American Tales
Deaf West Theatre, Los Angeles
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
***
Based on two very different 19th-century works of literature, American Tales is “a bipolar musical, in the best sense of the term,” said David Ng in the Los Angeles Times. The show begins with an adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton, a romantic comedy that’s full of outrageous plot twists stemming from an accidental phone call during the early days of the telephone. The evening’s second half is a darkly comic take on Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener, about a mild-mannered, eccentric copy clerk who refuses to either work or be fired for intransigence. Together the works create an odd juxtaposition, but Ken Stone’s adaptations and lyrics entertainingly highlight the fault line in the American psyche that has us “forever bouncing between strained cheer and hopeless depression.”
Director Kay Cole effortlessly shifts between the two works’ very different moods, said Terry Morgan in Variety. The sharp cast, many of whose members pull double duty in wildly divergent roles, never misses a beat. As Twain’s Alonzo, Daniel Blinkoff gives an openhearted and likable performance, then perfectly delivers the flip side as Melville’s “waspish” clerk, Nippers. Raphael Sbarge gives an indelible, affecting turn as Bartleby and is wickedly over-the-top as Twain’s thwarted suitor, Burley. Though their plots and themes are different, both Tales hit on “a motif that resonates from the 1890s to the Internet age”: From the lead performances right down to Jan Powell’s effective and understated score, every detail contributes to a bittersweet meditation on “the difficulty and importance of human connection.”
-
Is Andrew’s arrest the end for the monarchy?Today's Big Question The King has distanced the Royal Family from his disgraced brother but a ‘fit of revolutionary disgust’ could still wipe them out
-
Quiz of The Week: 14 – 20 FebruaryQuiz Have you been paying attention to The Week’s news?
-
The Week Unwrapped: Do the Freemasons have too much sway in the police force?Podcast Plus, what does the growing popularity of prediction markets mean for the future? And why are UK film and TV workers struggling?
-
If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.