Good Actors, Poor Impression (Newsday.com, March 25, 2009)

http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/wednesday/partii/ny-etimp6081287mar25,0,3661863.story

There must be a reason Irons chose "Impressionism" for his first Broadway vehicle since he won his Tony Award for "The Real Thing" in 1984. Surely, Allen saw something in this plodding romance - by virtual theater unknown Michael Jacobs - to be lured onstage for the first time here since she won her Tony for "Burn This" in 1988 and our allegiance forever in "The Heidi Chronicles" in 1989.

Not to belabor the bafflements, but how is it that director Jack O'Brien - with Tony achievements as diverse as "Hairspray" and "Henry IV" - lavished his entire magnificent creative team from "Coast of Utopia" on this emotional piffle wrapped in fancy dress?

"Impressionism" manages what would seem to be impossible. It makes bores out of two unconscionably attractive and intelligent actors and wastes the sporting efforts of Marsha Mason, André de Shields and an underemployed quartet of less-celebrated talents.

It's going to take more than a pair of spectacles and a sleeveless cardigan to make anyone believe Irons could work in a small high-end art gallery for two years and not spark recognizable chemistry with his female boss. It requires more than a few poor-me flashbacks to justify the emotional diffidence in the gallery owner, who has yards of camera-ready blonde hair and apparently commutes by subway in stratospheric footwear.

Irons plays a world-battered photojournalist who wanders into Allen's quiet, high-end Manhattan gallery with the spare inventory of mostly Impressionist lithographs. He stays, though it is unclear what he does except look bemused and drone on about the social history of the day's African coffee bean. She prattles about the "unique identity" of cranberries in muffins. He likes a Chagall poster of a mermaid. She wonders about the women who modeled for Modigliani. People drop into the gallery to deliver revelations that only occur in plays. Piano-bar music divides the scenes.

It is the space between those scenes where "Impressionism" makes an impression - at least as a traveling art exhibit. Projections of paintings - mostly of women and daughters - wash over the scrim and descend as if on gallery wire. We learn a bit about the characters in brief memory scenes, including a tragedy in Tanzania and one in which Irons plays an aging artist with what just might be some English idea of a Cajun accent.

Jacobs, a Hollywood veteran who created such TV series as "My Two Dads" and "Charles in Charge," says we cannot see reality - in life as in art - without taking a step back. Perhaps no one did that here.