Dustin Spence’s world premiere play The Promise of a Rose Garden, produced by Babes with Blades, depicts a hypothetical near future, and therefore, fictional events based on commonly held perceptions of soldiers, including its female protagonists.
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Buckley is a lithe and energetic performer, doubtlessly due to her years as a Broadway dancer, but still begins the show by saying that getting married for the first time at forty-five was like finishing a marathon: everyone goes home early and there are smashed Dixie cups everywhere. That she reached this milestone in life at such a late age was in large part due to her co-dependent relationship with her mother, and over the course of a ninety minute show in which she embodies dozens of characters, Buckley guides us through a journey millions of other Americans have been through or fearfully anticipate.
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To me the story was secondary to the energetic scenes played out by a large cast of acrobats, gymnasts and tumblers. This show features loud techno music vivid lighting and mind-blowing sets and extreme puppets. The emphasis on how the story is told trumps (sorry) the story. At just under two hours, it works Especially for those into Avatar the film. The audience seemed to enjoy the spectacle more than I did. All the running, tumbling and climbing together the ear-splitting music wore thin with me. But this show is “critic-proof” since the large following of Avatar will love this show.
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The new theatre group Fraud & Phony defines themselves as a collective instead of a company, they say, because they are more concerned about producing their own works when they feel it is of particular benefit to the community than in sticking to a regular schedule. Their first work, Troll, by Elizabeth Archer, demonstrates strong potential, and for the incredibly low price of the tickets, has excellent production values.
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Newsies delivers enough sheer energy with an adventurous story that depicts a worthy moral. This exciting show is filled with heart, empathetic characters as the boys win a round in quest of their place in the scheme of life in turn-of-the-Century New York. Newsies is a fine show filled with enough joy and energy to light up our holidays. It is much better than the film. Hurry, you have only until August 7th to see this fun show.
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Concepts such as the above are effectively explained by McLean during this 80 minute one-act solo show. This show is for fans of C. S. Lewis, for those who enjoy a “thinking-person’s” play, and for anyone who enjoys a tour de force performance. Actors need to see Max McLean to learn how to make subtle and complex material by an academic sizzle on stage. McLean delivers in C. S. Lewis onstage The Most Reluctant Convert without being ‘preachy.’
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In Thomas Klingenstein’s world premiere play Douglass, about an episode from the life of famed author, orator, and escaped slave Frederick Douglass, Klingenstein explores what he interprets as one such situation his subject encountered in New Bedford, Massachusetts prior to the Civil War. It could be a fascinating episode from the life of one of America’s most dramatic personalities, but unfortunately, the play is mostly static.
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This is the second incarnation of The 2 Sides Of Eddie Ramone that I have seen. Previously, at its Edinburgh festival outing, it was Eddie on his own with his demons, and I was moved to write: ‘With flashes of brilliance, mixing comedy and pathos, and with his original and bitingly powerful writing, the redoubtable Chris Sullivan’s performance is his most memorable to date’. He has lost none of this winning emotional cocktail. This version of the play now features Shian Denovan, who plays his daughter, in a beautifully delivered and felt performance.
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Reprising their wildly popular, twice-extended, Jeff Award-winning co-production from the spring, The New Colony and Definition Theatre Company remount Evan Linder’s nation-wide conversation-starter Byhalia, Mississippi at The Steppenwolf, giving those who neglected to learn its difficult life lessons another chance at redemption.
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A common complaint about one-person shows is that the speaker tends to be poorly motivated to monologue to the audience for over an hour. Susan Padveen’s The Portrait, about Austrian Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt, suffers from the opposite problem.
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