The Actor’s nightmare & The real inspector hound
For my performance review I went to go see a live play called The Actor’s nightmare & The real inspector hound at the Asolo Reparatory Theater on November 5, 2015. The Actor’s nightmare & The real inspector hound are two surreal comedic plays shown in one night. The Actor’s nightmare by Christopher Durang starts off with a man named George Spelvin, an accountant, who is mistaken for an actor, he finds himself trapped in his worst fear, being thrown on stage in a performance where he has never rehearsed. He has no idea how he even got there, but the curtain is almost ready to go up. His actions through out the play are hilarious, he throws out random lines and interacts with the other actors, hoping they’ll remind him of his lines or he’ll eventually wake up from his worst night mare. The real inspector hound written by Tom Stoppard, is a mysterious surreal comedy with a Sherlock Holmes
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The staging and technical theatre aspects such as costume, makeup, lighting, staging & acting were all very professional, the sound quality was spread evenly throughout the room, the stage was smaller than I imagined but they still had room to act, and perform the plays, no crowding at all. The main character in The Actor’s nightmare was dressed in a Shakespearean style outfit since he was reciting Hamlet and in The real inspector hound the two critics were dressed in a suit and tie. Also, the music matched perfectly with each scene, there would be mysterious music for a suspenseful scene. There were not any technical difficulties what so ever. This made my first comedy play experience so
Our high school play “Once Upon a Mattress” was fantastic. I thought that everything was really good especially the pit orchestra. As an audience member I thought everything went smoothly and there were not many difficulties. However, as a backstage member I thought that building some of the things were somewhat difficult, due to the fact that most of us that were building, were new to the concept of trying to construct a plan and then build it. Other than that, the set, costumes, lighting, sound, makeup, and the musical portion of the play was very good.
The play has naturalistic conversation all the way through, to make it seem real, like you could be there. But it also has surreal elements; for example; the inspectors name is Inspector Goole. This sounds like a ghoul or a ghost. And at the end of the play, he disappears and his existence remains a mystery.
Conflict with reality and appearance brings to surface the elements of the traditional commedia dell’arte in the form of mistaken identity, which enriches the farcical plot-lines that occur in the play. The very embodiment of mistaken identity establishes that what may be seem real could be quite the opposite, however the characters in the play are unable to distinguish this as their vision becomes distorted by their fall into the deception of appearance. It is this very comedic device that enables the conflict between Roscoe (Rachel) and Alan, or Charlie and Alan’s father to occur which is a significant part of the comedic nature of the play as the unproportional situation is what sparks laughter from the audience, and so it is the presence of mistaken identity alone that conveys the play into a light-hearted comedy. Furthermore, Peter O'Neill quotes that ‘using humour can provide a degree of safety for expressing difficult ideas or opinions which could be particularly effective…’. In the circumstances of the quotation Richard Bean effectively c...
One of its numerous strengths was the costuming and set. This musical would not have been the same had these elements not come together to transport the viewer. In addition to the costuming and the set, the actors were very well cast. Each actor was in a role that fit them and they portrayed their characters very well. For example, the man who played Glen really seemed like a greedy Wall Street worker. The choreography was also well done. It fit true to the style of dance in the 1980s and added to the immersion experience. The only thing that could have made this experience better would be to add more music. This may just be a personal preference, but when I see a musical I like for the music to be central like it is in Hamilton or Les Miserables. However, this musical was very good and not much could be added to enhance the
Layered in a veneer of madness, The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh is an ode to the absurd, taking dark comedy to the realm of social commentary, within the first two scenes alone. Opening the play with a very dead cat, the audience immediately sees the characters arguing over the life of the dead cat, saying, “The first thing the books say is don’t be moving an accident victim till professional fecking help arrives, and a fool knows that!” (McDonagh 8). In this case, the “accident victim” is an obviously dead cat that has absolutely no hope of survival, but Donny yells at Davey for moving him before “professional fecking help arrives” as if there was ever a possibility of saving the cat, whose brains later plop to the floor. Not
The setup of the stage was very simple. It was the living room of a home in the early 1980’s. It looked like a normal household, and it had small things such as crumpled up pieces of paper lying around the wastebasket. It also had a couch, circular class table and a recliner in the living room. The dining room was to the left side of the stage and only had the dining table and surrounding chairs. There was a door in the back of the set where characters entered and exited through. Beside the door was a table and stool where Willum presumably worked on his blueprints for the hotel. The lighting design was great; it put you into the atmosphere of the
It was good setting to get the attention from the audience and also a way to move around or change settings of the play. Although I love this play my small critic for this play was the players. Some others actors had understandable accents but others didn’t. For example, the brother of the servant his accent was confusing because he kept switching his accent from different country languages. This play was really nice it had a little of bit of everything drama, comedy, romance, betrayal. What like about this play it was how they used the dramatic structure the inciting incident and the climax. The inciting incident for this play of musical comedy murders of 1940 was guessing who the killer of the play was because there was tension building up not knowing who the murder was. The climax for this play would be for me finding out who was the murder and just being in shock how everything had change into a new scenario. Overall it was amazing show how it developed and how well an organized transition the play
The production had many elements which for the most part formed a coalition to further the plot. The characters, the three part scenery and costumes represented well the period of time these people were going through. As far as the performers entering and exiting the stage, it could have been more organized. There were a few times when the performers exited at the wrong times or it seemed so due to the echo of the music. At certain moments the music was slightly loud and drowned the performers. Many of the songs dragged on, so the pacing could have been more effectively executed. Though the music was off at times, the director's decision to have most of the songs performed center sage was a wise one. Also the implementation of actual white characters that were competent in their roles came as a great surprise to the audience and heightened the realism.
Lynn Nottage’s play Poof! is noteworthy due to the combination she used of realism and the fantastic which played well in the effectiveness as a piece of drama. In drama, realism is the attempt to imitate real life which, Nottage does with the two leading characters in her play. Loureen and Florence both endure spousal abuse which connects them as friends. Nottage opens Poof! with an element of the fantastic (the spontaneous combustion of Samuel) following Loureen's curse “Damn you to hell Samuel” to grabbed the audience’s attention. When reading a play as opposed to seeing it the author really needs to try to convey the emotions of the characters and to relay what the dramatic conflict is. In the essay Poof! Nottage uses realism and the fantastic
One of J.B Priestley’s most used dramatic devices throughout ‘An Inspector Calls’ is dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience understand the meaning of a situation but the characters in the play do not; this use of dramatic irony helps promote Priestley’s moral and political views. Dramatic irony can be seen in Act one when Mr. Birling makes self-assured conjectures about the potential war, “You’ll hear some people say that war’s inevitable. And to that I say – fiddlesticks,” and t...
the play was good. The first act was a little slow and tedious but the
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, playwright William Shakespeare creates in Bottom, Oberon, and Puck unique characters that represent different aspects of him. Like Bottom, Shakespeare aspires to rise socially; Bottom has high aims and, however slightly, interacts with a queen. Through Bottom, Shakespeare mocks these pretensions within himself. Shakespeare also resembles King Oberon, controlling the magic we see on the stage. Unseen, he and Oberon pull the strings that control what the characters act and say. Finally, Shakespeare is like Puck, standing back from the other characters, acutely aware of their weaknesses and mocks them, relishing in mischief at their expense. With these three characters and some play-within-a-play enchantment, Shakespeare mocks himself and his plays as much as he does the young lovers and the mechanicals onstage. This genius playwright who is capable of writing serious dramas such as Hamlet and Julius Caesar is still able to laugh at himself just as he does at his characters. With the help of Bottom, Oberon, and Puck, Shakespeare shows us that theatre, and even life itself, are illusions that one should remember to laugh at.
The most successful aspect of the performance for me were the scene changes. I found that the rotation of the blackboard, center stage, where the actors were able to stoop beneath it in order to enter and exit the stage, was an effective touch to this non naturalistic performance. When this was first used, at the end of the first scene, when the characters Ruth and Al left the stage, I thought it didn't quite fit as at the beginning the style was leaning towards realism. But as the play progressed and the acting style became more and more non naturalistic, and this rotation of the black board technique was used more frequently it fitted in really well and became really effective.
The clown contributes towards the humourous entertainment of this play through his numerous puns and jokes. He is a source of laughter, not because we are humoured by his "foolery"; for he proves to be no fool at all; but rather because he amuses us with his brilliant wit. Having mastered the art of jesting, Feste is sensitive of his profession, always aware of the circumstances he is in and the appropriateness of this folly.
There wasn’t any particular scene on stage that made me doubt the integrative work of the director since all the staging work such as lighting, design, costumes and performance were well coordinated and blended for a very good production. The lights were well positioned with well fitted costumes and a very ideal scene to match. There wasn’t much change of scenes in the play except for some movement of tables and chairs. There was an entrance and exit for the performers which made their movements uninterrupted. There was a loud sound of a bell when school was over while the lights were dimmed whenever there was a change of scene. The pace of the production was very smooth since one scene followed the other without delay and most likely because most of the performers wore the same costume; especially all eight students wore the same costume for the entire