Theater: A Steady Rain

Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

New York

(212) 239-6200

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That roar swelling over Broadway these days is the sound of fans lined up at the stage door for A Steady Rain,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Keith Huff’s two-man cop drama is breaking box office records thanks to a pair of Hollywood action stars. Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman here shed their James Bond and Wolverine personas to portray two hard-boiled Chicago cops whose lifelong bond (they’ve known each other since “kinny­garten”) is tested by a series of ­criminal incidents that blur the line between good guys and bad guys. Obviously, Jackman and Craig “could charm the pants off half the audience just by reading the ­proverbial phone book,” but both actors are actually “earning their adulation” with taut, surprising performances.

It’s nice to see that Jackman and Craig aren’t resting on their movie star laurels, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Too bad the play itself turns out to be such thin gruel. Without the presence of its two hunky stars, A Steady Rain almost certainly “would have never made it to Broadway.” Huff has packed the play with tales of all manner of pimps, ­killers, illicit sex, and “enough lurid incident to fill a season of Law & Order.” But his “threadbare” premise is the kind of stuff that’s replayed over and over again on television cop dramas. A Steady Rain “is probably best regarded as a small, wobbly pedestal on which two gods of the screen may stand in order to be worshipped.”

“But the two stars are so compelling onstage that the audience happily goes along for the ride,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. Director John Crowley has coached his actors through Huff’s complicated Chicago patois, and Jackman “is in full macho-bluster mode” as Denny, the swaggering alpha partner whose lack of a moral compass causes him to cross the boundaries of lawfulness. Craig, in his American stage debut, is a “revelation” as Joey, a brooding Irish-American cop whose patience with his partner is wearing increasingly thin. Jackman and Craig will have a long run to perfect an already strong chemistry that “should well translate” to A Steady Rain’s “inevitable screen version.”