Transcript
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Welcome to Today on Broadway for Friday, October 31st Halloween. Ooh on Broadway radio's Matt Tammanini and.
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I am Tell Me on a Sunday Podcast Grace Aki, I'm not going to.
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Ask you what your costume is, Grace. We've already been over this. It's a secret. But for everybody going out there and celebrating Halloween, whether that means you're going trick or treating, you're waiting for people to ring your doorbell so you can give them candy, you're going out to parties, whatever it is, or if you're like me and just not leaving your house because it is an absolute nightmare in the town that you live in to get around anywhere on Halloween. I hope that you have a safe and happy and sweet as well as goblin filled holiday. I did want to let you guys know that next week we will be off. I'll be traveling. Grace is super busy with a ton of things so there will not be Today on Broadway episodes next week. What I'm going to do instead is on Monday we will start with with the latest episode of Some Like It Pop and then we will go back on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with the previous month's episode so you can get caught up on all the pop culture things that you might have missed. There will be one opening next week, but it is Rob Lake Magic with special guest Muppets. So I'm not too worried about missing those. But we will be back on Monday or at least I will be back on Monday the 10th to kind of get things back in a regular schedule for you. So enjoy those episodes of Some Like It Popped. Get all of your pop culture needs taken care of as you head into the winter months of November and December. All right, Grace, we're going to start today's show over at the Booth Theater where Little Bear Ridge Road officially opened on Broadway. That's why we're a little late coming to folks on Patreon because we were waiting for these reviews to drop after 10pm this is the latest play by Samuel D. Hunter and his Broadway debut. Despite being somebody who has been a mainstay of off Broadway and even has a major feature film based on one of his plays, this is the first time that one of his shows has been on Broadway. It was originally commissioned by the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. It was put together by director Joe Mantello and the star Laurie Metcalfe. They commissioned it from Hunter specifically for Metcalf to star in. Bringing it to Broadway are producers Barry Diller and in his return to Broadway after four or five years in seclusion is Scott Rudin. Starring in the show is Metcalf as Sarah. We'll talk more about that character here in a minute. Micah Stock plays her nephew Ethan. Also in the show, playing multiple characters, are John Drea and Megan Garachas. The plot of the show is described thusly. On the remote outskirts of a small Idaho town, a razor tongued aunt and her long estranged nephew find themselves suddenly back in each other's orbit, two lonely souls with a crumbling house to sell and a tangled history to unravel. Bitingly funny and quietly explosive, Little Bear Ridge Road is a sharply etched portrait of two people reaching across emotional galaxies, searching for meaning and fumbling toward connection even as they fear it might swallow them whole. In this piercing and profound new play, the void is vast, the stars are indifferent, and love, messy, human and hard won, might be the only thing tethering us to earth. One thing to keep in mind with this it does begin in 2020, at the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. So that is the starting point for this show. Obviously, when you're talking about characters who are emotionally isolated, that makes sense. But let's begin with Laura Collins Hughes of the New York Times, who did make the show a critics pick. She said, quote, bulldozer. Aggressive, with a tripwire temper and a tendency to shout, she is seemingly unacquainted with the notion of emotional regulation, as played by a glorious Laurie Metcalf and Samuel D. Hunter's keen eyed, compassionate play Little Bear Ridge Road, which opened on Thursday night at the Booth Theater. She's also one of the funniest and most thoroughly human characters seen lately on a New York stage. One of the most entertaining, too. Despite the fact that Sarah's habitat is entirely domestic and almost defiantly unglamorous, she lives a small life not amped with exciting incident, unless you count the whipsaw changes to her mood. But as she says of the overwrought dramas she flips past on tv, real people aren't always desperately doing things. Little Bear Ridge Road asks of its audience. A mere 95 minutes straight through, and if Hunter wraps things up neatly at the end, that's the kind of story he decided to tell. Unlike some maddening TV show, he is not about to leave you dissatisfied. Charles Isherwood of the Wall Street Journal was also positive, saying, Mr. Hunter's writing has a clarity, delicacy and crisp simplicity that allows us to watch as Sarah and Ethan negotiate the minefields of their relationship, drawing comfort from one another's company, even though both would be loath to admit it. Under the astutely unfussy direction of Joe Mantello, Ms. Metcalf's remarkably fine performance is flinty, funny and savagely unsentimental. And Mr. Stock's Ethan? He says Micah, but he screws up. The name there is sensitive to the point of seeming to squirm inside a constricted, wounded soul. David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter is also positive, saying, quote, the production brings the reliably brilliant Laurie Metcalf back to Broadway in a role that dovetails neatly with her strengths. Playing Sarah, a flinty nurse, involuntarily nearing retirement and living in northern Idaho as far from other people as she can get, Metcalf exercises her usual peerless comic timing, tossing off line readings in a blunt deadpan that never misses. Only gradually does she allow reluctant glimpses of the fragility forced on her by the betrayal of her body. Jackson McHenry of Vulture was mixed, saying in Little Bear Ridge Road, Metcalf racks up the hits with ease, though the production feels more like watching Home Run Derby than a full game, I couldn't escape the nagging sensation as I watched Samuel D. Hunter's drama unfold that the circumstances were all arrayed too perfectly for a Metcalf showcase, that they're too custom fitted to her skills, that there were diminishing returns to watching her do only what she does best. Is it wrong to wish for more uncertainty, more risk the presence of another team on the field? Adam feldman of TimeOut New York did give the show five out of five stars. So he was positive. And finally, Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post was positive, saying, quote, it's a hard hitting, hard laughing show that combines topics that you arrive at the theater not itching to confront. The COVID pandemic, meth addiction, health insurance shift pay into an absorbing story you leave wanting much more of no grace. This is one that, as we were talking before we started recording, like neither one of us have heard a ton about. So reading the reviews is unsurprising that somebody as beloved by the critics as Laurie Metcalfe and Samuel D. Hunter to that extent as well, it's no surprise to me that this is one that the critics really liked. Like I said, though, I know people who have seen it, but I just haven't heard a ton about it. So the reviews are good to know, but the word of mouth, at least in my circles I don't know about yours, is pretty negligible. So take that for what it's worth. But certainly a show that seems to have enamored the people writing reviews.