Today I saw The River.  What was it supposed to be about?   Aside from getting to ogle Hugh Jackman's impressive physique for 85 uninterrupted minutes, I'm unclear.  Jackman, the "man",  is a recreational trout fisherman on a date on a river on a moonless night  ...spoiler alert!... told at least twice concurrently.  I'm afraid that about halfway through I began to think he was a serial killer. That would have actually given it some juice.  As it was the only juice came from the lemons used to cook - for real- a trout on stage.  However, I am going to try his recipe.  And I now know more about trout fishing than I will ever need to know.

Jez Butterworth author of the overpraised but engrossing Jerusalem wrote it and it has the same director, Ian Rickson.  I was not a fan of Mark Rylance's over-the-top emoting in that play but Hugh Jackman outdid himself trying not to match it.  No singing, dancing or even a flash of Wolverine here.  Cosh Jumbo's flat performance as one of the "women" did not do much to inspire me to see her in her upcoming one-woman show about Josephine Baker at the Public.  I did quite like the other actress, Laura Donnelly, who brought a little quirkiness to play with her odd posture, posturing and line-reading.  She can currently be seen on Starz in "Outlander" which I am now curious to see. But the best performance came from the understudy Kerry Warren who opened the show with a fresh and imaginative demonstration on how exactly to turn off our cell-phones.