and this is true of the memoir, as well) is a sense of why he's examining his life now. In public. Why would a man lay himself bare like this, on Broadway? It's hard to discern because the show all but ignores the latter part of his life and acting career.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: As a writer, Byrne is no Brendan Behan, but the sincerity of his voice is a fine cover for whatever artlessness it disguises. And there are moments when he really hits his mark, as with the image of himself as a child, saying his prayers and trying to catch a glimpse of his guardian angel, "standing by the bed to protect me from all the dangers of the night." In such moments he sounds like his own guardian angel, protecting his boyish self from the darkness to come as a grown man.

Chris Jones, The New York Daily News: "Walking with Ghosts," directed by Lonny Price, has some quirks. It's only loosely staged with minimal visual accoutrements and it hews too closely to the memoir. The piece, which could use more narrative drive for a two-act night of theater, unfolds, chapter-like, on the stage. Some of the transitions are abrupt. And the mix of theme and chronology sometimes feels better suited to the page than the stage.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: Lonny Price directs Byrne's memoir, and too often the staging is overly glitzy, especially with its many dramatic blackouts that signal we're supposed to be awed by what just took place on stage. Byrne's writing is writerly. He's very conscious of wowing us with his poetic description of a nun's waxy hands or a priest's sour breath or the disappearing coastline of Ireland as he travels to a seminary in Great Britain.

Elysa Gardner, The New York Sun: If Mr. Byrne's relatively quiet, raspy voice isn't the ideal instrument to carry a show that runs more than two hours, he's a charming raconteur, recounting his youthful foibles with equal parts wistfulness and dry wit. There are occasions when he tries rather too hard to wax lyrical; recalling an especially idyllic carnival outing, he quips that aiming to prolong the day would have been "like trying to empty the Irish Sea with a fork." Not all Irishmen, alas, are poets.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: This is the sort of theatrical memoir for which the term "lyrical" must have been invented. Recounting the story of his early life and only briefly dipping into the sort of show business anecdotes (none of them particularly juicy, alas) for which some gossip-craving theatergoers might be hoping, the piece is so quintessentially Irish that you'll find yourself craving a Guinness on the way home. Redolent of both James Joyce and Eugene O'Neill, two writers whose work Bryne has performed in his lengthy career, Walking with Ghosts feels far more literary than theatrical.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: With his tousled gray-flecked hair, dressed neatly in a jacket, shirt, and sweater vest in cool, complementary shades of blue, Byrne effortlessly charms the audience with tales of wax-like nuns, uncharitable Christian Brothers, and an indulgent granny who fed him forbidden cornflakes and introduced him to the joys of the cinema. Yet every engaging, dramatic moment brings many more equally lackluster stretches.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: "Walking With Ghosts" is a modest show, with quiet humor and gentle pathos - which is exactly why it's so wonderful. Even on Broadway, modesty can be a virtue.

Brittani Samuel, Broadway News: The play - a theatrical adaptation of Byrne's 2020 autobiography - takes a familiar approach: one man tracing the arc of his life, layering universal tragedies such as mental illness, alcoholism and abuse with the specific intricacies of an upbringing in mid-twentieth-century Dublin. In doing so, he reveals existential truths about the human condition, the vulnerability of love and the loneliness of fame. What's never revealed, however, is a unique or functional point of view about it all. Any chance of this production lifting from memoir recitation to illuminating theatrical experience is squashed by Lonny Price's artless direction and the design team's unembellished hand. And when a play's subject is void of any real color, all a spotlight does is wash it out.

Juan A. Ramirez, Theatrely: It's a testament to the second act of Walking with Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne's new one-man show at the Music Box Theatre, that its bouncy levity and charismatic performance managed to erase the rabid hatred I'd developed during its first. The notes I wrote during that opening half could be hardly be shown on a men's room stall in the actor's native Dublin, so enraged was I at being made to sit through a series of monologue even James Tyrone (from Byrne's last Broadway outing in 2016's Long Day's Journey Into Night) would deem self-serious and overblown....Then act two begins, and it's as if the lights have been turned on. Byrne is animated, filling up the three gold prosceniums that encase him with a sense of fun and purpose. Now giving an actual performance, he shines in relating tales of his early career on the UK stage, and the ups and downs of success. The first of these, which gives him the chance to prove his comedy skills by imitating the many ways actors deliver their bows, is a delight. When you have salient issues to get off your chest, like the tenderness your father had for you, or a legendary Richard Burton drinking story which led to your eventual sobriety, why bother with a dreary lead-up?