As I was watching Louie’s at 1st and Main, I noticed within the first ten minutes that the tempo of the dialogue could have gone a little bit faster than it did. I thought the director’s choice of dialogue in the script could have been modified if not cut out completely. By that I mean the scenes with Louie and Dmitri talking about peanut butter... I felt like it went longer than it should. But I also feel that it set up for future games of ‘conversation’, because later on it got deeper, like ‘love’. (Someone also pointed out that they liked how the homeless man could talk circles around the ‘educated people’. So true; that was entertaining watching his witty comebacks).
As far as the casting goes, each person carried their character on stage the best they could. Although I’ve never seen any professional plays, I have seen enough high school plays to notice which casts seem to click together in the play and which don’t. I’d like to echo what Ember said in her blog post, ‘the entire cast was always connected to each other, and be it in a negative, positive or neutral way. It made it more realistic and drew me into the show more because of it.’ I like the way Ember put those sentences together. It really does explain how I felt towards the play.
I felt like the movement of the actors was fine, some more so than others. In my opinion, it feels like there’s not much to work with when in such a small space, it seems like that type of space is good for conveying a message on a stage where not much movement is needed. As for the characters, Officer Charles could have moved more when Dmitri was talking to him when they had a scene together. What I also liked was the character Louie, how he had a few little mannerisms that gave clues that he wasn’t human. I don’t think anyone picked up on it until maybe the second half of the play (but I could be wrong, maybe some of you did!) that he actually wasn’t human, he was actually a pigeon. Like how he was quite when other people were around, when the mean police officer stomped his foot on the ground and he ran (flew always flapping his arms). Yes, I thought it was clever.
All in all, I think the director did a good job with the actors and how they portrayed their characters. I thought the characters played their parts to the best of their ability.
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3 comments:
Well, generally, it is looked down upon in the theatre community if content (whether it's catchy or not) is altered or cut. But I do agree that the director could have done something to speed up the pacing of those "topic scenes". For me, those scenes lost their energy because they were constantly in an unengaging position (sitting down, not facing each other, eyes facing down for a large majority of time).
I agree that a lot of the hints and movements of Louie's character were very clever, and it's always fun being able to put the clues together at the end and being able to say, "Oh that's wahy..."
Heather
There was a great moment in the show where you could look around and see everyone in the audience whispering to the person next to them trying to figure out what the script had not told us. And when it was finally made clear what Louie's true identity was so much more made sense.
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