Broadway Review: Fences

Let me just get this out of the way – Denzel Washington was outstanding. The very minute he walks onstage, he fills the theater with his presence and you just sit back and enjoy the ride he’s about to take you on.

Fences opened last night at Broadway’s Cort Theater for a limited run through July 11^th and judging from the packed, enthusiastic audience I saw it with, this will be a hard show to get tickets to.

It stars Washington as Troy Maxson, a 53-year-old sanitation worker who once had aspirations of a career in baseball. Married to the devoted Rose (Viola Davis), their back and forth talk, mostly with sexual undertones make for a seemingly happy marriage. Mid way through the first act, his best friend, Bono (Stephen McKinely Henderson), begins to hint at some definite character flaws in Troy that come up in the second act; some shocking, some not.

The show was great and as I said before, Denzel (I’ll call him by his first name, sure) was incredible. The only problem I had – and I’m not sure you can even call it a problem – was the Denzel was so fantastic that he made everyone else look just good. Do you know what I mean? He raised the bar so high that everyone was trying to get to the same level that he was on. Sometimes they were there and sometimes they weren’t.

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Denzel Washington and Viola Davis on the Broadway revival of “Fences”

You really have to watch this.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis talk about why they are doing this revival of Fences, their early careers in the theater and more.

This snippet is a little over 5 minutes but you can see the passion they have for the show, acting and life.

Watch it!

Update:
Here is the whole discussion. It’s broken down into 5 parts because YouTube can only handle shorter videos.

Viola Davis on why she wanted to become an actor

Actors facing dearth of work during downturn

Pursuing the actor’s path is an all-or-nothing decision, a choice rooted as much in identity as desire. For actors’ actors, doing any other kind of work is simply not an option, even when there’s nothing on the horizon. If starvation is the alternative, they’ll seriously consider it.

“I would go three months without a gig, and then I was on unemployment, and then unemployment would run out,” says Viola Davis — who appears opposite Meryl Streep as the mother of a possible abuse victim in Miramax’s “Doubt.” After she graduated from Juilliard, she found herself living in New York with multiple roommates, “auditioning for everything” and barely scraping by. “At various times, I would live on chicken wings at Chinese restaurants because they were really inexpensive — $1.25 for a package of four or five greasy chicken wings and 80 cents for a quart of white rice — and that’s what I would live on and nothing else. And every once in a while, those three-for-a-dollar vanilla creme sandwich cookies. And that’s hard.”

Read the rest here

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