“The Complete Works” Packs a Punch

This past Friday night I attended Wasatch Theatre Company’s “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)”. I should have guessed by the show’s title that it would offer some serious bang for your buck, but I had not anticipated the slapstick style Shakespeare that was about to shake up my night. Continue reading

Wasatch Theatre Company presents Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two”

Chapter Two is inspired by Simon’s own second marriage, after the death of his first wife, and the grief he still felt for her. “Doesn’t sound like a comedy,” you say? And you would be right. It’s not the subject that’s comedic, it’s the writing of it. In fact, most Neil Simon plays I’ve seen are basically depression and angst wrapped in wit, which isn’t a bad thing. I will admit I’m wary of “auto-biographical” pieces. Usually the author finds them much more interesting than the rest of us. But Simon obviously loved his second wife very much because in Jennie Malone, he wrote a character that was surprisingly interesting. Continue reading

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

The play is a charming and heartfelt piece that tackles its themes with quirky aplomb: the difficulties of intimacy in a world of technology, the inability to connect to the people right in front of us, and how much we invent ourselves and each other. Continue reading

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