Based on real-life events and using music, dance and video, Lucy Prebble’s Enron explores one of the most infamous scandals in financial history, reviewing the tumultuous 1990s and casting a new light on the financial turmoil in which the world currently finds itself. Director Rupert Goold (Macbeth with Patrick Stewart), along with a crack team of designers, will bring the most exciting and innovative theatrical event Broadway has seen this decade.
One understands the desire to goose material that is both potentially dry and well past its sell-by date. (In the wake of AIG and Bernie Madoff and Lehman Brothers' own collapse, doesn't the Enron scandal seem so 2001?) But subtlety gets lost in the process: At one point, Butz's Skilling literally stomps his foot like a petulant 2-year-old when Lay sides with Roe in a corporate dispute — an over-the-top gesture that undercuts any effort by the production to make its characters more than cardboard stand-ins for American Big Business excess and immaturity. Goold further muddles the satire with kitchen-sink showmanship, employing everything from a barbershop quartet of traders to a mini-ballet by lightsaber-wielding execs. He even creates anthropomorphized 'raptors' to represent the shady debt-laden shell companies that led to Enron's ultimate unraveling. We see Fastow and Skilling kill the raptors at the end, but there's no real-world explanation of what they're doing; Goold is too caught up in his theatrical conceit to serve the fact-based story he's trying to tell. Too often, in fact, Enron plays like 60 Minutes on acid.
Unlike the company whose storied fall it chronicles, Enron clearly telegraphs its intention to defraud the consumer: 'When we tell you [this] story, you should know it could never be exactly what happened. But we're gonna put it together and sell it to you as the truth.' This proviso is delivered by a lawyer, who adds: 'I could tell you how the world works, but I don't have the time, and you don't have the money.' That gets broad laughs—and broad laughs are what's for sale here. Subtlety is not a commodity that Lucy Prebble's fast, flashy, feckless Epcot ride of a play is trading in: If twelve-gauge potshots at the likes of Schwarzenegger and Lehman Brothers are your taste, you won't be disappointed.
2010 | West End |
West End Transfer West End |
2010 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Sound Design in a Play | Adam Cork |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Mark Henderson |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre | Adam Cork |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre | Lucy Prebble |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play | Stephen Kunken |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Sound Design of a Play | Adam Cork |
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