Thurgood Marshall Heads to Broadway, and So Do We!

[WSJ Law Blog]

For those who keep up with the culture pages, by now you know that Thurgood Marshall has come to Broadway — in the form of Laurence Fishburne (pictured). A one-man show, “Thurgood” opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theatre on 45th Street in Manhattan.

Though the Law Blog won’t be seeing the show until May 21, when Yale Law School professors Owen Fiss and Dan Kahan, both former Marshall clerks, will be present to participate in a talk-back after the performance, we want to give Loyal LB Readers a quick round-up of reviews before you head home. Have a great weekend!

A shallow exercise in hagiography?

According to the WSJ’s Terry Teachout, “Thurgood” shows us the Marshall that was “by all accounts a peerless raconteur, full to overflowing of blunt, salty tales about the troubles he’d seen” — but “nothing more.” Like most one-man shows about historical figures, writes Teachout, “it’s a shallow exercise in hagiography: [the] script turns Marshall into a smug, self-satisfied storyteller whom we are invited to admire, and the fact that he did so many admirable things does not make this one-dimensional portrait any more credible, much less dramatic.”

Surprisingly absorbing, at times even stirring: The NYT’s theater reviewer, Charles Isherwood, is a bit more kind. While Isherwood calls the play “a no-frills documentary,” “essentially an opportunity to watch a movie star deliver a history lecture,” he writes that Fishburne is “an effortlessly compelling actor, and the history in question is charged with a moral urgency that still resonates today.” (For the LB’s money, Fishburne will never be as good as he was when, at 17, he played Gunner 3rd Class Tyrone “Mr. Clean” Miller in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Academy Award-winning “Apocalypse Now.”)

“‘Thurgood’ — Not Thurgreat”: That’s the headline of a review by the NY Post’s Clive Barnes. But, writes Barnes, through “Fishburne’s carefully layered, wholly convincing performance” one discovers a great deal about Marshall’s life, even if most of what he has to tell “is admirable yet predictable - a hardscrabble childhood, parental sacrifice, a fierce unyielding ambition, a splendid intellect and a natural legal mind, all of it essential for the journey from the back streets of Baltimore to Washington’s corridors of power.”