Sunday, May 2, 2010

“Enron” at the Broadhurst Theater

"We're going to put it together and sell it to you as the truth," proclaims the lawyer for the villainous CEO Jeffrey Skilling, played with surprising nuance by song-and-dance man Norbert Leo Butz, at the outset of “Enron,” referring to the grand spectacle that's about to unfold before our eyes. The calamitous fall of the energy giant in 2001, a harbinger of the financial meltdown to come, has been exhaustively documented, first in the 2003 book “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and later in Alex Gibney's 2005 Oscar-nominated doc based on that source. So the latest incarnation, a ballsy Broadway musical, is smartly less concerned with the how's of the scandal than with asking "Why?"—as the company's own tagline urged in its advertising.

To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door at Slant Magazine.

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