Tuesday, September 21
8pm Performance
In a nutshell, this show offers some great individual moments, some cool stage effects and a kicking onstage band, but the great moments don’t add up to an emotionally satisfying whole.
Sure, there was lots of ooh-ing and ah-ing after the first big visual effect - actors climbing through a movie screen to instantaneously appear in the movie and interact with the “real” people on stage. But the excitement generated by creative staging and the multi-media applications quickly got bogged down in the melodrama of the closing book scenes.
My favorite moment? - the band playing a Klezmer-like rendition of Estelle’s “American Boy” as we filed out of the theatre.
Is it me, or does every show seem to have some kind of flying or aerial work? I mean, Billy Elliott, American Idiot, Spiderman and now this? It didn’t quite work here. The leads looked really awkward trying to hook and un-hook their arms from the ropes suspended from chandeliers.
Oh, and I almost forgot about the puppet children. Another developing Broadway trend (Lion King, Avenue Q)? Let’s hope not. For me the “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” approach didn’t quite lend a cohesive style to the piece. A nice attempt, but ultimately left me cold. Not exactly the feeling you want to leave with from a play about a supposed passionate affair between two married people.
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