Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross; photo by Scott Landis.
A bunch of dodgy real estate and questionable business dealings, untenable fiscal positions, a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources, and, somewhere offstage, an executive so detached from reality that he treats the human race like a kid with an ant farm: What took so long to arrange a revival of Glengarry Glen Ross? (Or another revival, the last one having been in 2005.) You’d think this would have been under way since the fourth quarter of 2008, perhaps with Dick Fuld cast in the role of the hapless Shelley “The Machine” Levene.
Rather than one of those real life sad sacks, we have Al Pacino as the saddest specimen among a very sad collection of real-estate salesmen forced to compete against one another to keep their jobs. Mr. Pacino’s acting on stage is as uneven as his acting on film, and one suspects that he is one of those great talents like Walt Whitman, capable of producing great work but utterly unable to distinguish his wheat from his chaff. His 2010 Shylock struck me as shallow and cartoonish, though those characteristics are not entirely inappropriate to The Merchant of Venice. Left to his own devices, Mr. Pacino is capable of spectacular acts of artistic self-immolation. But constrained by Mr. Mamet’s text and by Daniel Sullivan’s tight directing, Mr. Pacino here is an actor transformed. Rather than the manic and masticating Al Pacino of recent years,