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Norbert Leo Butz leads a stylized Broadway play

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

BROADWAY REVIEW

Enjoy business — really big business? Serious plays about business are rare on Broadway (or anywhere) these days, so the new British comedy-drama-history epic "Enron" may well be a strong buy for you.

Opening Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theatre, "Enron" is a semi-expressionistic exploration of the billion dollar bankruptcy scandal of the early 2000s and the big dogs behind it.

First a caveat: Comprehending the thickets of Enron's shady practices is beyond my liberal arts-y mind. (Apparently that's just how Enron liked it.) So as much as playwright Lucy Prebble's text explains higher concepts like mark-to-market accounting and shell companies, I exited the Broadhurst still vague about the niceties of the scandal.

As far as the accuracy of this complicated matter goes, a figure representing a lawyer (the audience hissed him, by the way) tells viewers at the beginning how "we're going to sell it to you as the truth."

Anyway, I sure know a striking show when I see one and "Enron" offers a whirlwind study of the guts and greed driving Enron's boom and bust over a ten-year period.

Stylized musical interludes, choreographed movement, multimedia effects and fanciful costumes are extensively employed by director Rupert Goold to relate and enhance Prebble's darkly comic saga of modern-day robber barons madly pumping up a Texas energy company into an international bubble.

Such a surreal atmosphere — those debt-swallowing special purpose entities known as "Raptors" are seen as "Jurassic Park" monsters lurking in a basement — brightens the skullduggery into something of a dramatic cartoon. Led by Norbert Leo Butz's bravura performance as gonzo Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, a 16-member ensemble whips through the seriocomic story's intricacies.

A Maplewood, N.J. resident last seen on Broadway sporting petticoats in Mark Twain's "Is He Dead?", Butz proficiently depicts Skilling's successive transformations from a nerdy whiz kid to a corporate master of the universe to a desperate man fighting off ruin. What's more, Butz makes the guy fairly likeable.

Stephen Kunken wittily portrays Enron chief financial officer Andy Fastow as a wonk who warps into a fiscal mad scientist. Gregory Itzin is very folksy as foxy Kenneth Lay while a poised Marin Mazzie coolly represents Skilling's board room frenemy. Confidently swinging laptops and light sabers, the ensemble neatly enacts everyone from the Lehman Brothers to a nasty scrum of traders.

Bewildering though the technicalities of "Enron" may be to anyone who doesn't own an MBA, the 29-year old Prebble has fashioned a swift journey on a corporate thrill ride. This satirical yet ultimately sobering study in American avarice has been extravagantly staged by Goold and production designer Anthony Ward with frenzies of videos, projections, lighting and sound effects that support the story and display a lot of incidental smarts.

For instance, a sequence depicting the commodities market zooming upwards is amusingly rendered as an atonal Philip Glass-Robert Wilson sort of post-modern chorale interpreted with typically spastic gestures. Now that shows an imagination that even Skilling and his inventive crew could envy.

"Enron" continues an open-end run at the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St., New York. Call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.broadwaysbestshows.com.

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