Jean Smart has made her triumphant return to the Broadway stage after a 25-year hiatus, earning rave reviews from critics for her performance in the new one-woman production Call Me Izzy.
Written by Jamie Wax and directed by Sarna Lapine, the play is a darkly comedic portrait of a brilliant yet naive Louisiana woman trapped in an abusive marriage, whose secret talent for writing is both her greatest gift and her only way out.
The production, which opened Thursday at Studio 54, marks the six-time Emmy-winning Hacks star’s third time on Broadway. Smart, 73, made her debut starring as Hollywood darling Marlene Dietrich in the 1981 biographical play Piaf. She later led George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 2000 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, for which she earned a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play.
Smart’s long-awaited Broadway return has impressed critics, who have called her portrayal of Izzy “dazzling.”
Variety’s Frank Rizzo labeled it a “stunning and soulful performance.” Though Rizzo found Wax’s writing to be “all-too-familiar,” he credited Smart with elevating the material and making “Izzy’s story feel fresh, authentic and always compelling.”
“Smart is transformed here into a woman of a different class, one of limited means and options, but also one of great warmth, mischief and liveliness,” Rizzo added, predicting, “Yet another Smart turn and bravura performance should be a strong box office pull for this limited summer run.”
The Guardian’s Adrian Horton agreed that Smart’s performance was “magnetic,” but had stronger criticism of the story itself, writing that it “is the theatrical equivalent of the poverty porn that has baited Oscar voters for years.”
“Smart, heading back to Broadway after a career revival on television, has plenty of talent,” Jackson McHenry wrote for Vulture. “The trouble is she’s stuck in a production that has little idea what to do with it, other than subject her character to grim and unenlightening suffering.”
McHenry particularly took issue with Lapine’s “fondness of setting stage transitions to plaintive country-guitar strumming, which gives the production the unfortunate air of an inspirational film a substitute teacher would play for a middle-school English class.”
“That’s too bad, because Smart is more than capable of a subtler gradation of performance,” he continued. “I’d love to see her in material that supports and challenges her, preferably alongside some other actors.”
USA Today’s Patrick Ryan noted that while “Wax’s writing is riddled with clichés,” he “occasionally hits on something uniquely powerful or harrowing.” Ryan also turned to call out Lapine’s production, opining that it “never quite coalesces.”
“As for Smart, she elevates the show in every sense imaginable,” he lauded.
“But there’s only so much looming and improving a star can do,” Jesse Green of The New York Times argued, before a portion of the story becomes “so ridiculous it flips into a judgment on the play itself.”
Call Me Izzy is running for 12 weeks through August 17 at Studio 54.
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