cawing about the seagull

We went and saw Chekhov's the Seagull on Broadway the other night. I have this thing with Chekhov - somehow I only see productions of his plays with people with British accents. If I had known this was an English cast, I may have said no.
We studied The Cherry Orchard in high school (bc - before computers!) and I saw a teleplay with these upper class British accents and we all read it like it was set during an afternoon tea. And then our teacher cleverly showed us a Russian version, where we didn't understand the language, but the passion, and the energy - nothing like the stifled upper classes! I really want to see a Chekhov play done by Russian actors, I keep thinking we get the flavor wrong.

In this play Kristen Scott Thomas was just wonderful, horrible, awful and real - a really good performance (not a great performance, not like Patti LuPone in Gypsy, but a really good one) Zoe Kazan, who plays Masha, was equally good, a stand out performance. But all the rest were - to use a new word in the dictionary - meh. They were okay but I didn't believe them, a bit too declaratory and upper class British for me. I didn't like Mackenzie Crooke as Kosta in the first half at all, and while Art Malik as the doctor was good I didn't believe Peter Sarsgaard as the lover playwright Trigorin. So the men let it down for me. But I've been thinking about it, the themes and the stories Chekhov was trying to tell...