Lobby Hero Broadway Reviews

There's a reason that Mr. Rockwell's set revolves between scenes, forcing us to adjust our angles of observation. Like morality, identity is relative in 'Lobby Hero.' Few playwrights match Mr. Lonergan in making confident art out of such constantly shifting uncertainty.

Despite a slow start and an abrupt ending, the play takes on an absorbing quality with the news that William's brother has been accused of participating in a brutal murder, which brings out the complexities in the four uniformed characters. It also contains many funny moments and themes (harassment, crisis management, social mobility) that are relevant to working professionals.

Second Stage's Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan's tonally mercurial 2001 play, directed by Trip Cullman, uses Cera's ineffectual persona to deft comic effect, even as it smartly explores weighty questions of spinelessness and courage.

Chris Evans trades a Captain America shield for an NYPD badge in his Broadway debut in Kenneth Lonergan's drama 'Lobby Hero.' Evans's deft performance is one of the pluses of this fine-tuned show, which marks Second Stage's inaugural Broadway production at the renovated Hayes Theater.

Michael Cera is not a transformational actor. Whether in film or on Broadway in his 2014 debut, 'This Is Our Youth,' he repeatedly embodies the beta male. Nothing wrong with that. Several comic geniuses, from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen, present a defined persona over and over again and yet dazzle with their delivery and timing. Kenneth Lonergan's 'Lobby Hero' opened Monday at Second Stage's newly renovated Hayes Theater, and the role of the insecure security guard Jeff fits Cera as tightly as the blue collar and black tie the character wears every night manning the front desk of a large New York apartment building.

Let's get the obvious question out of the way up front: Does Chris Evans cut it in his leap from the superhero universe to the naturalistic comedy-drama of Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero? Absolutely. Evans fully inhabits his character of a vain but well-liked New York City career cop on track to make detective, who is quite comfortable rationalizing to himself abuses of power large and small in a profession where gender inequality and toxic masculinity come with the badge. The actor best known as Captain America brings plenty of cocky swagger, his thumbs hooked into his utility belt like an Old West cowboy with a bushy mustache to match, but his assured performance never aims to be a star turn. Rather, it's an integral part of an evenly balanced, four-person ensemble piece.

Under Trip Cullman's direction the acting is mostly extraordinary. Michael Cera is doing his typical high-voiced friendly slacker thing and Powley is feisty, though her role is less fully written than the others. Henry is a standout, with his sturdy physicality and his easy authority. He shows William's helpless determination to make the right call and the ways that his choices undermine his sense of self. Evans is a surprise, much more than an action hero trying to prove that he's still got it. His Bill, a fine cop and a lousy human, is a monster you can often empathize with.

It's Henry, with his murky moral dilemma - should he step in to offer his brother the alibi he's begging for? - and low-key comic timing, who becomes the play's least showy MVP. His family quandary is also what the plot turns on; its jerry-rigged tension eventually comes to a head in a revelation that feels more schematic than earned, and the stress points of race and sex and power the script touches on are only glancingly resolved. but Lobby is still a smart, thoughtful piece of work, fairy-dusted by the starry presence of its celebrated cast.

Trip Cullman does his best work with small, tight ensembles like this one, so there's no slack in the emotional tension and no escape from the sticky web that even nice people get tangled up in when they tell lies - especially the lies they tell themselves.

And as Lonergan's web of dilemmas grows more interesting, Henry's performance blossoms, riding an arc of injustice that seems to bend permanently away from a security guard with big plans and the wrong color of skin. It's powerful to watch him simmer and boil and wither, while Cera plays his downtrodden but still privileged foil. The rest of the show: It's got a lot of potential.

What pretty, plush new seats the Hayes Theater has. This compact Broadway house, the smallest on the Great White Way, has been renovated under its new owners Second Stage and reopened as a non-profit. Sadly, Lobby Hero, starring Chris 'Captain America' Evans and Michael Cera and directed by Trip Cullman, does not blazingly usher in the new dawn.

Lobby Hero is its inaugural production in the new space. Kenneth Lonergan's 2001 play began life Off-Broadway and it feels slightly under-nourished on a Broadway stage. That's in part down to David Rockwell's design. It puts the single-set lobby on a revolve, but wilts against the splendour of the theatre - also designed by him.

'Lobby Hero' is packed with issues that resonate in very big ways today - gender, race, police abuse and the entire criminal justice system, But it's also simply about the conflicted impulses that make us all so terribly and confoundingly human.

'How are you supposed to know if you're right and everyone else is wrong?' Dawn asks in the closing moments. The play provides no answers, of course, but when this lobby heroine finally throws it back at her domineering partner with a bold, in-your-face tirade that emphatically puts him in his place, the audience all but stands and carries her out in triumph.