The News Review:
- Accomplice: New York – Interactive Theater – New York Times
- G NRTH YUNG MEN FREEDM AS MUCH AS MNEY PRMPTS MEXICAN…
- Denman gives them the song and dance
Accomplice: New York – Interactive Theater – New York Times
New York Times – Apr 22, 2007
“Accomplice: New York” an audience-friendly blend of walking tour mobster movie and scavenger hunt that treats Lower Manhattan as its sprawling stage is part of what has become one of the few consistently and for some people perplexingly popular ff Broadway genres: interactive theater. In a cultural moment when television viewers choose the next “American Idol” and Time magazine celebrates You as its Person of the Year theater audience members have more opportunities than ever to be the stars of the show. They break dance at the 1980s-themed “Awesome ’80s Prom” and gab and ogle with the girls at “Birdy’s Bachelorette Party” and “The Fantasy Party. ” Even on Broadway they may take part in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. ” f course audience participation has been around for as long as tossed tomatoes but this particular model didn’t really take off until the opening of “Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding” which has been running and gesticulating since 1988 (with an interruption or two). Partly inspired by the environmental theater movement “Tony ‘n’ Tina” aimed to break down the divide between the audience and actors. Since then interactive theater has hardened into an often crass formula featuring a thin plot stitched together by a few broad stereotypical characters (the slutty cheerleader the drunken Irishman) who interact with and gently encourage the audience to play along.
G NRTH YUNG MEN FREEDM AS MUCH AS MNEY PRMPTS MEXICAN…
San Francisco Chronicle – Apr 22, 2007
At 12 he tells her he can’t live there anymore. He takes the road down to Mexico City. He becomes an underage underpaid construction worker who sends money home but who on his Sundays off learns to break-dance in Alameda Park. He shaves his hair into an Americanized Mohawk shocking the elders of Xocotla whenever he comes back thrilling those younger than him about the world below driving them onward. At 22 married he’s had enough of Mexico City. With a group he crosses the Sonora Desert into the United States only a few hours stronger than the slow-moving “se?” with them who collapses and dies of thirst. He ends up living in Huntington Park and working throughout Southern California as a tile setter until he cuts his hand at a job in xnard and can’t work.
Denman gives them the song and dance
Boston Globe – Apr 22, 2007
At the center of the action looking utterly relaxed in the midst of all the corrections and adjustments is Jeffry Denman lifting and spinning his costar Amanda Watkins with the ease of a seasoned hand. In “Crazy for You” Denman plays Bobby Childs a wealthy but frustrated accountant sent to a small mining town to foreclose on a theater — but who in a classic musical-theater twist passes himself off as a director putting on a show to save the theater instead. “Bobby Childs is a dork and a romantic” Denman says during a break still full of energy despite singing and dancing for four hours straight. “He believes people will help each other out and work together to accomplish something in this case to save a theater. I admire that honesty and sincerity. “Much of the sincerity of “Crazy for You” comes from the collection of songs that the creative team — the late director Mike ckrent the choreographer Susan Stroman and the book writer Ken Ludwig — selected from several Gershwin musicals for what debuted on Broadway in 1992 as “a new Gershwin musical comedy. ” They picked such Gershwin chestnuts as “I Got Rhythm” “Embraceable You” and “Someone to Watch ver Me”; fashioned a boy-meets-girl story around them; and then reveled in the razzle-dazzle that emerged.