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Wall Street Journal
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Call Me Izzy' Review: A Woman Shows Her Smarts on Broadway
New York Jean Smart makes a welcome, and warmly welcomed, return to Broadway after an absence of a quarter-century in 'Call Me Izzy,' a solo show by Jamie Wax about a woman trying to break free from an abusive marriage. Ms. Smart has reached a later-career peak recently, winning three Emmy Awards for her performance as a down-and-out comic rampaging on the comeback trail in 'Hacks,' in which she has given one of the most superlative performances of the streaming-television era.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Jean Smart, Gritty and Poetic in ‘Call Me Izzy'
Two things can happen when a big star appears in a small play. She can crush it, or she can crush it. The first is almost literal: She leaves the story in smithereens beneath her glamorous feet. The second is colloquial: She's a triumph, lifting the story to her level. Returning to Broadway after 25 years in 'Call Me Izzy,' which opened Thursday at Studio 54, Jean Smart crushes it in the good way. Naturally, Smart plays the title character, a poor Louisiana housewife who writes poems on the sly. In the manner of such vehicles, she also plays everyone else, including Ferd (her abusive husband), Rosalie (a nosy neighbor), Professor Heckerling (a community college instructor) and the Levitsbergs (a couple who have endowed a poetry fellowship). You could probably write the play from that information alone, but I'm not sure you'd achieve the level of old-fashioned floweriness and deep-dish pathos that the actual author, Jamie Wax, has achieved. For this is quite self-consciously a weepie, one that with its allusions to Melville's lyrical prose ('Moby-Dick' begins with the phrase 'Call me Ishmael') aspires to poetry itself. The play's first words are an incantation: six synonyms for 'blue' as Izzy drops toilet cleaner tablets in the tank. ('Swirlin' cerulean' is one.) Shakespeare comes next, after a visit to a local library she didn't know existed. Ears opened, she is soon devising sonnets of her own. This she does in secret, lest Ferd, who sees her hobby as a betrayal, should discover the evidence and beat her up. (He has been doing that with some regularity since their infant son died years earlier.) In a detail that's a few orders of magnitude too cute, Izzy's sanctum is the bathroom, where she scratches out her lines in eyebrow pencil, on reams of toilet paper. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
