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Ellie Heyman

Space Dogs

February 27, 2022

Heyman and the rest of the production team quickly turn "Space Dogs" into an exercise of quantity over quality. More lights. More noise. More projections. More props. It's theater as sensory overload, with success measured by distraction. The major problem is that it also leads to a lot of other annoyances, with Nathan Leigh's sound design doing nothing for the intelligibility of Hughes and Blaemire's lyrics, Mary Ellen Stebbins' concert lighting occasionally blinding the audience in MCC's small off-Broadway space, and Stefania Bulbarella's numerous projections just stoking the meaningless hurly-burly. [more]

Dinner with Georgette

March 30, 2018

Michel Foucault and Walt Whitman are quoted offstage at the beginning of "Dinner With Georgette." It’s riddled with pretentious nonsense masquerading as profundity and this bit is a harbinger of what’s to come. The playwright, Obie award-winning theater artist and Brown University alumnus Rick Burkhardt piles on academic inanities for one hour and 40 minutes in this leaden saga.  The abrasive dialogue has the characters refer to themselves in the third person and comment on the actions, addressing the audience directly. [more]