As you probably know, Frost/Nixon was a stage play and a movie, both starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as the other guy. I enjoyed the movie (as delineated here) but had a lot of reservations about the way it portrayed certain true events.
The National Touring Company, which features Alan Cox as Frost and Stacy Keach as Nixon, has parked itself down at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles for a few weeks and this evening, Carolyn and I attended the first performance. Sad to say, I didn't much like it. The production is slick and well-assembled but I found it superficial and shallow, reducing its story down to the kind of conflict that gets resolved by one outta-left-field "gotcha" moment. David slays Goliath and snatches victory from defeat wholly because at the last minute, one of his researchers hands him a magic bullet in the form of a previously-unknown tape transcript.
That was one problem I had with it. Another, greater one was that I rarely saw Richard Nixon on that stage. Stacy Keach is a fine actor but you either buy him as Nixon or you don't and I couldn't buy him. Among other problems, he seemed too commanding in a movie star way. Richard M. Nixon was socially awkward (the play even says that a few times) and despite his many triumphs, always had an air about him of trying to prove that he belonged among the elite crowd. Keach's Nixon says that in so many words but Keach's manner is confident, charming and theatrical. There's that famous exchange when Nixon made a desperate stab at male bonding small talk, asking Frost, "Did you do any fornicating this weekend?" Coming from Stacy Keach, it sounds like a deliberate joke.
Maybe I'm too familiar with the material and the real events to warm fully to any shorthand or fictionalization…but it seems to me there's a deeper story there, having to do with Nixon's vulnerabilities. Keach does a great job of wringing audience laughter at the sheer disingenuousness of many real Nixon quotes but I just felt he was too good an actor to play someone who was that bad an actor.