Posts tagged ‘review’

Feb 18

Arts Runoff: GREEN EDEN

Based on a true story.

Summary: An original play, the senior work of Noah Mease ’11. I’ll use his summary: “Philip Cummings welcomes a young poet to his house on a winter’s night, but this is not the first Spanish poet to find him in the solitude of Vermont. Years earlier, summer, 1929, the famous poet Federico García Lorca visits a young Philip Cummings at a rented cabin beside Lake Eden. As the night grows late, the two Spanish poets blur, history and memory become poetry and translation, and Mr. Cummings tries to reclaim what he lost that August in Eden.”

Good: OMFG. // Unquestionably as engaging, profound, and dramatic as any play I’ve seen. Way better than a lot of the scripts Middlebury pays to put on. // Direcor Sasha Rivera ’12 helps Willy McKay ’11 (The Poet/Lorca) and Matt Ball (young & old Philip) lead us through the script’s nimble jumps back and forth in time without ever tripping–even when the Winter Carnival fireworks went off in the middle of the show.

Bad: Nothing was “bad.” Some comments. // No matter how good an actor Matt Ball is, he still looks young. For that reason, I was never sure how old the older Philip actually was. // Some dialog is supposed to be in “English” and some in “Spanish.” However, the quality of the language does not change when the language changes. There are artistic reasons for keeping the style uniform, but since so much of the play is about (mis)translation, I wondered whether the irreconcilableness of the two languages could be incorporated into the speech on a more fundamental level.

Broad: Mease hones his playwriting skills in The Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense, an oft-overlooked but quirky-awesome club on campus. Mease’s hometown paper, the Williston Observer, published a profile on him.

Contextual Rating: If you have something important to do this weekend…
-do it, and see this show if you can.
-put it off and see this show.
-Skip it. SEE GREEN EDEN! No one should pass this up. Seriously.

Green Eden, in the Hepburn Zoo, FRIDAY at 8:00 and 10:30, SATURDAY at 8:00. The show runs about 1:30 and there’s no intermission.

Mar 5

Mister Show with Neil & Andrew – Review

In the interest of posting this review before tonight’s late showing of Mister Show with Neil & Andrew, I’m going to keep my comments short. That’s fitting: the hybrid theater-video sketch comedy performance lasts only and hour, and it ends before one wants it to. The play, in the Hepburn Zoo this weekend, is a theatrical adaptation of sketches from the now-defunct Mister Show TV series, adapted for the stage by director Ele Woods ’11 (and other people–the credits, projected onscreen, moved a bit too fast).

Sketch comedy is really, really hard to do right. I was worried in the first scene or two of Mister Show that the cast wasn’t going to pull it off; the pace seemed strange, as if jokes were being force-fed instead of slipped to the audience. However, a fast pace seemed to help everyone (including the audience) get into stride after the first 15 minutes. Even better, once we thought we knew what to expect, the cast gave us something new–for instance, a hilariously impossible sketch about a mafioso out to convince is underlings that there are no numbers larger than 24. There are no dull moments in Mister Show. Scene transitions–often a momentum-killer–are effectively eliminated by the strategic use of video sketches between scenes. The set, lighting, and sound were simple but effective: I didn’t notice them, which meant they supported the goofy actors flawlessly.

A crisp, taut, funny show. In short: see it.

In the Hepburn Zoo. Two performances left: TONIGHT at 10:30 and Saturday at 7:30. Both are “sold out,” but getting a ticket at the door is usually easy. Just make sure to arrive a little early. Be prepared for some offensive language–just sayin’.

Dec 31

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