Never Be Opening———The 'Glengarry' Switcheroo

I really liked Charles Isherwood's story in the Times about the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross and their cynical decision to hold the show's opening, so I wrote a thing about it. 

Times theater critic Charles Isherwood caused a stir this week with an essay about the craven behavior of the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross, who used Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to postpone the official opening of their show by a month. While some imaginative conspiracy theorists have fantasized that this was simply a ploy to give marquee star Al Pacino a bit more time to learn his lines, Isherwood paints a more cynical picture, of producers selling high-priced tickets to something that is a preview-in-name-only, allowing them to rake in around $1 million weekly without having to face potential critical wrath.

When news came this week that Mamet’s other show on Broadway is closing—something his plays have done a lot of lately—hiding from critics suddenly seemed like a bright idea. Reviewers hated The Anarchist—a turgid think-piece about, sigh, the nature of evil and truth and stuff—and so The Anarchist died. But Glengarry might be a special case: a serious play that doesn’t need to be reviewed, because the critics can’t affect it at all.

Read it! Read it, you fools!

Al Pacino, King of Jockstraps

Continuing my streak of breaking thirty year-old, well-reported news, I wrote some things about Cruising for Bullett. That would be Cruising, the 1980 William Friedkin/Al Pacino masterpiece about a leather bar serial killer, which is on Watch Now for the next five days, so really if you're gonna watch it, watch it now. Now now now!

Last week, previews started for the new Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, which has been marketed with a particularly unimaginative bit of stunt casting: putting Al Pacino, who played hotshot Ricky Roma in the 1992 film adaptation, in the role of sadsack Shelly Levene. Because we haven’t seen this new Glengarry yet, and because it’s a grey Friday afternoon, we decided to spend the afternoon with an earlier, less self-conscious version of Alfredo James Pacino. It was a worthwhile experiment, and not just because it was so much more fun than doing real work.

(An aside: Can you measure an actor’s success by how few original plays he appears in on Broadway? Pacino’s last appearance in an original play was in 1969′s Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie?, a drug addict drama the Times called “spasmodically rewarding.” It closed in a month, but Pacino drew good reviews for his portrayal of “a lumbering, drug-sodden psychopath with the mind of a bully and the soul of a poet.” He got famous soon after, and since then has been the kind of bankable Hollywood star who can anchor a big money revival.)

And, of course, there's more! But this is really the best part—the jockstrap-wearing cop whose presence is not explained at all:

The infamous interrogation scene from the notorious 1980 thriller "Cruising" directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino. Believe it or not, it was based off an actual interrogation technique.