I very much enjoyed this show. Right now, it has a score of 85 on Show Score, based on 55 reviews by audience members. (For those of you unfamiliar with it Show Score, it's like Rotten Tomatoes for movies & Zagat for restaurants. 85 is a high score, especially for a show with more than 50 reviews.) The story in this was believable. So were the characters. The dialogue was was excellent. Mary Bacon's performance was superb and all of the other actors did a good to excellent job.
I don't know anyone associated with the show and am not in the business. I'm just a New Yorker who sees a fair amount of theatre--roughly 70 or so shows a year. This is a good show and well worth seeing.
Not sure what play this critic saw, but having grown up in Central Maine, I recognized each of these people, the mom, the older brother and sister, even the two main characters (although in my day it was pot and shrooms, not heroin and pills lol). I think they totally missed the boat on this one and got it wrong wrong wrong.
4
I've lived in Maine for many decades. No one here born after 1950 says GAH-DEN or any of the boring stereotypes gleaned from "Bert and I" and like material.
3
@Ed L Clearly in all your many decades in Maine you've neither visited nor conversed with anyone from Gardiner (Gahd-nah) or Yarmouth (Yah-muth) or Scarborough (Scah-bro). (And you clearly must have been in Maine a long time to reference "Bert & I." I saw this play last Saturday and I can tell you, this piece ain't that.)
2
Wow. I could not disagree more with this review. I found this show to be haunting and it really shook me. The cast is amazing especially the brother and the mom. That these people are stuck and repeat their behavior feels like part of the point of the whole play. I felt like I was in their living room with them and it just felt so real to me.
7
I’d bet for most people, at least most people my age, the first association with the title would be “Stay gold, Ponyboy.”
2
And that refers to the Frost poem
1
@Jeanine, along those lines of associating great work - in summer camp, a mischievous older camper had some of us younger kids believing for a little while that TV producers had hired Gioachino Rossini to write the Lone Ranger theme, and it took off to become a classical music piece. (It was really catchy, just like the Gomer Pyle theme and Room 222 opening. We had no reason to doubt it at 7 and 8 years old, and no internet to double-check it, but a counselor stepped in.)