Word: shalhoub
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...other four actors, most of whom play more than one role, all give strong lively performances with especially fine timing and interaction. Cherry Jones is a charming incarnation of evil as Mother: Tony Shalhoub (Father) and Karen MacDonald (several roles) appear appropriately flimsy creatures, attracting attention without abandoning their feeble personalities. Marianne Owen (Nanny/Principal) is the best comedian, but she tends to be even more overpowering than her characters are intended to be, which distracts the audience from the rest of the show...
...A.R.T.'s Figaro seems a document of the 1780s, a chronicle of crumbling deference, while remaining in many ways an autobiographical play. Leib has taken Figaro's lengthy monologue from the start of Beaumarchais' fifth act and distributed it as a series of prologues for each act. As Tony Shalhoub's Figaro recounts his life-history as a swashbuckler, gambler, poet, doctor, barber--an account filled with the sarcasm of a man hounded by a world he's sure is in the wrong--the audience recognizes the playwright behind his costume...
...first time this season, though, the individual A.R.T. performers do not match the precision of the rest of the creative team. Their errors are of emphasis, not conception: Shalhoub's Figaro, feisty and engaging in his monologues, seems too resentful and angry in his battle of wits with the Count--his "high spirits" reach only middling altitudes. As he counters the Count's designs on his bride-to-be Suzanne with plots of his own, he acts more like an lago than a Prospero. Karen Macdonald's Suzanne follows his lead--spleen overbalances sweetness. Harry Murphy's smug Count...
...through little touches and shades of emphasis that Epstein works his interpretation into the grain of Beaumarchais' play. When Shalhoub presents Figaro's epiphanic monologue, he strides from seat-top to seat through the empty first rows of the auditorium, with all the precarious confidence of his social-climbing instinct--then hops down, nods furtively and scurries by the legs of the audience with some submissive mutters of "excuse me." The moment when the jealous Count gives Cherubino an army officer's commission to remove him from the scene--immortalized by Mozart in his mock-heroic, trumpet-and-drum aria...
LIKE ANY BURLESQUE, Has "Washington" Legs? depends heavily on individual performances and a lot of business. Stephen Rowe, as the hapless Joe Veriato, seems overwrought in the first act, his pained expressions becoming tiresome; as his assistant Wesley, Tony Shalhoub succeeds with less mugging. I also liked Eric Elice as the silent Dan Rashur and Thomas Derrah, as the hipster director Mickey Boorman in the first act and the lost actor in the second half...