Based on real-life events and using music, dance and video, Lucy Prebble’s Enron explores one of the most infamous scandals in financial history, reviewing the tumultuous 1990s and casting a new light on the financial turmoil in which the world currently finds itself. Director Rupert Goold (Macbeth with Patrick Stewart), along with a crack team of designers, will bring the most exciting and innovative theatrical event Broadway has seen this decade.
Enron, the hit London import that opened last night at the Broadhurst Theatre, is a surprising and remarkable creation: It’s a two-and-a-half-hour lecture on business history, and it’s utterly thrilling. Credit for this feat of alchemy goes primarily to second-time playwright Lucy Prebble, and her director, Rupert Goold, artistic director of London’s Headlong Theatre, which commissioned Enron. Together, they take the seemingly dry subject matter and, with a clever, tightly constructed script and dark, menacing, inventive staging, produce a vibrant, deeply theatrical experience.
The English-born multimedia docudrama Enron, about the rise and crash of the Texas energy-trading behemoth, smelled strongly of what I called “transatlantic schadenfreude” in a review of another import: a topical satire in which Brits laugh up their sleeves at greedy, gullible American rubes. I was able to hedge my low expectations with my tremendous respect for director Rupert Goold and my boundless admiration for musical-comedy trouper Norbert Leo Butz, who portrays Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. What a surprise, then, to discover that Lucy Prebble’s multilayered play is not your typical Yank-bashing, but a darkly exhilarating portrait of hypertrophied capitalism and a society that allows faith-based fiscal systems to ravage the body economic. Drawing from a deep bag of theatrical tricks and riffling through found text, news videos and observed gestures, Prebble and Goold supply Broadway theatergoers with the sort of play they demand—a sharp-witted and rollicking business thriller to dazzle the eye and tickle the brain. If Enron’s stock were still circling the ticker, my advice would be to buy, buy, buy.
2010 | West End |
West End Transfer West End |
2010 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Sound Design in a Play | Adam Cork |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Mark Henderson |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre | Adam Cork |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre | Lucy Prebble |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play | Stephen Kunken |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Sound Design of a Play | Adam Cork |
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