Breakfast At Tiffany’s, the Truman Capote novella, was famously adapted to film starring Audrey Hepburn and recently for Broadway, starring Emilia Clarke. Unfortunately, the reviews suggest they should have stopped at the movie. Let’s take a look.
Emilia Clarke is obviously talented, but she is so miscast as Holly Golightly that it’s kind of shocking.
There’s no palpable connection between [lead characters] Fred and Holly…[Clarke] has the air of an impostor, which is good (and her best quality in this role)…But this is not a nuanced performance that reveals personal dislocation or pain, or some emptiness inside, or any kind of journey.
Clarke doesn’t demonstrate the maturity to convey Holly’s unique dichotomy of breezy insouciance and jaded calculation…[her] delivery mostly comes off as effortful over-enunciation…Far more than the casting or writing, however, the insurmountable problem is Mathias’ cloddish direction. One scene bumps into the next with painfully awkward transitions…
Emilia Clarke…can’t pull it off. She’s likable, she sings her one song (not “Moon River”) well, and she looks lovely in Colleen Atwood’s costumes. But when a girl named Golightly has to work at effervescence, something’s wrong—and it’s wrong throughout the production…Breakfast at Tiffany’s gets dreary pretty fast.
Richard Greenberg’s new stage adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a meandering misfire lacking the charm and oomph of either Capote’s 1958 novella or the 1961 movie…[Clark] she comes off as shrill rather than insouciant…Greenberg’s entire first act is a slog, bogged down with dreary exposition and the introduction of far too many quirky but uninteresting characters.
All of the reviews agree on one thing: the cat is fantastic. Yeah, that’s a real-life motherf-cking cat, and it steals the whole motherf-cking show.
But cats always do :)
My critique for the Hollywood Reporter: It’s writers are so tightly enveloped in their own (often misguided) sense of self-importance that they offer readers –in generous quantities– eye-rolling induced nausea as a direct result of their conspicuous pretension…
Read HR’s comment and then mine…and tell me honestly that neither of them make you want to dry heave. Just sayin’.