It is football season. The Badgers and Packers both won last weekend, and, more importantly (or perhaps equally importantly), Vince Lombardi, legendary Packers coach, has been brought back to life. Okay, he isn't really alive again, but you might be fooled if you wander down to the Overture Center's Playhouse over the next couple weeks.
The Madison Repertory Theatre's world premiere production of Lombardi/The Only Thing opened to a near packed house last Friday. The curtains opened on football footage flashing in the background, and there stood Lombardi (Jeff Still), The Pope of Green Bay.""
The play starts with Lombardi looking at game film in his office after the only playoff loss of his career. This is the man who once said, ""Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing"" (from which the play draws its title), and he is a little cantankerous after a loss. His star fullback, Jim Taylor, played superbly by John Taylor Phillips, is already giving him contract troubles, and Paul Hornung, played with great charisma by Michael Huftile, is having injury trouble.
On top of all this, Lombardi, a Brooklyn native, has just been offered a job to coach for his hometown New York Jets. Admittedly, this would be his dream job. This would be a stressful situation for most people, and Lombardi suffers throughout the play with indigestion, shouting, hollering and constantly swigging of Pepto Bismol in a state of discontent.
We have been given a lot of problems facing Lombardi, but we already know how most of these things end, particularly with a member of the faithful Packers. Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor both go on to become Packer greats, and Lombardi wins the first two super bowls ever, eventually having a trophy named after him.
So, since we have the beginning, and we know the ending, the play should be over about 20 minutes after curtain. This is not a play about Lombardi, however, as a mythic football hero, the greatest coach in gridiron history whose quotations are constantly scratched on inspirational posters.
This is a play about Lombardi, a complex and flawed man. He is a character like Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman, or King Lear. He is remembered as football's patron saint, but somewhere in all of that he was also a human being.
The play could have been a bunch of inside jokes for footballs fans - and those do exist throughout the script - but this play comes from Madison native David Maraniss' well-rounded biography, When Pride Still Mattered, which was crafted in to a play by the Oscar winning director, and nephew of a Packers board member, Eric Simonson.
The play is written like a magical-realism biopic, where all of a sudden Lombardi is taken away from the world of football and cast into a dream sequence in the middle of the Mitchell Field Airport. Entering onto the scene is John F. Kennedy (Huftile), Army's football coach Colonel Red Blaik (Will Zahrn) and flight attendant Eva (Sara Phillips) who gets them drinks. They play sheeps-head together and make jokes, but haunting the scene is Ignatius Loyola, the warrior saint, whose manner and movements give us a type of saintly grim reaper.
The dream ends, and we are back in Milwaukee in the middle of a snowstorm after Lombardi's big loss. Still, who fills Lombardi's character as well as anyone could ever hope to expect, must have gone through a Lombardi-like preseason training camp to keep his energy levels at full capacity (The Lombardi ""110"") during this 90-minute long performance.
It is an accomplishment Still is able to keep the audience's interest and focus for the duration of the play. It is also to the director Richard Corley's credit he was able to reach in to the script and pull out the humorous moments, while also pulling as much universal appeal as the subject will allow.
The play should be a hit with football fans (even Bears fans), but this review does not need to be relegated to the sports pages because even in the arts, ""winning isn't the only thing.""
