The play seemed to bring out the best prescriptive instincts on the critical corps. Reviewers were mostly impressed with the play as something new and different, if uneven and unwieldy. All agreed the play was "overstuffed" and ought to have been trimmed. "There's a tight, bright, nasty 90-minute play lurking in this sprawling two-and-three-quarter-hour work," wrote Newsday. Still, most reviewers cut Diamond considerable slack on this front. "As over-written as it is," said Hollywood Reporter, "Diamond’s script has enough amusing lines and perceptive observations — particularly about the behavior men learn or reject from their fathers — to keep it engaging."

A few reviews gave Diamond great credit for putting an unfamiliar world — a well-to-do, intellectual, African-American family in which class and race are just a couple of the subjects open to argument — on stage. "Yes, it's a mess," wrote the Wall Street Journal, "but a fascinating one, well directed by Kenny Leon and performed with total persuasiveness by his ensemble cast, and the best parts are so good that you'll be glad to forgive Ms. Diamond when she goes wrong." Others pointed out that, while the characters were interesting and well-spoken, one got few glimpses into their inner lives. Meanwhile, some reviews chided the play's slide into conventional melodrama, while others applauded this same tendency.

The cast received high marks, and Rashad was singled out for her "quietly captivating" portrayal of a maid's daughter with ambitions. Mama Phylicia must be proud.

	Steve Kazee in Once.
	photo by Joan Marcus

Once, the folky Irish pop stage musical inspired by the hit independent film, is on a fast track indeed. Producers didn't even wait until the show opened Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop Dec. 6 to tell the world it would move to Broadway soon after. A covey of backers will take the show to Broadway's Jacobs Theatre for a first preview Feb. 28, 2012, and an opening night of March 18.

The musical is based on the cult 2006 Irish movie-with-music of the same name, in which an ordinary Guy and a Girl meet over a broken vacuum cleaner and begin composing music for a demo tape, and possibly falling in love. The musical has an interesting array of highly talented creatives, even if none of them quite rate as a household name with American theatregoers. The music and lyrics are by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who won an Oscar for their work. The book is by noted Irish playwright Enda Walsh. John Tiffany, the acclaimed Scottish director of the international success Black Watch, directs. And the cast feature Steve Kazee as Guy and Cristin Milioti as Girl.

You can't really blame the producers for jumping the gun on this one. Word of mouth on the show has been good for weeks. In aiming the show at Broadway before the critics weighed in, the producers obviously showed great faith in the project's appeal. But what did those critics think when the show opened Dec. 6? Ah, there's the rub. Well, some liked it a lot. Others had reservations. The main reservation-haver was the New York Times, which thought Once trucked a little too much in dangerously sentimental cliches. "The script is now steeped in wise and folksy observations about committing to love and taking chances, most of which are given solemn and thickly accented utterance by Girl." Still, the Times liked the music very much and had other positive things to say. But no doubt producers wished Ben Brantley had written something closer to the review that ran in Hollywood Reporter, which said "this bewitching stage adaptation arguably improves on the movie, expanding its emotional breadth and elevating it stylistically while remaining true to the original's raw fragility."