Word: burtness
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...infinite advantage, Frankie and Johnny has always attracted superior actors--Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham in New York, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino in Movieland. That tradition continues in the Loeb Ex production, where Sarah Burt-Kinderman "97 and Peter Friedland "98 are providing some enchanted evenings...
...Burt-Kinderman has a harder job. McNally gives Johnny the snappiest lines and the sweetest ones, leaving Frankie to fill all the emotional space between. Also, because Johnny is smitten from Scene One, the will-they-or-won't-they momentum of the piece rests entirely on her changes of mood. In other words, whoever plays Frankie has to keep the play moving and slow everything down...
...Burt-Kinderman performs the balancing act well. She moves with a casual grace that really transforms the Loeb from a theatre space into a real woman's apartment. She also has the rare comic gift of winning laughs without seeming to have any punch lines. Her jokes fall humbly out of her mouth as if she had just made them...
...feel a little strained, as if each actor is still warming up and searching for a rhythm. Both performances also warranted a fine-tuning here and there. Friedland, for example, on Johnny's first visit to Frankie's apartment, walks toward every utensil, appliance and food product he needs. Burt-Kinderman, for her part, tends to forecast future jokes by speeding through her lines so Johnny can zing one off. Both of these tendencies felt a little overrehearsed, a problem in a play that already feels a little canned...
...makes no pretense toward Art. At one point, Johnny asks Frankie to recite a monologue from a high-school performance. She balks: "You think actors just go around acting for people like that?" Sometimes, it seems, they do. Frankie and Johnny is fast-food for the theatrical set, but Burt-Kinderman and Friedland serve it up scrumptious...