Gian Perez Archives - TheaterScene.net

Gian Perez

The Potluck

July 15, 2026

César Alvarez's "The Potluck," directed with uncommon daring by Sarah Benson, is that increasingly rare theatrical achievement: a musical willing to risk confusion, contradiction, and formal unruliness in pursuit of emotional and historical truth. Inspired by the 1979 Greensboro Massacre—in which members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, aided by astonishing failures of law enforcement, murdered five labor organizers during an anti-Klan demonstration—the production refuses to transform political martyrdom into tidy historical pageantry. Instead, Alvarez, in concert with Benson's characteristically adventurous theatrical imagination, constructs an expansive meditation on inheritance, memory, identity, and the uneasy obligations of art itself. The result is not documentary theater, nor autobiography, nor agitprop, nor conventional musical comedy, but an exhilarating synthesis of all four. It unfolds less as a linear narrative than as an act of excavation, uncovering the ways political violence reverberates through generations long after headlines have faded. [more]

Romeo+Juliet

November 11, 2024

This is another one of those cut down versions of Shakespeare with only ten actors in total. As result, seven of the ten actors double (one triples). The problem is that almost all of the actors have to appear in every scene to fill out the stage. It is also very difficult to know who is who with almost every actor (other than the two leads) playing more than one character, some in gender swaps. The Nurse played by (Ms.) Tommy Dorfman also plays Tybalt, while Mercutio, The Friar and the Prince are all played by actress Gabby Beans. [more]

Sing Street

December 27, 2019

By stripping the story of local color—even the projections show little but an anonymous seascape—the creative team does ill by "Sing Street. " Take away the Irish accents, the 1980’s songs and a quick reference to The Famine, and this story of alienated teens could have taken place in Boise, Idaho, or Buenos Aires, Argentina. Let’s face it, the let’s-put-together-a-band-to-solve-our-problems was even a common theme in MGM films of the forties! (The original "Sing Street" movie, of course, was filmed in Dublin and was filled to the brim with local color and the grimness of economic distress.) [more]