Tuesday, March 21, 6-8:15pm
Transit Arts, 1150 E. Main St.
FACEBOOK EVENT

Set around the turn of the last century in New London, Connecticut - where young Eugene had summered - O’Neill’s 1933 Ah, Wilderness! is a marked departure from his usually gloomy plays, fraught with familial Sturm und Drang. Indeed, with their happy if imperfect lives, this comedy’s Millers are the polar opposites of those long suffering characters in his angsty final dramas, such as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Indeed, one could say that the Millers are the family O’Neill wished he had grown up in, rather than the tense, dysfunctional, substance-abusing unit he had the misbegotten misfortune to have been born into.

In 1968 Simon and Garfunkel sang: “Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it’s true.” And after witnessing Deaf West Theatre’s production of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo I’ve become a true believer. Serious theatergoers shouldn’t monkey around - head down ASAP to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts to catch this run, which is short on number of days but long on profundity, leavened by Albee’s wicked wit about the human (or lack of) condition.

This is a very unique live stage experience delivered in a singular way on the boards of the Wallis’ 150-seat Lovelace Studio Theater. In both acts two hearing impaired thesps perform onstage, using facial expressions, body language and American Sign Language. Offstage, or on the side of the set, a pair of actors literally give voice to what the onstage pair of protagonists are communicating via ASL.

Because I’m attracted to tales of romance or redemption, it’s not surprising that I love Beauty and the Beast. It is, after all, a fairy tale that combines both romance and redemption.

But that doesn’t mean I love every version of Beauty and the Beast equally.

Who wouldn’t be won over by Disney’s 1991 animated flick, which retold the charming French tale with the help of beautiful songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken? On the other hand, the first time I saw Disney’s stage adaptation of the musical, I was disappointed to find it diluted the original’s power by adding tot-pleasing slapstick. It wasn’t until I saw a toned-down reboot in 2012 that the stage show claimed a place in my heart.

Now comes Disney’s live-action film version, and I find myself of two minds. The meat of the story—the growing affection between the beautiful Belle (Emma Watson) and the monstrous Beast (Dan Stevens)—is as touching as ever. But director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) and his writers weigh it down with embellishments designed to answer questions that really didn’t need to be answered.