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Richard Saudek

Waiting for Godot (New Yiddish Rep)

January 7, 2019

Translator Shane Baker has found excellent Yiddish equivalents for Beckett’s language.  He understands that Yiddish is a minor key tongue full of sadness, quicksilver tone changes, perfect for expressing the constant complaints that fill the libretto of Godot.  Of course, it is Beckett’s language that passes the time with its casually tossed off deep observations of the human condition in the guise of flippant or quasi-philosophical comments. [more]

beep boop

September 11, 2018

"beep boop," Richard Saudek’s hour-long sad-sack romp through modern man’s constant love/hate bout with technology, is at HERE, the avant-garde arts center in SoHo. Its deft combination of mime, music, audio-visual effects and—yes—modern technology is worth a visit to this very active performance space, if for nothing else than to see Saudek disappear into his laptop. [more]

Balls

January 26, 2018

Playwrights Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery take the well-known facts that have been explored in documentaries and in the feature film "Battle of the Sexes" and shovel on a cascade of imagined sub plots, heavy-handed theatrical techniques and sociological trimmings. The opening voice-over prologue is a wry pseudo-scientific lecture about men and woman.  This narrator sounds like Jane Lynch at her most sarcastic and it’s supposed to be funny but falls flat.  The strident tone of the show is set. [more]