Elling
Opening Night: November 21, 2010
Closing: November 28, 2010
Theater: Ethel Barrymore Theater
Set in the current day, Elling is a comedy about a wildly mismatched pair of roommates trying to embrace life, love, friendship, pizza, poetry and women. Both Elling and Kjell are patients in a mental hospital—Elling suffers from acute anxiety following his mother’s death, while Kjell is a childlike 40-year-old eager to lose his virginity. The two become roommates and face the challenge of establishing a normal life when released from the institution.
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November 21, 2010
The story of two recently released mental patients bunking together in an apartment in Oslo doesn’t sound like perfect fodder for a Broadway comedy. But there’s something relentlessly charming about "Elling."
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November 21, 2010
In theory, any play can be good. I’ve been surprised time and again by the excellence of shows that I expected to be awful. Sometimes, though, a show turns out to be fully as bad as I was expecting, a fact that usually becomes evident shortly after the curtain rises.
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November 21, 2010
Jacking up the comic volume on intimate material, this stage treatment smothers the off-kilter appeal and tender character observation of the movie.
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November 21, 2010
“Elling,” a delicate parable about male outcasts that combines elements of “The Odd Couple” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” might have been well served in an intimate Off-Broadway theater. Instead, it has been poorly chosen as a star vehicle for Brendan Fraser, who is making a horrifically bad Broadway debut.
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November 21, 2010
One is an almost-40-year-old virgin, understandably obsessed with sex but not particularly fond of bathing. The other is a proud mama’s boy who does not see the point in leaving the apartment — ever. Both are Norwegian and nutty as fruitcakes.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2010
Even the fiercest Palinite will succumb to the charms of Elling, a bent little love triangle between two middle-aged, mentally ill men and a mildly exasperated European welfare state. This gentle, subversively mellow comedy-of-quirks, adapted from a series of Norwegian novels that have already made multiple visits to the stage and screen (a movie version was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2002), follows the same ingratiating Oscar-and-Felix rhythms that dominate lots of roommate-story situations — with an important twist.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 22, 2010
Odd couples are the stuff comedies are made of. And duos don’t come stranger than the one in "Elling," an endearing but wearying play at the Barrymore Theatre.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2010
Not having read Norwegian writer Ingvar Ambjornsen’s novel "Elling" nor seen the 2002 film drawn from it, I cannot assess how faithfully his story regarding two misfits has been adapted for the stage.
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