CHARLOTTE MAIER OPENS IN "INHERIT THE WIND" ON BROADWAY

Smartmom called her friend Charlotte Maier early this morning. Oops. She woke them up. She knew they were up late at the opening night party of Inherit the Wind in which Charlotte plays Mrs. Krebs. But she couldn't wait to hear how it went. The show opened Thursday night the Lyceum Theater (on Broadway not the Brooklyn Lyceum). How glamorous, how fun: partying down at the Bryant Park Grill with the cast and crew of the show, including Christopher Plummer, who will always be known and loved as Captain Von Trapp in "The Sound of Music."

"So how'd it go?" Smartmom asked Charlotte.

"Great. Joan Rivers was in the audience," she told Smartmom.

"How were the reviews?"

Charlotte groaned. Seems that the Times pretty much panned the show. But Variety gave it a rave and New York Magazine seems to have liked it very much as did Smartmom (Hepcat and OSFO, too).

Okay, so everyone's excited about Christopher Plummer. But for those in Park Slope, the big news is that Charlotte Maier is in the show and she's wonderful to watch.

Here's what New York Magazine had to say:

Christopher Plummer s giving the kind of performance you’ll one day brag about having seen. As Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow–esque lawyer in Inherit the Wind, he makes every snap of his suspenders ring true. He walks a little stiffly, with a stoop, and tosses away some lines. But note the wicked twinkle in his eye: He’s just playing rope-a-dope. At the climax of this dramatized version of the Scopes Monkey Trial, when Drummond calls the Bible-thumping attorney Matthew Harrison Brady to the stand, Plummer gives his lines an acid bite, and moves with the kind of can’t-look-away ­charisma that mortals don’t possess. He skips from aggressive to playful to grave, but never when you expect him to, making this one of the rare performances you love to watch because there’s no telling where it might go next. I’ve seen plenty of first-class acting, and flashes of greatness now and then, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

When Plummer really gets going, as in the speech where Drummond acknowledges that progress comes at a price—“You may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline”—he makes Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee sound like much, much better playwrights than they were. So, for the most part, does director Doug Hughes. He’s not usually an auteur type: Getting extraordinary work out of his actors, like Cherry Jones and Brían F. O’Byrne in Doubt, or Plummer and Byron Jennings, who’s scarily fierce as the town preacher here, is usually his forte. But he goes a little conceptual on this one.

If you want to be technical, you’d say he’s taken a folksy expressionist approach, using white light and spare staging to replace the play’s mid-century realism with a Thornton Wilder vibe. If you don’t want to be technical, you’d say he’s not screwing around. All the extra stagecraft he’s thrown at the script—a bluegrass band that warms up the crowd, audience members who sit in what look like two jury boxes onstage—is designed to cut through its fussy, dated qualities, making this ninth-grade-English-class favorite feel as direct and pressing as breaking news.

Smartmom disagrees with what Jeremy McCarter has to say about the direction. She enjoyed the so-called "folksy" approach, especially the bluegrass band.