[NEohioPAL] Review of "Seminar" at Beck Center for the Arts

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Beck Center turns 'Seminar' into a master class  

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review will appear in the Cleveland Jewish News on 6/6/14

 

 

Quoting a review from The New York Times, the Beck Center for the Arts boasts that Theresa Rebeck's "Seminar" - currently in production on its intimate Studio Theatre stage - got "big laughs" when it opened on Broadway in 2011.  

 

Not cited are the critic's observations that this show is "a breezy comedy" that employs so many "shortcuts in the ways it defines and manipulates its characters . that it feels as if it were written according to some literary equivalent of a mileage-saving GPS device."  The play, notes the review, is full of "verbal flatulence." 

 

Yes it is. And that flatulence is delivered by "highly varnished papier-mâché figures" who play every line for the laugh with "inherent cartoonishness."  

 

Beck Center's director Donald Carrier chose to go in another direction.  

 

For more of this review, go to:  

 

http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/features/leisure/arts/article_0d86a756-eb2a-11e3-84cb-001a4bcf887a.html.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.neohiopal.org/pipermail/neohiopal-neohiopal.org/attachments/20140603/b46cc978/attachment.htm>