Caroline Grogan

Are the Bennett Girls Ok?

October 12, 2025

The style and tone of "re the Bennet Girls Ok?" has been updated to contemporary language with the women using “like” and multiple curse words including the F-bomb so that although we see women dressed in Mariah Anzaldo Hale’s clothing from 1811 what we hear is 2025 language. And while the jokes suggest this is now a farce, none of it is very funny, with the men getting the worst of it. Both Charles Bingley (nicknamed "Bing Bong" by the Bennet sisters) and Fitzwilliam Darcy are figures of fun so that we do not see what the women see in them. While the original novel was a social comedy, the serious problem that the Bennet women must marry as they will be evicted from their house on the death of their father is no longer a consideration today: entailment to the oldest male heir was discontinued in England in 1925. Also unlike in 1811, women can now work and earn their own money. [more]

Arcadia

November 17, 2023

This being Bedlam famous for its experimental revivals, the second act is handled differently. The audience is asked to leave their seats in the amphitheater and when they return are given other seats now arranged on what had been the stage of the theater before. The second act then takes place mostly in the seats that were just vacated. Unfortunately, as both acts are supposed to take place in the same setting this is rather distracting. The opening of the second act is a speech given by Bernard which makes perfect sense in what now looks like a college lecture hall or an amphitheater but the rest of that act makes little sense in such a setting. In each act, a character enters and is made to walk through one of the rows of the audience, not only breaking the fourth wall of the theater so to speak but also inconveniencing everyone seated in that row. [more]

Bedlam’s Persuasion

September 29, 2021

Bedlam’s 2014 production of "Sense and Sensibility," adapted by Kate Hamil from the novel by Jane Austen, and directed by Eric Tucker, set the bar so high for cleverness, originality and wit that we have come to expect this level of expectation from all of their future offerings. Unfortunately, their stage version of Austen’s last novel "Persuasion," a tale of mature love and second chances by first time playwright Sarah Rose Kearns, does not work as well. Among the problems are so much doubling and tripling that it becomes difficult to keep the characters separate and a lack of humor and irony that was inherent in the original material. Tucker seems to have forgotten that this should be a comedy of manners. [more]