Writer's Block: Press views

The American press review Woody Allen's directorial debut on Broadway, Writer's Block.

Allen returns to familiar themes

New York Times

Writer's Block sits dead centre in the Woody Allen universe, a New York City-centric place where beautiful young women are unaccountably attracted to much older men, and more significantly where relatively affluent people grapple comically and paranoiacally with serious questions of love and lust, artistic and financial achievement, and the possibility of happiness given the inevitablility of death.

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Variety.com

For one thing, it's clear he's used to writing for the movies, where the camera frame usually focuses on one or two people. The dialogue here tends to keep breaking down into one-on-one confrontations that leave the rest of the characters onstage stranded. Allen the director is clearly at a loss when this occurs: The characters not involved in these exchanges often sit frozen in artificial attitudes of anguish or annoyance before the camera, as it were, pans back to them and they spring back to life.

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USA Today

The banter is salty but never sour; Allen keeps the tone and the performances warm and bright. A sassy Bebe Neuwirth and droll Heather Burns are especially sharp as sisters who share more than they realise.

Of course, however rich Allen's characters are, there's always the nagging impression that he's somehow, to some extent, writing about Woody Allen. But even those who don't buy into the theory that all art is self-serving would have to admit that, in good form, he's about as entertaining a solipsist as we've got.

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Hollywood Reporter

Peppered with Allen's usual quotient of amusing one-liners and dealing with themes oft explored in his films, Writer's Block, a pair of one-act off-Broadway comedies, has a tossed-out feel for which no amount of expert comic acting can compensate. Not that it matters; the limited engagement is already completely sold out.