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Peer Reviews One Night with You Entire contents are copyright © 2007, Craig Nolan Highley. All rights reserved.
Sight & Sound’s current production at the Rudyard Kipling defies description. Not so much a coherent theatre piece but more of a variety show, but not quite that either. The best way I can think of to describe it is to do just that, section by section. The show opens with some live music by local band Walrus Gumboot. The three-man group performed several Beatles and Eagles songs that sounded like at least one of the guitars was out of tune. When the lead guitarist stepped out of their final song, “The Mighty Quinn,” they actually sounded pretty good. Next up was a session with local stand-up comic Adam White. It’s interesting to note that I had seen this same comic last week at Comedy Caravan and the crowd loved him. During this show at the Rudyard, however, he didn’t quite get the same crowd response, and he was doing a lot of the same material. I personally found him very funny with a unique voice, and would love to see him pursue more local theatre. The highlight of the evening was the next piece, a short one-act play called Necessary Evil. It was an amusing imagining of a conversation between the angels Michael and Lucy (get it?) just before the creation of the world. Lucy wants to abandon the project and overthrow God, and Michael is having none of it. Ryan Derman and Katie Doyle turn in nicely subdued performances in roles that could easily have been played over the top. Another one-act play, Brides of Deceit, follows, and seems to be an odd choice for this production. It’s a Greek tragedy, a conversation between Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon, and Cassandra, Agamemnon’s mistress. Clytemnestra has just butchered her husband, and is still spattered from head to toe with his blood, and is about to do the same to Cassandra. That’s about all there is to the story, and though it’s well acted, it is strangely uninvolving. The next play, Jar of Nickles, is very strange, but succeeds thanks to interesting staging and an unusual structure. It’s almost a one-man show, as the protagonist Terry (Tim Brown) gets out of bed and recounts a bad day he is having, and it’s clear that the other days of his life are not any better. His monologue sounds as though it was written as a short story rather than a play, but it somehow works. The finale of the evening comes in the form of three selected scenes from Sight & Sound’s upcoming original production of Frankenstein. The producers promise a unique and entirely new take on the story, but nothing in the scenes sampled here looks all that groundbreaking. The scenes do, however, hint at a well-written (by Tim Brown, John Hetzel and Bill Breuer) and acted version of the classic story, with some interesting lighting effects. How much of that will carry through to the actual production next year remains to be seen. All in all, this was an entertaining evening, and promises good things to come in the next year from a theatre company that bears watching. One Night with You At the Rudyard Kipling Tickets (502) 636-1311 August 24 through September 1, 2007 Featuring David Bizianes, Tim Brown, Harli Cooper, Ryan Dermon, Katie Doyle, Talia Girton, Walrus Gumboot, Bill “Pliney” Jackson, Jeff Kulas, Victoria Lee, Colleen Mooney, Chris Petty, Skylight Station, and Adam White Posted August 28, 2007
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