Let's make one thing clear before I start this review: I've never really cared for Julia Roberts. I've never really thought of her as, y'know, a real actress, and never found her that attractive. So, walking into "Three Days of Rain," the superstar's Broadway debut, my expectations were pretty low. The good news is that they were exceeded.

But only slightly.

The production is clearly a vehicle for Roberts. Her performance is unsurprisingly stiff, but not in the ways you would expect. The play is structured as two one-acts, so each actor must play two characters. Roberts' first performance is distinctly stiffer than her second. Her delivery is frequently awkward, as if she had just gotten off-book the day before and wasn't quite familiar enough with the lines to imbue them with any emotion or emphasis. Her physical presence onstage is fine, and when sitting and listening to another character, she appears as natural looking as can be.

In the second act, she employs a faulty Southern accent but manages to loosen up considerably, appearing languid onstage and capturing her character's proximity to the edge of insanity. Still, her delivery leaves something to be desired. Luckily, Paul Rudd manages to steal the second act with his neurotic depiction of a shy young architect named Ned. While Rudd's performance in the first act is a jumbled mess of ADD thrashing across the stage, his quiet, subdued performance in the second ultimately makes up for many of the production's low points.

Rounding out the cast is Bradley Cooper, who played Rachel McAdam's fiancee in "Wedding Crashers." Yep, the guy from "Wedding Crashers" is on Broadway - and he's actually OK. His is the one performance in the first act that stands out; he injects it with some energy, playing a variation on his "Wedding Crashers" role in the form of Pip, the fun-loving, mediocre daytime TV star. His second act performance, however, is as stiff as Roberts's first act. Cooper's character in the second act, Theo, is meant to be an architectural virtuoso who lets his emotions get the best of him at times, but Cooper's portrayal paints him more as a perpetually pissed-off caricature of a tortured genius.

The thing all three of these actors have in common is that they are predominantly film actors, and it shows at times. For the entirety of the first act theyalldelivertheirlinessoquickly that it's almost as if they're expecting dramatic and comedic pauses to be edited in later with other footage. In a similar vein, it's clear that Roberts is used to relying on small movements and facial tics to convey emotion, which get lost on such a large stage.

The staging, by Joe Mantello, is- well, typical Mantello. He is clearly the reliable go-to guy of Broadway, helming not only this production but recent productions of "The Odd Couple" and "Glengarry Glenn Ross." The only problem is that his style is too generic, and I persistently leave his productions underwhelmed. There's nothing technically wrong with his stagings, but the performances in his productions (as clearly seen in this one) are chronically uneven, as if he just let the actors do their own thing without bringing them together to form one gelled, coherent production.

As for the play itself, Richard Greenberg's script suffers from the stiff deliveries and caricatured performances listed above. His style is uniquely theatrical, with dialogue and speeches you would never come across in everyday life but which can work onstage if the actors present them properly.

The choice of this play, specifically as the vehicle for Roberts's stage debut, is perplexing to say the least, and on the whole it doesn't really work. But then again, when you stage a play for the express purpose of showing off one actress, what's the point in making the rest of production noticeable?

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