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Alan Cox as David Frost and Stacy Keach as Richard Nixon
Frost/Nixon plays tonight at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. at the Paramount Theatre. Tickets are $18-$60 plus fees.
For those of you wondering, Frost/Nixon works better as a play than as a film. As written by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland), it comes to life on the stage, collapsing the decades since, while the film tries and fails really to recreate the era. The touring Broadway production is directed by Michael Grandage, who staged the original London Sheen/Langella production, and his work here is sure-handed.
Grandage was lucky enough to get Alan Cox and Stacy Keach for take two, and they play wonderfully off each other. Orotund Mount Keach stews and rumbles and erupts; puppyish Cox gushes rainbows and sunshine, popping to the balls of his feet to underscore his excitement.
It may surprise anyone who thinks of Stacy Keach as Mike Hammer, but Keach has long led a double-life as one of America's leading Shakespearean actors, and here, in this story of a once-powerful king in his angry, embittered dotage, he sinks his teeth in deep. We were sitting quite a way back, but when Keach's Nixon caught fire, we instinctively wanted to step back a bit more.
The set--basically what you see above--highlights the play's conceit: two very different armchair combatants fighting for a prize only one can win. Lightweight British talk-show host David Frost has made ex-President Nixon an offer he can't refuse: a chance to "set the record straight" and cash a sizable check. Frost, trying to battle his way back to relevancy after cancellation of his New York show set him all the way back to Australian TV, wants the taciturn Nixon to bare his soul on national television.
Frankly, that conflict never rises to the occasion--it feels drummed up by a playwright who wants a hook. And while Brian Sgambati plays the idealistic Presidential watchdog Jim Reston capably, motoring through piles exposition as our narrator, this story not his story--so why all the stage time when Jim Reston intertitles would do? Still there are two reasons not to miss this show.
One: Stacy Keach's Nixon is some of the best acting you're going to see in your life. It's shot through with the truth of Nixon--his self-destructiveness, paranoia, viciousness, intellect, strategic genius, and sentimentality--and yet never amounts to imitation. Keach suggests Nixon here and there with a florid tone, bitten-off speech, crabbed posture--all elements he subtly embodies so that, as you watch, Nixon becomes this other man on stage.
Two: The play presents the reality of Presidential power in a novel, and very real, way. When he was in office, ordering the carpet bombing of Cambodia, people like Reston couldn't hate Nixon enough. Afterwards...there he was, a crushed retiree playing golf in the California sunshine, and of course you'd shake his hand. Frost/Nixon presents that moment of judgment for you, the audience, staged like a mini-Nuremberg trial, and asks if it matters. Does it still matter? Your answer may be disturbing.
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I had no idea Stacy Keach was actually a good actor!
You take a swipe at the movie. I have watched it several times (and compared it to the actual interviews) and thought it proved some drama/tension plus featured real actors with talent. Can't say that this road version of the play. I know what Keach was thinking up there on stage (I'll show them what ACTING is").
Is there an actor out there who doesn't think that? I liked the movie for its performances more than its success as a movie. (How are you not gonna love Langella's Nixon? Not possible.) But I feel like the play really puts you *there* in the moment, with Nixon losing his shit onstage, in a way that the film felt like it was reproducing. Tastes vary, though. I don't mean to say the film isn't an accomplishment in its own right.