Originally produced on Broadway by the National Football League, you can rest assured that the biodrama of the Green Bay Packers’ legendary coach, titled simply Lombardi, is an unwavering tribute to the man.
Sure, it shows he had a short-fused temper, barking orders to his players and his wife, as if they all worked for him. But as playwright Eric Simonson sees it, that explosive behavior is just evidence that Vince Lombardi cared too much about winning.
That is about as deep as Lombardi — the play, that is — gets. A surprise hit in New York, where it reportedly attracted sports fans to try theatergoing in unprecedented numbers, it could well do the same for Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre, which is kicking off the Southeastern premiere of the 90-minute celebration of the obsessive Hall of Famer.
Richard Jay Simon directs the material efficiently on a gridiron stage flanked by two revolving stages, designed by technical director Douglas Grinn to become such locales as the Packers’ locker room, the Lombardis’ living room and a Green Bay pool hall/pub. And Simon has imported The Sopranos’ Ray Abruzzo to play Coach Lombardi with a persuasive, albeit two-note — seething and volcanic — performance.
There can be no argument that Lombardi is one of pro football’s greats. He took a talented but losing team and turned it around, winning three straight league championships and the first two Super Bowls. But even those achievements do not add up to sufficient drama onstage, at least as Simonson tells the story.
He opts for a fairly wheezy device of introducing a fictional reporter and unabashed Lombardi fan, Michael McCormick (Antonio Amadeo), sent by Look magazine to profile the coach, in part to counteract a recent hatchet job in Esquire. Welcomed into their home by Lombardi’s alcoholic wife Marie (Laura Turnbull), McCormick soon learns that getting beneath his subject’s blustery surface will be difficult if not impossible, and so do we.
Nevertheless, Lombardi is entertaining, but you had better be interested in football, because the play is unable to make the leap to metaphor, to find a larger message in the man’s accomplishments. Simonson knows how to craft a good one-liner, with most of the best handled with assurance by highball-toting Turnbull, but after a while you will probably crave something more profound.
Rounding out the cast are Scott Douglas Wilson, Donte Fitzgerald and Skye Whitcomb as Packers players Paul Hornung, Dave Robinson and Jim Taylor. Each is sketched in to make a specific point. Hornung is the undisciplined partier to the coach’s dismay and Robinson is there to illustrate Lombardi’s evenhandedness to his black squad members. Taylor, a loose cannon when it comes to talking to the press, shares one of the play’s most intriguing scenes, a confrontation with Lombardi over the advent of sports agents for contract negotiations.
Lombardi is a cut below the plays that Simon usually chooses, but it just might prove to be one of his biggest commercial successes. Any theater company is entitled to the occasional cash cow, but here’s hoping Mosaic does not make a habit of it.
LOMBARDI, Mosaic Theatre, 12200 West Broward Blvd., Plantation. Continuing through Dec. 4. Tickets: $39.50. Call: (954) 577-8243.