[NEohioPAL] Review of "Lady Windermere's Fan" at Mamai Theatre

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Girls gone Wilde is the best part of Mamaí’s ‘Lady Windermere's Fan’ 



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

  

Men are immoral cowards and incorrigible fools and, though they become old, they never become good.



So says playwright Oscar Wilde in his 1892 high society comedy “Lady Windermere's Fan,” and he reinforces his position by offering his male characters the wittiest self-incriminating one-liners (“Good heavens!  How marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.”) and most emasculating dialogue.  



It’s the women in this play – who, while privileged and well positioned, live restricted and unsatisfying Victorian era lives – that take the moral high ground.  And a few are supplied with Wilde’s most poignant, empowering soliloquies and pointed social commentary.



Mamaí’s greatest strength is its ability to assemble an ensemble of remarkable female performers, and it has certainly done so in this production.  



For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/. 
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