Comb Bernard’s hair a little differently, and the roles could just as easily have been reversed.Īnd still, this Death of a Salesman scores. When, in a flashback to his glory days as a high school athlete, his nerdy friend Bernard (Fran Kranz) pleads to carry some of his gear to the big game, it almost plays as a joke. And Garfield is awfully young and delicate-looking for the disillusioned, 30-ish, former all-American boy Biff. Linda Emond, as Willy’s faithful wife Linda, seems too vibrant and self-assured to have been sucked in by his bluster all these years. The supporting cast is a little off as well. ( LIST: Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2011) His Willy Loman doesn’t sound like he could sell anybody anything. I didn’t mind Hoffman’s relative young age for the role of Willy (Hoffman is 44 Willy supposedly in his 60s), but he struck me as too slouchy and hangdog, with line readings so flat and matter-of-fact that it made me wonder how he got this far in the business world. Mike Nichols’ new production of Salesman, moreover, had me grumbling from the get-go.
And while Andrew Garfield, as his tormented son Biff, made a mark as one of the people screwed by Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, his real big-screen breakthrough - as Hollywood’s next Spider-Man - is still months away. Yes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Willy Loman in this revival of Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic, is one of our most acclaimed actors, and an Oscar winner for Capote, but no one has ever mistaken him for Reese Witherspoon. Even stranger, it’s a Death of a Salesman without one certified box office star. Follow Book of Mormon is a near-impossible ticket, long-running shows like Wicked and Jersey Boys are still packing them in, but the one undisputed new hit of the Broadway season is, strangely, that old dramatic warhorse, Death of a Salesman.
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