The haunting tunes together with several rousing show stoppers, makes Once a contemporary folk musical celebration of life and love. Once is original, innovative in its simplicity, yet it is a sophisticated and understated work filled with daring honesty. Anyone who has ever felt the pain of heartbreak will relate and empathize with Once’s tone. This beautiful musical is well staged, well sung and well acted
Directed swiftly by Joannie Schultz, Northanger Abbey is a witty, charming and amusing comedy of manners adaptation. It is the first major role for Sarah Price as the precocious 17-year old voracious reader with a vivid imagination. Her performance as Catherine Morland anchors a cast of terrific actors.
We feel Rita’s pain and misery. We see that stardom, riches, and glory are nothing if we suffer from feeling unloved. The Goddes is a beautiful play that demonstrates how an epic film can, and does, work better live onstage especially in an intimate storefront venue.
Certainly, Duras lived a colorful life, born in 1914 in Gia-Dinh, French Indochina (now Vietnam), where her widowed mother struggled to bring up Marguerite and her two brothers. She chronicled these early years in several books which detail the plot of the play, candidly exposing her dysfunctional family. Her mother preferred her oldest to the younger children (resulting in a vicious elder brother who tyrannized the whole family). She engaged in an incestuous relationship her younger brother, and later had a memorable love affair with the spoiled young son of a wealthy Chinese merchant.
Gershwin’s Greatest Hits is a slick well-sung two hour tribute to the genius of Gershwin. This revue is a fine introduction Gershwin to all who are interested in modern music. Light Opera Works has established a fine niche here and using Nichols Concert Hall is a plus. This revue is a “must see.”
Motortown is a 90 minute journey into the abbess of a psychopathic soldier who returns from the Iraq war isolated, desperate and hopeless. Danny is also a self-proclaimed squaddie (A member of the armed forces who thinks he’s the “Gods gift to women”). Danny is determined to win back his old girlfriend Marley (Julie Siple) but she is fearful of Danny since he sent her weird letters from Iraq. her rejection send him on a downward spiral of violence and despair.
Groener captures every facet and emotion of this complex and highly sympathetic figure. In a virtuoso performance, he reaches the heights and depths of Cyrano’s passion for his cousin, the lovely Roxanne (Julie Jesneck) and brings us to agony as we empathize with his torment in ghost writing love letters for his handsome, inarticulate rival Christian (Nick Dillenburg).
This well paced show has several vaudevillian songs that in themselves were witty and humorous. The jokes reminded me of grooming up watching the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday evenings where the likes of Alan King grabbed our laugh bones. Many of the jokes depend on razor-sharp timing and this cast delivered them with deft aplomb. For those of us who admire and are familiar with this unique style of humor, there is much to admire and laugh at here.
We meet a young female student (Sarah Wellington) and her lawyer boyfriend (Chris Ballou) as they seem to be touring an old house in New England. The older Irish couple, Amanda Jane Long and Sean Thomas are the caretakers of the house. They convince the girl to role play as Veronica for the sake of an elderly sister who is dying but she believes that her sister Veronica is alive and living in the room they all now find themselves in. The girl agrees to do that and she changes into one of Veronica’s dresses.
The drama builds into a tensely shocking twist that leads to a stunning climax. Amy Kasper’s performance emerges from mild sarcasm to blinding rage as her vengeance explodes toward Richard.