'God of Carnage' still amuses but less brutally
Photo credit: Newsday/Joan Marcus | Christine Lahti, left, and Annie Potts are among the new castmembers in Yasmina Reza�s Tony-winning "God of Carnage," at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in Manhattan.
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'God of Carnage'
When "God of Carnage" opened on Broadway last March, the comedy of bad marriages and worse manners featured James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis as warring couples in upscale Brooklyn.
Although playwright Yasmina Reza, director Matthew Warchus and Harden all won Tonys, it was clear that this particular four-star quartet could have sold out the entire run if they had merely read congressional health-care proposals.
Completely recast, the solid four-actor play now seems more amusing than brutally entertaining. Despite eight months of rising ticket prices (a top $121.50, compared with $116.50 at opening), however, this can no longer be considered a big Broadway event.
Christine Lahti is dazzling in the Harden role, a woman who begins with high-minded interests in art history and Darfur, then devolves marvelously into a fireball of moral grandiosity. Both she and Jimmy Smits have those tall, serious presences that make their wild physicality into a giddy surprise.
Smits plays the Daniels' character, a high-rolling lawyer with a spray-on tan and a better grasp of his cell phone than his ethics. He and his wife - played with deftly timed likability by Annie Potts - have been invited by the other couple to discuss, like civilized parents, a playground fight between their 11-year-old boys.
Reza ("Art") and director Warchus clearly decided not to even try to compete with their Gandolfini coup. Instead, they replaced him with Ken Stott, a short, stout, respected English actor who created the role in London. Stott doesn't try to play it with an American accent, which is no problem. Lahti's character could easily have married a Brit.
Unfortunately, the fellow talks almost unintelligibly fast, with an understated comic rhythm that seems foreign to that of his wife and their neighbors.
The play does not build now to the same level of outrageous savagery, which reinforces the feeling that this sharply observed sketch is never much deeper than its big-issue smart-talk veneer. The 90-minute piece is less profound than a marriage play by Edward Albee, but much more than a sitcom. It also still has the very best scene of projectile vomit since Linda Blair's in "The Exorcist."
WHAT "God of Carnage"
WHERE Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., Manhattan
INFO $66.50-$121.50; 212-239-6200; godofcarnage.com
BOTTOM LINE Amusing new cast, but no longer an event
