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Mickey Jo
Riley Herbst from 2311 Racing checking in. Got a break in between team meetings? Sounds like the perfect time for some fast paced fun at Chumba Casino. No waiting, just instant action to keep you going. So next time you need a pick me up, fire it up and take a spin. Play now@chumbacasino.com let's Chumba. No purchase necessary VGW Group Void where prohibited by law. CTNC's 21+ sponsored by Jumbo Casino I don't know if you've had this experience, but sometimes I'll be in the middle of specifically watching a play and I'll start to have an existential crisis about whether or not theatre needs to mean anything or say anything or really do anything. Like if I liked the play, does it matter that nothing really happened? Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening to this theatre review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media and today we are going to be talking about one of the West End's newest openings. This is the play Clarkston by the American playwright Samuel D. Hunter. It has just opened at the Trafalgar Theatre in the West End and it stars a trio of exciting performers. Joe Locke, best known for his work on screen in Heartstopper, as well as Rory Mollico and Sophie Melville. It's a one act play directed by Jack Serio, set in the state of Washington and I'm going to tell you all about it today. We're going to talk about the themes we're going to talk about, the plot that there is. And as I still kind of process all of my thoughts about this play in real time and unpack my feelings about it, I'm going to attempt to articulate why this felt to me so much like an Off Broadway play and whether or not that made it difficult to enjoy in London, which honestly sounds ridiculous but is worth thinking about. As always, however, these are just my own subjective thoughts about this piece of theatre, and I would love to hear yours. If you have already seen Clarkston or thrillingly, a previous production of Clarkston, this is not the world premiere production of this fairly recent play. Let us all know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. And if you enjoy listening to my thoughts and would like to hear more of my theatre reviews of other plays and musicals on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere in the world, then make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Turn on notifications so you don't miss any any upcoming videos, including recaps of theatre news, theatre drama and the occasional theatre going vlog. Or go follow me on podcast platforms. But in the meantime, let us talk about the play Clarkston. Let me tell you a little bit more about it. So this is one of several plays written by Samuel D. Hunter, perhaps best known for writing the play the Whale that became the film of the same name. This is not the only play that he has written which is set in proximity to the place where he grew up in Moscow, Idaho. And though Clarkston is actually set in Clarkston comma Washington in the state of Washington, which borders Idaho, it is very proximal to that border. And much of the identity of the play and the themes that it's exploring. And the closest thing there is to an overall message or idea has a lot to do with working class, rural American towns and communities and these spaces and these frontiers once explored by pioneers and now inhabited by people growing up and living and working in just enough austerity to prevent them ever really being able to expand their own frontiers and, for example, travel west far enough to go and see the Pacific Ocean in their lifetime. That is a specific note from the play. In other words, while this is not necessarily set where Samuel D. Hunter himself was born, it does seem to portray an insight into the experience of living in that kind of a community. And if this is not your first time listening to my critical work and you're thinking to yourself, Mickey Jo, this is a lot of geographical insight for somebody who has often said that they are not Mickey Joe places and they are horrible at geography and I would like you all to know that prior to this review I looked at a map feeling pretty proud of myself. Now why is the place set in this particular town of Clarkston? Well, there is a clue in the name and it has to do with why Joe Locke's character, whose name is Jake, finds himself there in the first place. Because he is originally from Connecticut and he has recently traveled away from his home, from his parents, from his hometown and home state, and everything about the life that he knew in order to head west. Because he is an indirect descendant of One of the US's great famous explorers, Lewis and Clark. He is a descendant of Clark and he has stopped on route to the western coast in the Pacific Ocean, which he has never seen before because he lives on the east coast, not because he's not from wealth. He has stopped in the town of Clarkston, named for Clark. Interestingly enough, while I was researching for this, I learned that Samuel D. Hunter has also written another play called Lewiston, which is about an imagined descendant of Lewis and their experiences in a contemporary world. Now I'll expand a little bit more on exactly what it is that Jake is searching for on his journey, but in the introductory scene of the play we find him being trained for a new job at Costco, specifically in like the warehouse area of Costco, unboxing things and stacking shelves, etc. He is being trained by another employee, a young man close to him in age whose name is Chris. And while in real life I have a deceptively dull sense of scent, I'm like a sniffer dog when it comes to homoerotic tension. And in the first couple interactions between these two, though, it's immediately made very clear to us that they have very different backgrounds, very different personalities and world views, and different life experience sort of stemming from an inherent class divide. There is quite clearly a romantic tension and a spark there also, but one in its very earliest uncomfortable stages of infancy. And we notice this as they sort of interrogate each other, asking just a few more more questions than they really need to for their professional working relationship, but more so when we find out something very personal about Jake that he reveals to Chris. He experiences a tremor in his hand and Chris questions whether he's going to be able to do this job, which involves a lot of manual labor, prompting Jake to confess that he has a very rare juvenile version of Huntington's disease and he isn't expected to live past the age of 50 30. All of which is beginning to shape our understanding of why he's on this journey and what he's looking for. And also at the same time, from a playwrighting perspective, instilling something of a background tension. Because, you know, he's very, quite clearly in his 20s. We don't know at this stage exactly how old he is, but he's told us he's not expecting to live past 30. It's the same thing that we experience in Kimberly Akimbo by David Lindsay Abare. This sort of fundamentally unnatural idea of a young person still coming to terms with their identity and forced to reckon with their. Their own potential imminent death. All of this increasingly heavy conversation and the gradual peeling back of these layers of revelation taking place, by the way, as they are stacking boxes of potato chips and cheese balls on the shelf. But I promised you queer romantic tension. And that comes into play when we see Chris's sympathy towards Jake. He is quite clearly guarded in his emotions, but when Jake tells him about the juvenile Huntingtons, he shares that he isn't going to tell anyone and in fact that he is friends with the person who creates the rotors and he can make sure that they always have shifts together. And, you know, there's something about the way that he says, I'm not going to tell anyone and I'll make sure that we're always working together. That immediately feels like a little bit of electricity to me. And I'm not wrong, because we then jump forwards just far enough to see the two of them trying to go about a romantic encounter. Much of the play is this sort of, are they an item? Are they going to acknowledge the thing that is between them? Are they going to succumb to it? Or is there too much getting in there, their way? And for the most part, the roadblock that is stopping them from succumbing to the obvious romance that is lingering in the air is not only the hefty emotional baggage that they are each carrying, which we will get to, don't you worry, but also, like I said, the difference in economic background. Gerlog's character, Jake, is coming from wealth and from privilege. We find out ticklingly early on that his family is very liberal, that even in Connecticut his father posted a land acknowledgment on their front door that he majored in post colonial gender studies and that his perspective of their current circumstances is very different to Chris's. He even says stores like Costco in towns like this might be. I don't know if he calls it the new Frontier or the final frontier, not in a Star Trek way, but, you know, kind of harkening back to the pioneer age of America, the New West, I think he calls it. I think that's what he says. Chris, a little later on in the play, meanwhile, in a moment of passion and frustration, says, this is just some stupid town. And he has had a comparatively very difficult upbringing, one which we eventually find out an awful lot more about, because the third character in this play is his mother, played by the brilliant Sophie Melville, from whom we learned he has perhaps recently become estranged due to her extensive history of drug abuse throughout his adolescence, the emotional impact of which is clear to us from their very first encounter and his reluctance to even reciprocate a hug. Though she is making every attempt. It seems to be very selfless with just little bit of emotional manipulation sprinkled in there. But the exact details of which are revealed to us before the end of the play as he recounts some of the harder realities of his upbringing and life with his mother, the drug addict. All of which, as you might expect, becomes just a little bit more dramatic as the events of the play continue and accelerate. And each of our three characters in turn confronts their own angst and their own darkness. But like a lot of reflective and naturalistic contemporary writer writing, it doesn't necessarily boil into the most dramatic of circumstances. There is one hefty confrontation that we build towards, but it's not a play in which a series of consecutive dramatic events take place. It is more about moments of encounter and moments of sharing details about yourself with another person and moments of sort of strained connection. And predominantly, it's about these two souls and the circumstances in which they find each other and what it is that they need for each other and their ability to move past their own tensions, their own baggage, and find comfort in each other. And so, without giving you too many spoilers, that is something of a synopsis of the play. We're going to continue to talk about the themes as I give you my overall thoughts. Tonight's meal, Tilapia surprise with boiled cabbage. Begin cooking steps 1 through 50 now.
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Mickey Jo
So my response to this basically is that I enjoyed it. I thought it was pretty great scene study and for the most part well developed characters. I feel like the character of Jake was a little bit challenging just because I thought he was very minimally endearing. And I think fundamentally I'm still trying to reckon with the idea of this wildly liberal character leaving his Connecticut home and idolizing the pioneer age and his own pioneer ancestors. In spite of everything that he has acknowledged about colonialism, in spite of his own post colonial gender studies education. Education. And even though he tells us repeatedly about his eagerness to see the ocean and we know that this is all a kind of a time bomb situation for him and this is a bucket list kind of achievement, and he is bringing with him an awful lot of trauma. He has not too long ago received this prognosis. He was also dumped by his boyfriend a few months previously. All the same, there is this creeping quality of emotional dishonesty and it's as though we never really get to the bottom of why this means as much as it does for him. And the explanation that we do receive about him having this epiphany that he has had a very privileged existence and this is something he is finally going to do for himself, still rings sort of false, at least in comparison to the character of Chris, who by contrast feels wildly honest, soul bearingly so. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. Like I said, I enjoyed the scene study between these characters, between these performers on stage, and each moment was well written. It just felt a little bit more like an indie movie than a substantial and rewarding piece of theater, which I think is a way of me saying not a lot really happened. And for a play that I'm seeing in London and for a play in the West End theater ecosystem, I think that might be a little bit to its disadvantage. But it's also an interesting reality of the theatre industry in 2025. Now, I said around this time last year that we were beginning to see the oft Broadway ification of London theatre. There were a lot of Plays coming over here. I'm thinking about Dracula, a comedy of terrors. I'm thinking about Titanique, literal Off Broadway shows making their way to London, but also just a lot of producing that felt more familiar of that kind of area than the stuff that we would usually see on or off West End. And a big part of that is what's happening with New York theatre, financially speaking, because Broadway is becoming less and less financially viable. So a lot of great work is happening off Broadway way. And I assume there is perhaps a scarcity of theaters as a result. But in any case, another byproduct of that is that more and more New York based producers and New York based investors are turning their attention across the Atlantic to London. There are so many American producers and investors in London right now working with or on West End shows. And this is one example of that. And so consequentially you have pieces produced like this, a play from an American playwright that speaks quite specifically to American ideals and notions. The entire concept of, you know, a privileged young man trying to find himself by heading west, I think means fairly little to us as a British audience. It's a very romanticized American idea that to my mind just doesn't really resonate. But that's not all. I think in general, a lot of the plays that we tend to see in London either offer really gritty explorations of interpersonal dynamics between characters or substantial plots in which a lot of different things happen. And so something that is very naturalistic, that does not have an extensive synopsis, you know, this is only a 95 minute play, isn't necessarily going to feel like a lot of the other pieces of theatre that we see in the West End, which is not necessarily a bad thing. For a lot of theatre goers, this might be a rewarding breath of fresh air. And there's a lot to enjoy about it. There's a lot to enjoy about the queer characters portrayed on stage. And the fact that even though there is some reluctance for Chris to be perceived by other people in the town, he has had some difficulty with coming out to his parents and he has been warned by his mother that he could be subject to violence. For the most part, though, it is not a queer trauma play and its queer identity is essential, but it's also only a characteristic of it. It's not what I would call a gay play. And in fact, a lot of the most enjoyable scenes are those in which the relationship between these two characters subtly progresses. The intimacy of their first kiss is equaled almost by the intimacy of a moment in which they read to each other. Chris is an aspiring novelist reading to Jake but reading a spooky story that Jake finds a little bit unnerving. Jake, meanwhile, recalls journal entries by Lewis and Clark from memory, and it's in those moments that I felt the greatest sense of emotional connection. But ultimately it's still a play that I don't think is really saying as much as it could and not that every play needs to deliver a hard hitting message. Chris, as a writer character even says at one point during this that he whatever he writes, he feels it doesn't necessarily have to mean anything. And I wonder if that's sort of an echo of the voice of Samuel D. Hunter reflecting on his own work. But in circumstances like this, when you're bringing two characters like these together in this kind of an environment, it's a play that, you know, could be empowered to say just a little more than it does and to mean a little more than it does. And you know, not that I'm discontent with good acting and vibes, but I think there's more that we could do here. Finally, however, let us continue by talking about that acting in this trio of performances.
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Mickey Jo
Now for me to probably do justice to these, I think there are going to have to be some further spoilers in this section. If you don't want to know everything that happens by the end of the play. I encourage you to first go and see it or read it for yourself and then come back to me if you already have or if you know you're not going to get the chance to. To let's carry on. So we are going to talk about Gerlog, but I feel as though I have had such a revelation this evening in the discovery of Rory Molocher. And not that I discovered him, you know, he's been cast in this play. I just went to go see it, but I wasn't familiar with his work before and I think he is extraordinary. All of the detail in his performance and this sort of angry young man quality with a concealed sensitivity motivated by a child who, who was hurt and who was betrayed by a parent who was in no position to be responsible. Somehow in a 95 minute play, years of sorrow and disappointment tremble on his lips and it's as though he is wrestling the youth that he never really got to have in the adulthood that he has been forced to experience a little too early into this uncomfortable choke hold. To that end, he is just occasionally a little volatile, always coming from a place place of passion and playing this constant tension captivatingly well. It's particularly fascinating watching him in dialogue with Jake and in dialogue with his mother, and the way that he shifts and the way that he tries to resist the emotional connection that she is trying to rebuild, but one which he ultimately succumbs to before finally being disappointed by her drug relapse. Yes. Spoiler alert. She comes back in towards the end of the play and he, over the course of one extended manic, one sided conversation that she is having mostly at him, starts to realize that she is high, that she has been using again, in spite of his warning, his ultimatum that if she ever did, they would no longer have a relationship. And when he's alone with Jake, when the two of them have become a little more comfortable, the way that we see each of them shifting in each other's company, the way that Jake, who is a little somber and more than a little self involved, smiles in spite of himself in these moments and the way that, that Chris just attains this levity and begins to feel significantly lighter than he had done in the scene previously. That is a very exciting actor, definitely one to watch on stage, on screen. Which brings us to Sherlock and a fundamental difference, I think, between their performances because Ruri and Sophie both feel a degree more heightened and more theatrical, but that's also necessitated by their Material and the level of passion and histrionic that they arrive at, because the two of them are playing this disconnected mother and son with all of this fraught history that gets brought back to the surface as she arrives high in front of him in this moment of extraordinary regret and pain and betrayal. While Jake, meanwhile, is a little more emotionally disconnected. He is arriving in this place from his hometown. He doesn't have a prior connection with the other characters on stage, though he is building one increasingly with Chris. Chris. But it becomes a slightly laborious feature of the dialogue that he has to keep explaining all of these details about his life and about his circumstances, because that's the only way that we're gonna find out. We're only gonna learn this when he tells us. Unlike with Chris and his mother, who are able to offer us a little bit more with the prior insight that they have into each other, but at the same time, with all of this in a naturalistic modern day set play, it does feel a little bit like Joe Locke is giving a performance more crafted for the screen than for the stage. It doesn't have the same degree of theatricality, and it's not to do with the extensive emotion. I think if anything has a little bit more to do with the subtext. Rory is playing all of this sort of strangled and withheld emotion. And Joe's character, Jake, has an awful lot lingering beneath the surface. And in one moment he is shown to have a depressive even, even suicidal inclination. But as we circle around the roundabout of his inner turmoil a few too many times, it does sort of just start to feel like a generic angst without layers, without depth and without detail in the subtext. It's a good performance and it's a believable performance. It's certainly a believable chemistry between the two of them. You root for this relationship as you are watching it bloom under difficult circumstances. And it's a minimally endearing character at the center of the story, which is a slightly difficult protagonist. But ultimately, I do think the material could be colored with a little more detail, with a greater sense of motivation when he is lying and why he is lying and what it is that he is really striving for. I wish that there was more clarity in what on earth he is doing there and what on earth he is hoping to achieve in all of it. Like, you can tell me again that your boyfriend broke up with you and you're trying to drive to the Pacific Ocean prior to succumbing, coming to an unfortunately early death, but it still, to my mind, doesn't necessarily offer a meaningful enough explanation. That's what you're doing, that's not why you're doing it. There's one particularly interesting scene towards the end of the play when the two young men are stacking shelves together in Costco. And there's an earlier reference to someone breaking something expensive and being punished for it. And they're stacking televisions, which instantly I thought was basically Chekhov's Panasonic. And true enough, spoiler alert. After an extended scene in which they go from. From embracing and clinging each other to a moment of intense emotional opposition and lashing out in the way that hurt people do when they hurt other people with their pain, television does end up being intentionally broken. But pedant that I am, I do want to point out to you that the height of the box guaranteed that they weren't going to be able to put it on the shelf, even if they had tried to. Like, that TV had to get dropped on the floor because it was never going to fit, fit on the shelves. In the set design, and I should tell you at this point, who designed those shelves? There's not a huge amount of set design happening because there is some on stage seating. There are a couple of banks of onstage seats if you want to be really proximal to the action. I was out front in the store, so I can't tell you about it. But certainly for some of the emotional moments of these performances, I think it would be really rewarding to be up close. The set has been designed, designed as well as the costumes by Miller Clark, and Stacey derossier did the lighting design, which is probably the creative element that I enjoyed the most. There are some stunning moments of lighting, a lot of warm orange glows and then this bright blue wash at the end of the thing when they eventually find themselves staring out across the Pacific Ocean. But before they do, there is a showdown to be had with Sophie Melville's character, who I learn from the program is called Trisha. I don't know if we ever hear that in the play, but I was particularly excited when this was announced because I'm a big fan of Sophie Melville's work and I know what range and power and intensity she has as an actress. So in the early moments of the play, when she comes in and it's fairly low key, you get the sense that this is going to build to something more dramatic. And as terrible as it is, I did have the specific thought that this woman is definitely going to relapse because otherwise they wouldn't need Sophie Melville to be on this stage. And she is a gripping performer, one who, fascinatingly has the capacity to continue to take my breath away, even though I know exactly where we're going in terms of intensity and power. I saw her mesmerizing performance a few years ago in Iphigenia, in Splot. I also loved her in Cowboys. And at this point, it's like eating a red hot chili pepper repeatedly and continuing to be surprised by the fact that it's hot. And to continue in the vein of that metaphor, hers is a scorchingly good performance. By the end of the thing, it's an emotional supernova, but one that doesn't entirely come out of nowhere. Because, like I said, even in that first encounter, when she is trying to give utter deference to her son and just offering an olive branch, she's brought him groceries and she's put a childhood toy in there, there's still the creeping sense of a little bit of emotional manipulation. And we see more of that frustration and impatience from her. Her the second time that she appears, when it isn't Chris who she speaks to first, it's Jake as he's leaving his workplace, and he points out that he knows who she is. And she observes him very scrutinizingly, sort of fascinatingly studying him before jumping to the conclusion that he is dating her son, which isn't a million miles from the truth, but it's not anything they've specifically labeled. All of this eventually building towards the frenzy of her final scene in the play and this excruciating, painful emotional showdown with her son, which leaves him trembling, wordless, in the fetal position on the floor, and her walking away, turning back, being visibly filled with remorse, and ultimately finding herself unable to connect to him and get past her own demons, and so leaving nonetheless. But it's in those moments when she's still pleading with him for forgiveness and he is sobbing on the floor of the stage and she is getting down on his level and trying to bring her face closer to his. There's such an electricity between these two actors on stage. It is so vitally directed. The chemistry between this trio of characters in each instance has been so honed and so refined. And we can feel the difference between what feels like an authentic relationship that has become strained and is being rejected from one side, and what feels like a sort of slightly jealous relationship on the other side, and another between the two men that is challenged and fractured, but ultimately offering hope for a more promising future. And even with all of its emotional turbulence and it's more overtly morose moments. I think Clarkston is a play that offers a degree of hope. I think the connection that is found between these two young men coming from very different parts of this country is an inspiring and rewarding one. Certainly this is a play to be seen if you were in the market for some fantastic acting for great scene work between these performers. Specifically, if you want to see these two playing really convincing, tentative lovers before they maybe play brothers in a marvel moving. Anyway, those have been my thoughts about Clarkston at the Trafalgar Theatre in the West End, alongside the critiques that I detailed in this review. I did still enjoy it, especially these performances, and I would encourage you, as always, to go and see it for yourself and make up your own mind if you haven't already. And if you have already, then like I said, let us all know what you thought about the play in the comments section down below. And if you enjoyed listening to my thoughts and want to stay up to date with all of my theater reviews, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on those channel notifications so YouTube lets you know every time I post a new video or go follow me on podcast platforms. In the meantime, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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Host: Mickey Jo (MickeyJoTheatre)
Release Date: September 27, 2025
Mickey Jo offers an in-depth review and personal reflection on "Clarkston," a one-act play by Samuel D. Hunter, now running at London's Trafalgar Theatre. The episode explores the play’s themes, character dynamics, cultural resonance (or lack thereof), and the quality of acting from its principal cast—Joe Locke, Ruaridh Mollica, and Sophie Melville. Mickey Jo also comments on the increasing “Off-Broadwayification” of London theatre.
“...frontiers once explored by pioneers and now inhabited by people growing up and living and working in just enough austerity to prevent them ever really being able to expand their own frontiers and, for example, travel west far enough to go and see the Pacific Ocean in their lifetime.” —Mickey Jo [02:18]
“I'm like a sniffer dog when it comes to homoerotic tension. And in the first couple interactions between these two...there is quite clearly a romantic tension and a spark there...” —Mickey Jo [05:50]
“It is more about moments of encounter and moments of sharing details about yourself with another person...predominantly, it's about these two souls and the circumstances in which they find each other and what it is that they need from each other...” —Mickey Jo [10:40]
“There is this creeping quality of emotional dishonesty and it's as though we never really get to the bottom of why this means as much as it does for him.” —Mickey Jo [13:32]
“The entire concept of, you know, a privileged young man trying to find himself by heading west, I think means fairly little to us as a British audience. It's a very romanticized American idea that to my mind just doesn't really resonate.” —Mickey Jo [15:15]
“It just felt a little bit more like an indie movie than a substantial and rewarding piece of theater, which I think is a way of me saying not a lot really happened.” —Mickey Jo [13:31]
“...for the most part, though, it is not a queer trauma play and its queer identity is essential, but it's also only a characteristic of it. It's not what I would call a gay play.” —Mickey Jo [16:23]
Mickey Jo offers detailed praise and nuanced critique of each actor:
Ruaridh Mollica (Chris):
“Years of sorrow and disappointment tremble on his lips and it's as though he is wrestling the youth that he never really got to have in the adulthood that he has been forced to experience a little too early into this uncomfortable choke hold.” —Mickey Jo [20:40]
Joe Locke (Jake):
“It does feel a little bit like Joe Locke is giving a performance more crafted for the screen than for the stage. It doesn't have the same degree of theatricality...” —Mickey Jo [22:00]
“That's what you're doing, that's not why you're doing it.” —Mickey Jo [23:52]
Sophie Melville (Trisha, Chris’s Mother):
“It's like eating a red hot chili pepper repeatedly and continuing to be surprised by the fact that it's hot. ... hers is a scorchingly good performance.” —Mickey Jo [26:11]
Onstage Chemistry:
Technical/Design Elements:
| Time | Segment | |------------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:00–05:00| Intro to Clarkston, setting, origins, and plot setup | | 05:00–11:59| Character relationships, reveals, central tension | | 13:02–18:48| Thematic analysis, cultural mismatch, “Off-Broadwayification”| | 20:15–30:00| Acting/performance assessment, design, notable scenes |
“Certainly this is a play to be seen if you were in the market for some fantastic acting for great scene work between these performers.” —Mickey Jo [29:41]
Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)
Host sign-off: “Have a stagey day!”