By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Julia Roberts' Onstage Voodoo
In recent weeks, it’s become impossible to ignore the bizarre behavior of a beloved, perpetually smiling film star.
I speak, of course, of Julia Roberts, who has confounded public expectations by not making a summer movie and not doing anything scandalous or wildly emotional like getting married, divorced, or having a baby.
Roberts is acting in a play. On Broadway, no less.
That’s just…weird.
But in a good way. Whatever theatre reviewers will say of her performance in Richard Goldberg’s Three Days of Rain, tickets are sold out for the plays’ entire run.
David Edelstein, the film critic for New York magazine, shelled out $250 bucks to see an early preview, and he writes this week about how Roberts, until now a purely cinematic performer, comes across on stage.
Here’s a little of what Edelstein says in The Close-Up Is Her Voodoo
“It’s that somehow those clown-princess features coalesce into one of the best faces ever captured on the big screen.
She’s plainly gorgeous in still photos, but it’s in motion that the real magic happens. She can entrance you with the tiniest shifts in expression. And does she know it!”
UPDATE, April 20: The opening night reviews are in.
The Boston Globe ‘s carries a slam from theatre critic Ed Siegel: he didn’t like her effusive Oscar acceptance speech for Erin Brockovich in 2001, and he reviews her Three Days of Rain performance as if she’d swanned onstage in a vintage gown and started bawling.
Self-confessed “Juliaholic” Ben Brantley of the New York Times was, like Edelstein, entranced by Roberts’ unique beauty, but managed to notice that the play was weak and the role didn’t suit her.
“The only emotion that this production generates arises not from any interaction onstage, but from the relationship between Ms. Roberts and her fans”
“We wanted our Julia to do well,” writes Brantley. “In a smaller, Off Broadway house, she wouldn’t have to worry about projecting and could perhaps relax a bit. (She never seems to know what to do with her body.) And she really should be playing a romantic heroine, of the imperiled or comic variety. Her parts in “Three Days of Rain” are essentially character parts, and Ms. Roberts is not a character actress.”