Theater Review: 'The Vertical Hour'

“The Vertical Hour,” David Hare’s timely new play, refers to that moment in combat medicine when you can be of some use after a soldier is critically wounded.

Julianne Moore makes her Broadway debut as an American foreign correspondent turned Yale University professor who finds herself caught in a romantic triangle with Bill Nighy, who plays an esteemed British physician, and his son and her fiancé, Andrew Scott, who plays a thoroughly Americanized physical therapist.

“The Vertical Hour” is about sense of self, the death of 1960s idealism and the war in Iraq. But it is the dramatic tension provided by Moore, who is pulled between the affections of her lover and his father, that propels this five-act play, which is directed by Sam Mendes.

Moore, who played the seductress in “The Big Lebowski,” one of my all-time favorite movies, stumbles a bit in the early scenes, while Nighy, whose most recent film credits include the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, is brilliant from the opening curtain.

The play closes on April 1. The Christmas Week performance that the DF&C and I attended at the Music Box Theater on West 45^th Street in New York City was sold out, and I suspect that tickets for this fine limited-run production will be scarce.

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