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Animal Farm

April 30, 2007 By 2 Comments

Adapted by Paata Tsikurishvili and Nathan Weinberger from the novel by George Orwell

Directed by Paata Tsikurishvili

Produced by Synetic Theater

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Synetic, a theater company which has won mighty accolades for the flowing theatricality of its movement-based productions, and which once won a Helen Hayes Award for its absolutely wordless performance of Hamlet has given itself the ultimate challenge. It has produced a play with words. Lots of words. Rivers and lakes of words; words used like bullets, and like construction tools.

Animal Farm is a novel about the use of words to overpower and stupefy, to induce docility and compliance, to manipulate and enslave. It cannot be wholly represented by music, gestures or movement. It must be done with words.

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Saving Aimee

April 30, 2007 By 3 Comments

Coralee Carmello as Aimee Semple McPherson (Photo: Scott Suchman)

Book and Lyrics by Kathie Lee Gifford
Music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman
Directed by Eric Schaeffer
Reviewed by Gary McMillan

In pre-TV America, Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy Semple McPherson Hutton was one of the most renowned (and “notorious”) women of the first half of the 20th Century. She was a world-famous evangelist, a trail-blazing radio broadcaster, a pioneer prescription drug addict, and an alleged adulterer. But unlike her media-mogul successors such as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard, Saving Aimee portrays McPherson as refreshingly free of condescension, demagoguery and vitriol, and with an abundant compassion for the downtrodden. Can I get an Amen!

Eric Shaeffer again teams with Kathie Lee Gifford (Putting It Together on Broadway and Off-Broadway’s Under the Bridge) for this world premiere musical. The cast features a high-powered female trio: Carolee Carmello, Florence Lacy, and E. Faye Butler (Priscilla Cuellar, Butler’s understudy, went on the performance I saw).

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In On It

April 30, 2007 By Leave a Comment

 (l to r) Jason Stiles and Jason Lott (Photo: Colin Hovde)

By Daniel MacIvor

Produced by Theater Alliance

Reviewed by Tim Treanor 

Ray King (Jason Stiles or, occasionally, Jason Lott) is trying to die. But the damn playwright (Jason Lott), in the throes of a dysfunctional relationship with a lover who specializes in telling inconvenient truths (Jason Stiles), won’t let him. Ray wants to confront his terminal illness honestly, and with dignity, but no one – not his condescending doctor (Jason Lott) nor his self-absorbed son (Jason Stiles) nor his faithless wife (Jason Lott) will give him an ear, much less their heart. And if this is beginning to sound like a review for Woolly Mammoth’s screamingly funny She Stoops to Comedy, think again. All of the devices in Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor’s extraordinary script – the play-within-a-play, the multiple characters played by two actors – are done for one purpose only: to bring us into the belly of the beast.

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