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The Play Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing
As if it wasn’t obvious from the all caps title boldly printed on the poster outside the Circle In the Square Theatre, featuring the title character’s iconic profile attired in his classic fedora, black-framed glasses and camel hair overcoat, glaring out at an unseen frozen tundra, Lombardi is all about the hard nosed life and inspirational times of legendary Green Bay Packers head coach Vincent T. Lombardi. As such, it is an entertaining, emotional and informative 90-minute scrimmage with a tough man, his tough men and the tough woman who was crazy about her man, even if she realized shortly after they married that she’d made “the biggest mistake of my life.”
And playing that man to the obsessive, manic-depressive hilt is Dan Lauria (The Wonder Years). This type of play is only as good as its titular actor and Lauria’s gravelly voice, irascible manner and dynamic performance score MVP honors and hopefully Tony Award consideration as Lombardi, winner of three consecutive NFL championships, including Super Bowls I and II (the trophy for which is now named after him), and recipient of innumerable accolades including the Vincent Lombardi Service Area (Exit 16W on the New Jersey Turnpike), a location visited even more often than his Hall of Fame bust, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Lombardi’s action takes place mostly in 1965, alternating between the Packers’ grueling, highly disciplined practice field and the Lombardi living room, a venue nearly as combative and the one place where the coach’s cast iron will bends slightly to the arched eyebrow and acerbic but loving asides of Marie, his long-suffering, highball-drinking, chain-smoking wife, played with a delicious, deadpan demeanor by Judith Light (Who’s the Boss). Imagine a slightly buzzed, better dressed Alice Kramden of Honeymooners fame and you’ll get the idea. Banished to the frigid outback of Green Bay, a place Marie needed an atlas to locate upon learning Vince would be tacking the Packers’ head coaching job instead of continuing his brief off-season banking career, she desperately misses her family and friends back east, the Manhattan social scene and, of course, shopping at Bloomingdales. But rather than see her husband suffer a self-imposed banishment to corporate exile, Marie moved to the snowbound American Siberia of Wisconsin, to make her fearsome but frustrated hubby happy. Good woman, that Marie. I’d buy her a drink but she seems to have plenty of her own.
Into this loving but combustible and slightly sauced dynamic comes, suitcase and notebook in hand, Michael McCormick, niftily played by Broadway newcomer Keith Nobbs, a young sportswriter from Look magazine on assignment to document the proud heart and private soul of a certifiable living legend, who just may certifiable in other areas as well. Unbeknownst to McCormick, his article is also meant to provide damage control following an Esquire feature that took exception to the coach’s old fashioned work ethic and winning is everything mentality. (I knew there was a reason I never liked Esquire.)
It’s semi-interesting to note that McCormick is the only character not based on a real person, but a composite of the era’s sports journalists, as well as David Maraniss, on whose Lombardi biography, When Pride Still Mattered, the show is based, and partly on Lombardi’s estranged son, Vincent Jr., whose relationship to his father is mentioned backhandedly as befitting his apparent upbringing.
Along the way McCormick makes fast friends and enemies, briefly, of Lombardi and several of his star players including Paul Hornung, played by Bill Dawes with a relaxed Mathew McConaughey style charm befitting the team’s leading scorer both on and off the field. Dawes delights wickedly while drawling Hornung’s strategy: “Why get married in the morning. You never know who you’ll meet that night.”
Other premiere Packers depicted in Lombardi include Jim Taylor, the “Thunder” to Hornung’s “Lightning” in Green Bay’s unstoppable power sweep offense. Taylor is played with the likeably dim demeanor of a faithful plow horse with only so many rows left in him by Chris Sullivan, a Broadway rookie via a decade of solid credits in the semi-pros, a.k.a. Chicago.
Defensive star and early players’ union organizer Dave Robinson rounds out the trio of Lombardi’s real life All Stars. Robert Christopher Riley’s Robinson is a dedicated, purposeful man who just wants to play one perfect game of error free ball that leaves The Coach with nothing to complain about. Though, in reality, it was when Lombardi stopped criticizing when a player really knew he was in trouble and it wouldn’t be long before he was cleaning out his locker and boarding the next train for Detroit, Cleveland or the new upstart AFL.
Eventually who among the Packers is allowed to contribute to McCormick’s piece, (and who gets final edit) becomes Lombardi’s turning point. Though clearly it’s all just an excuse for the audience to get the closest thing to face time with the coach with a gift for human alchemy, the rarest of teacher who knows what buttons to push to turn a pack of perennial losers into a legion of chest beating champions. And no Mr. Kotter, for once I’m not talking about you. Welcome back by the way.
Little matter in the eyes of eternity does it make that the cost of Lombardi’s winning ways was a trail of fractured family relationships and a cancer that would prematurely snuff out his twice brightly burning, gut churning candle. Would he have changed a thing if he could? Doubtful, according to Marie; the three things that mattered to Vince were God, family and the Green Bay Packers, with family placing third and God not exactly a close second.
Like any winning team Lombardi is the cumulative effort of a group of individuals working in concert with eyes unblinking from the prize. In the show’s case, game balls are due to Dan Lauria for his visceral, vein popping performance; director and Tony Award-nominee Thomas Kail; and playwright and Academy Award-winner Eric Simonson.
Also of note: Lombardi is the first play to be produced in part by the National Football League, which may account for the lack of mention of the gambling scandal and suspension that kept Paul Hornung out of the Packers lineup in 1963, one of the few seasons that a Lombardi-coached Packers did not finish first, an unacceptable fate to a man who believed “you don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.” Or more succinctly: “You show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”
Lastly, to all the production’s hard earned credit, the only negative spin comes literally in the theater and its round staging. While providing a great seat 25 percent of the time, the stage soon rotates so the actors have their backs to you, whereupon precious dialogue can become lost and you want to yell, “Coach, come back, what did I do wrong this time?”
But for the most part Lombardi succeeds in its mission of bringing back to life the man, the myth, the legend in all his perfect imperfections. Those who knew him will remember tearfully as did the real life Dave Robinson at the shows’ premiere and those who never got the chance to play for the coach who “treats all his players the same—like dogs” will wish they did. And everyone can leave with a little of Lombardi’s “The greatest accomplishment is not never failing, but in rising again after you fall” attitude to help overcome whatever opponents they may face personally.