In honor of the New York Knicks reaching the finals (in 2026) for the first time since 1999, here is a resurrection of my review of the latest play about basketball on Broadway, which opened on April 11, 2012 and ran for 38 performances before closing on May 12, 2012. You might notice that the director (whom I don’t mention in the review except in the final credits) went on to greater glory.
The most powerful moment for me in “Magic/Bird,” a play about the rivalry and then friendship between basketball stars Magic Earvin Johnson and Larry Bird, occurs after Johnson announces that he has HIV, retires, and then returns to play the 1992 NBA All-Star Game. There is so much emotion in Larry Bird’s normally stoic face during the game that I nearly burst into tears.
But there is a catch. It is Larry Bird’s actual face up on a screen, one of many video snippets that are used in “Magic/Bird.” Virtually nothing that the live performers do on the stage at the Longacre Theater has anywhere near the impact. And the videos are not enough to fill the gap in drama or excitement.
While there are a few interesting scenes, “Magic/Bird” simply doesn’t hold together as a play. The team that created it is the same group of pros (producers, playwright, director) that brought “Lombardi”to Broadway. That play about the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi lasted about seven months at Circle in the Square, longer than any previous play about football. (Longest-running previously were two months after opening, 23 days, and 12 days.) The success of “Lombardi” was in part because of aggressive marketing in partnership with the National Football League. (It didn’t hurt that Lombardi’s old team, the Green Bay Packers, won the Super Bowl during the run.)Even so, the “Lombardi” team would not comment on whether or not it made a profit, which surely means it didn’t.
Still, they seem intent on repeating the formula with “Magic/Bird,” partnering this time with the National Basketball Association, and enlisting the play’s real-life (and, unlike Lombardi, very much alive) subjects to do promotion and publicity. Magic Johnson is scheduled to appear at a talk-back after the show later this week.
This may be enough to satisfy some basketball fans. But there are major differences between “Lombardi” and “Magic/Bird.” The football play, which theater critics gave respectful though rarely enthusiastic reviews, was based on a best-selling biography full of intriguing anecdotes and a deep well of information from which to draw. By contrast, “Magic/Bird” seems to have been inspired by a marketing strategy. If “Lombardi” could be faulted for a somewhat jerry-built structure and a lack of drama, it was positively “Macbeth” compared to “Magic/Bird.”
The play begins with the news of Magic Johnson’s diagnosis, and a brief, laconic conversation between Johnson (Kevin Daniels) and Bird (Tug Coker): “You ok?” “I’m still kinda, you know, processing.” Right away, we see a problem. It is certainly believable that the two NBA stars speak so banally – Lombardi was paid to speak; Johnson and Bird were paid to play – but it is a challenge to build a drama around two inarticulate characters.
The action flashes back some dozen years. Bryant Gumbel interviews a teenage Magic Johnson, star player at Michigan State University, asking him if he’ll leave college early to go pro, getting the kind of non-committal answer that athletes learn from an early age. Gumbel is played by Francois Battiste, using a bizarre falsetto that comes off as some kind of lame locker room joke. This is a rare lapse in otherwise faultless ensemble acting. That scene segues into one with Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach (Peter Scolari) as he welcomes the taciturn Larry Bird to Boston, then one with L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss (also Peter Scolari) as he welcomes Johnson to Los Angeles.
The rivalry is established from the get-go: Johnson is irked that his contract is for $400,000, while Bird’s is for $450,000, making him the highest-paid NBA rookie up to that point. From there, one quick scene tumbles onto another, more or less chronologically through the years of rivalry and championships. The two actors playing Bird and Johnson interact with four other cast members, who each take on some half a dozen roles – coaches, teammates, family members, reporters, fans. There is a perfunctory feel to most of these scenes, as if playwright Eric Simonson were working from a check list.
One exception is an overlong but affecting scene that marks the beginning of the stars’ famous friendship. Converse, the sneaker manufacturer, has convinced Bird and Johnson to make a television commercial together, which lures Johnson to Bird’s hometown of French Lick, Indiana. Bird tells Johnson that his mother has invited him to lunch. Bird’s mother, played (as are all the female characters in the play) by the wonderful actress Deirdre O’Connell (Circle Mirror Transformation), serves lunch, tells Johnson she’s a fan of his, and relates less than prideful stories about her son.
“See, Earvin, the whole point of inviting you up here in the first place was to give my mom a chance to embarrass me,” Bird says sardonically. It’s all right, Johnson says to Bird, his mother’s the same way. The two rivals discover how much they have in common – hard-working, uncomplaining folks, large families, poverty-tinged childhoods.
There are other attempts to get at the regular guys behind the sports heroes, though none as charming nor persuasive: At one point, Johnson tells a female journalist he sees himself as two people, one of them the likeable Earvin, “but Earvin doesn’t win championships. Magic does.”
How does “Magic/Bird” solve the problem of presenting the actual sport of basketball on the stage? Not very effectively: The actors dribble a little, shoot a basket here and there; there is some video footage, as well as a couple of fancy effects involving lighting and slow motion. But all in all, there was more of a sense of the actual game of basketball – the kinetic excitement of it — in the choreography of the musical “Lysistrata Jones.”
Magic/Bird at Longacre Theater
by Eric Simonson
Directed by Thomas Kail
Set design by David Korins, costume design by Paul Tazewell, lighting by Howell Binkley, media design by Jeff Sugg, sound design by Nevin Steinberg
Cast: Kevin Daniels, Tug Coker, Deirdre O’Connell, Peter Scolari, Francois Battiste, Robert Manning Jr.
Running time: 90 minutes, with no intermission
Ticket prices: $31.50 to $126.50
