No one in the audience at A Steady Rain bought tickets thinking, “Oh, yes! The new Keith Huff play!” This season’s hot ticket started off hot thanks to the presence of superstars Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, and then stayed hot as its sold-out status made it a status symbol. Attending the show is as much an exercise in vanity as an exercise in star gazing.
So does it even matter what Huff’s one-act two-hander is about? Yes and no. What’s most fascinating about the play isn’t his story about two Chicago cops remembering a summer when everything fell apart in an unceasing rain, but in the benefits and deficits of casting marquee names.
There’s no way Huff’s clumsy play would have ever made it to Broadway without Craig and Jackman—and there’s no way either of them could have done the show without the other. The only person who wouldn’t be overshadowed by Wolverine on a Broadway stage is James Bond (one wonders if Craig and Jackman talk about 007 backstage, a role Jackman was rumored to be considered for), and both of these hulking actors balance one another out nicely.
Whether or not the benefits of Craig and Jackman outweigh the damage they do to the play depends on what you’re interested in seeing. If you just want to ogle two matinee idols for 90 minutes, then you’re in luck. If you’re interested in seeing two actors give riveting stage performances, well, they do, to a certain degree. But while Craig rivets by disappearing into his boxy suit and dishwater blond hair (and that bristly mustache), Jackman holds your attention with a distracting roguish charm.
As Denny, a family man who tries to convince his best friend and partner Joey (Craig) to give up the bottle for the benefits of a wife and kids, Jackman is fully believable. But as Denny begins a slow slide into madness and violence, spurred on by a drive-by shooting that puts his youngest son in the hospital, there’s something unnerving about the way Jackman is unable to turn off his charm. When Joey talks about the empty vials of morphine he finds Denny with, it takes a beat before you realized that Jackman’s crinkly-smiling cop just shot up; it’s actually easier to buy James Bond as a nebbish.
For anyone not dazzled by the star power of the two men, Huff’s play is an exercise in frustration. Denny and Joey start the play in office chairs on a dim set, taking turns telling their story, but then they double back in time to further explain incidents and occasionally stop remembering and start acting act out their past. And there’s not a symbol of innocence that Huff doesn’t trample on to make his heavy-handed point, including—improbably—a puppy.
Scott Pask contributes some fantastic scenic designs (seriously, they upstage the actors) and though the clothes he’s dressed Craig and Jackman in are disappointingly drab, he has the good graces to make sure the shirts are fitted well enough to give the audience glimpses of what they came to see. What a shame that the audience couldn’t also get a side of great theater with their Grade-A beefcake.
Thru Dec. 6. At the
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St. (between B’way & 8th
Ave.), 212-239-6200. $66.50–$135.
