“Hughie,” Eugene O’Neill’s 1942 one-act about a two-bit gambler, has proven to be catnip to actors: Jason Robards, Brian Dennehy and Al Pacino are among the great actors who have all taken on the main role. And now Forest Whitaker is the latest to portray Erie Smith in a revival, directed by Michael Grandage (“Red”), beginning a limited engagement at the Booth Theatre on February 2 prior to opening on February 25. It will be the Broadway debut of the veteran actor, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 2006 for the role of dictator Idi Amin in “The King of Scotland,” and whose latest major film was in Lee Daniels’ critically-acclaimed “The Butler.”O’Neill’s brief play (just under an hour) is set in 1928 in a midtown Manhattan hotel, which has been reduced to something of a flophouse, home to itinerants and losers like Smith. Alternately aggressive, sentimental, and self-pitying, the forlorn Erie tells exaggerated tales of long-shot wins, mythic crap games, and floozies to a new hotel clerk who listens, bored but patient. His predecessor, the eponymous Hughie, has just died and the funeral sent Erie on a five-day bender. In the new revival, Tony winner Frank Wood (“Side Man”) will take the role of the long-suffering clerk.O’Neill himself confessed that “Hughie” was, “…written more to be read that staged,” the first and only completed drama of a proposed play cycle, called “By Way of Obit,” which was to be two characters discussing the death of another. Although written in 1942, the drama did not receive an American premiere until Jason Robards took on the role in 1964, which was followed by Ben Gazzara in 1975. Both men were nominated for Tony Awards. But that was not the case for the actor who had the longest and most successful run in the role: Al Pacino, who starred in a sell-out engagement in 1996 at Circle in the Square.Pacino, whose commitment to theater has not cooled since his Broadway debut in the short-lived “Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie?” in 1969, is presently in previews in David Mamet’s new play “China Doll.” Opening on November 19, the production has been doing brisk business, entering the $1 million/week club at last accounting. The play is directed by Pam Mackinnon (Tony winner for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) and has come in for a lot of sniping and damning gossip (see Michael Riedel in the New York Post).That probably won’t matter much since the run is nearly sold out through the holidays and will continue only through January 31. This is the world premiere of a new drama by one of the theater’s most controversial playwrights, and it’s inevitable that kinks being ironed out at full-priced previews are likely to try the public’s patience. Pacino is known for coming into his characters slowly, and the two-character drama, about a billionaire, Mickey Ross, who’s bought a plane for his fiancée as he is about to go into semiretirement, is long on talk and short on action. (Christopher Denham plays his assistant.) “China Doll” was written for Pacino, who’s done well by Mamet in the past (“American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”). Some have compared the character to a certain bombastic presidential candidate, so it seems hard to believe it could be that boring.
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