Review: A ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Lacking Some Intensity

A new West End adaptation, starring Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist, recasts Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story as a memory play. Jack Twist (Mike Faist) and Ennis del Mar (Lucas Hedges) in a new production of “Brokeback Mountain” at London’s @sohoplace.Credit…Manuel Harlan “This ain’t no little thing,” Jack Twist (Mike Faist) says of the depth of attraction he is experiencing in “ Brokeback Mountain .” But the rodeo cowboy could equally be referring to the ongoing life of Annie Proulx’s celebrated short story. First seen on the pages of The New Yorker in 1997, Proulx’s distilled account of a tragically foreshortened affair has been an Oscar-winning film , an opera and now a self-described play-with-music. This latest iteration opened Thursday night in the @sohoplace theater in the West End, where it is scheduled to run through Aug. 12, offering a passing glimpse of some powerfully familiar characters. The bare bones of the narrative are there; the dramatically necessary flesh and blood and sinew are not. I was pleased to renew my acquaintanceship with the gregarious Jack and the more indrawn, troubled Ennis del Mar (Lucas Hedges), the two men who begin a furtive relationship in 1963 while herding sheep in the rural Wyoming locale of the title. But I’m not sure that the American writer Ashley Robinson’s adaptation actually deepens our understanding of material that many will inevitably associate with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a lauded movie that lasts a good 45 minutes longer than the play (Jonathan Butterell’s atmospheric production clocks in at 90 minutes, no intermission). Told piecemeal across 20 years, the play comes punctuated with an attractive sequence of original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, the English musician with whom Butterell collaborated on the (very sweet) homegrown stage and screen musical, “ Everybody’s Talking About Jamie .” The seductive country twang of his music is punchily delivered here by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader and an ace band visible at the side of the stage: look closely and you’ll see the pedal steel guitarist B.J. Cole, who has worked with Elton John and Joan […]

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