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First night theatre review: Macbeth @ The Lupin Theatre, New Orleans Shakespeare Festival

7/1/2026

 
David Lind as Macbeth at the Lupin Theatre in New Orleans
David Lind as Macbeth at the Lupin Theatre in New Orleans (photo: The New Orleans Shakespeare Festival)

​Shifting sands: Macbeth @ The Lupin Theatre, part of the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival
Review by Lauren Malara


The Lupin's black box theatre is set in the round. Audience members sit on all sides of the stage like a sporting arena, projectors wrapped around the theatre and above the audience. At the center of the stage sits a large sandbox.

​Within it, Director Graham Burk conceptualizes Shakespeare's classic story about absolute power. Some characters tiptoe around it, while others aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. Those who enter draw lines and plant flags, yet the ground is constantly shifting beneath their feet. Those who grasp for power find it slipping through their hands like so many grains of sand.

In the modern age, a sandbox is more than a playground fixture. In gaming, it allows players to choose their own path. In software development, it provides a space for trial runs. In cybersecurity, it isolates and eliminates threats. Burk's sandbox similarly becomes a place where Macbeth's ambition is developed, tested, and ultimately eliminated.

The production is spectacular. Throughout the performance, the box transforms through multimedia projections and LED lighting. At the same time, arena-style projectors encase the audience in a virtual box of their own. These projections allow for minimal scenery, quickly transporting the audience from Birnam Wood to the halls of Inverness. They also conjure eerie apparitions, illustrating Macbeth's descent into madness.

As Macbeth, David Lind (previously reviewed here in last year's The Lehman Trilogy) maintains a compelling connection with the audience. During his asides, he invites us into his dangerous game. The costumes by Kaci Thomassie are stunning. Lady Macbeth, played by Jana Mestecky, is especially striking, at one point wrapped regally in a down comforter.

Ryan Hayes brings a warm affability to Banquo, making his return at the banquet all the more ghastly. The witches (James Bartelle, Georgia Morgan, and Zarah Hōkūleʻa Spalding) are real strange, y'all. Honestly, they remind me of the girl from (horror movie)The Ring. They acrobatically collaborate to create a supernatural being.

The warmth and playfulness between Anja Avsharian and Lucien Grace, as Lady Macduff and Macduff's child, is filled with love. It makes the tragedy that follows all the more devastating. Edward Carter Simon's Macduff delivers grief so raw that his thirst for vengeance feels inevitable.

Of note, Robert A. Mitchell's performance remains grounded despite the constantly shifting terrain, his Duncan exuding ease and grace. Similarly, Robinson J. Cyprian has a commanding stage presence with his silk-smooth voice. Sofia Severson (Fleance) delivers a bright, spirited performance full of fight, and stage manager Jenny L. Billot deserves special recognition for the production's extensive integration of technology.

Macbeth runs through July 12 at the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane. Click here for show information and ticketing

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Movie review: Supergirl

6/30/2026

 
A review of Supergirl starring Milly Alcock
Milly Alcock in Supergirl (2026), directed by Craig Gillepsie

​Cape drear: Supergirl (2026, dir. Craig Gillespie)
Review by Connor McLaughlin


Superhero movies are going extinct. For nearly twenty or so years, comic book movies were Hollywood’s predominant genre and a surefire ace in the hole to turn a profit. They were revolutionary, exciting, and sometimes even radical movies that presented good vs. evil archetypes clearly. Nobody can deny the success of what Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige achieved with his Infinity Saga. It will be remembered as one of the great cinematic achievements.

However, the times have changed.

The audiences have grown up, but the studio shareholders do not want these profitable stories to end. Films are harder and more expensive to make than ever, and studios need to make safer bets on their colorful heroes, with perhaps less artistic direction. This unfortunately marks
Supergirl as just another nail in the coffin. I
t may be coming hot off the heels of James Gunn’s Superman reboot, this project from director Craig Gillepsie is essentially dead on arrival.

The story follows Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl, cousin to Superman/Clark Kent, travelling across the galaxy on a quest for revenge after being personally wronged by a warlord. If the plot sounds familiar, it is because this film is essentially the reheated nachos of past superhero glories.


Despite Alcock and a scene-stealing Jason Momoa's (as an undead bounty hunter) best efforts, the film feels like it barely has a reason to exist. It is simply one tired trope after another, executed without clear enthusiasm or intrigue. Notwithstanding wacky costume design and great SFX makeup, the visuals are unforgivably bad and might be a contender for the brownest, muddiest movie of 2026 (with one of the worst needledrops in a comic book movie to boot).

Alcock is an innocent party here, and she gamely attempts to bring some fresh energy to the project, but I found it barely watchable as a
tentpole summer blockbuster. If anything, Supergirl is a reminder of how much audiences are over both superhero movies and dejected antiheroes that spend the runtime figuring out how to care about people again.

Household heroes like Spider-Man, Batman, and members of The Avengers may maintain success in their upcoming films, but the future looks grim for others, especially the female heroes that Hollywood keeps failing. 

Supergirl is playing at cinemas across the city

Movie review: Backrooms

6/11/2026

 
Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms (2026), directed by Kane Parsons
Backrooms (2026), directed by Kane Parsons

​A room with askew: Backrooms (2026, Dir, Kane Parsons)

Review by Paul Oswell


Horror and its related genres (in this case intense psychological drama with horror elements) has always served as a metaphor for real life anxieties. Dracula tells on Victorian England’s fears of reverse colonization and repressed sexuality, while Frankenstein has unchecked scientific ambition and the isolation of ‘the outsider’ as themes. 


Kane Parsons – a YouTuber tapped by A24’s cinematic distribution juggernaut – has created something that is genuinely unsettling, which is impressive given how desensitized we all are to, well, everything. Mr Parsons was born in 2005, and already has years of lore about The Backrooms concept online. It’s largely a Gen Z phenomenon, so we can perhaps extract data as to their generationally-specific demons.

Backrooms is a dreamlike experience, abstraction and surrealism featuring heavily. David Lynch may have approved. The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly about Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect in the early '90s who's separated, alcoholic, and managing a tatty discount furniture store called 'Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire'. He makes humiliating TV ads dressed as a pirate, aware that he should be a sultan for the pun to work. He sees a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), a morose woman hawking self-help tapes. Both are broken in their own ways. 

One day, Clark finds an impossibly porous section of wall in the store's basement that leads to an infinite network of backrooms, like a portal.  These rooms are uncanny, installation-style areas showing snapshots of different realities. It's like someone took every beige corridor, every fluorescent-lit waiting room, every soulless corporate space you've ever been trapped in and the physical reality matches your memory of them a week later. 

Clark begins to warily explore the rooms, mapping them as best he can amid half chairs in the walls, narrowing corridors, stairs that go nowhere and nonsensical masonry. Noises and shadows hint at a hidden population that inhabit the rooms. Clark’s young media team - Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett) - and eventually Mary are also drawn into the space. The less you know about what comes next, the more your appreciation for it will be. 

It's not really the supernatural horror that gets to you. This is a film about Gen Z’s most pressing existential terrors dressed up as found video footage. It's about being lost in systems designed as traps. These aren't haunted mansions or cursed graveyards, they're waiting rooms and office buildings. Dead yellowish light leaks from strip lighting, and what you feel is the dread of being one of millions of people stuck in the same beige nightmare, unable to escape.

We're all just wandering through the backrooms, looking for a way out. But it probably doesn't exist.
​
Backrooms is playing at cinemas across the city

Movie review: Is God Is

6/4/2026

 
A still from Is God Is (2026), directed by Aleshea Harris

​Is God Is (2026, directed by Aleshea Harris)
Review by Lauren Malara

Is God Is tells the story of twins Racine and Anaia. As children, they were disfigured in a fire started by their father. As adults struggling to find their place in the world, they receive a message directly from God, their mother. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord. With that, the twins set out on a pilgrimage to murder their father. 

Holy opening sequence. From the start, it is clear we are in for a wild ride. The fast-paced storytelling is complemented by screenwriter and director Aleshea Harris’ visual risk-taking. The film, like the stage play it is adapted from, is poetic and visceral. 

Most refreshing of all, every character is Black, yet there is not a single mention of racism. Thank God! The story is dark, but at the forefront is Black joy and beauty. Think Bill Gunn. The film is delightfully Black, from Janelle Monáe singing Prince’s Thunder to unforgettable dialogue like “YOooooooU AIN’T SH*T DEVIL!”

Then there are the gorgeous images of Blackness. Talking about waist beads, box braids, and drip. Filmed in New Orleans, the twins are serving looks on the levees, beneath the Crescent City Connection, and surrounded by Spanish moss hanging from old oaks in City Park. 

Ultimately, this is a story about what is seen and unseen. Acts of violence are hidden from the audience, until they aren’t. Much like the twins, we are allowed to turn away from the horrors of the past. We are given permission to overlook that which is too painful to see. But how do we heal scars if we ignore them? Is God Is asks us to face ourselves, accept the ugly truths, keep faith and hold on to hope for a happy ending. 
​
Is God Is is playing at theaters across the city

First night review: King Lear @ The Lupin Theater, New Orleans

5/28/2026

 
King Lear plays as part of the New Orleans Shakepeare Festival
King Lear plays as part of the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival (Photo: Brittney Werner)

King Lear (New Orleans Shakespeare Festival) @ The Lupin Theatre
Review by David S. Lewis


Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of the great masterworks of the English language, and perhaps the pinnacle of Western drama. Written around 1605, the staying power of the play is thanks to the remarkable poetry in every line, its permanence having little to do with politics. The maneuvering around royal succession means little to denizens of democracies (or whatever we have now). It is easy to recognize the onset of dementia - here coded as “dotage” - and madness. Also familiar is the intense acrimony, too often seeded within families settling estates, particularly that which flowers after the death of a manipulative, love-testing patriarch. 

The play shows us Shakespeare's gift for bringing the macro closer. When we watch a TV show like HBO’s Succession, for example, we can squint and see our own familial archetypes represented, but must map them onto the excess of wealth and power depicted. Shakespeare, in spite of the Elizabethan gilding of the language, manages to focus our attention on the human hurt felt by these characters, and director Jana Mestecky deftly illuminates these elements.

When Lear wanders out into a raging storm in one of the most famous scenes in all of English literature, we live our fears of aging parents and grandparents wandering off into the night. When his daughters insist he doesn’t really require his full retinue of knights, receiving his forceful indignation, we may think of how it is to separate our elders from their car keys. I imagine more than a few of us watched Regan and Goneril vie for their father’s financial affections and bicker over who is to watch him and recollected similarly embittering conversations.


Mestecky makes the arcane and the ancient feel familiar without resorting to tactics of modernization: the setting and costumes are non-specific, but we know that this is from The Past. The sound and visual design are truly impressive without being distracting. Mestecky also empowers her actors, staging this Shakespeare in the round: the audience is seated around a raised circular stage. Every seat in the house gets a different perspective this way, and somehow that makes us more aware of the experience we’re sharing with the rest of the audience.

When John Neisler’s Lear reconciled with his cast-off Cordelia, I doubt my eyes were the only tearful ones (you can feel the agony of that feather in the play’s closing moments). Zarah H
ōkūle’a Spalding’s Cordelia, despite relatively little time on stage, brings intensity; but it’s her turn as the Fool, the King’s loyal friend and personal satirist, where she shines.

Both she and Silas Cooper were scene-stealers in last year’s
Caesar, and are such strong players in Shakespearean repertoire.
Los Angeles’ Jeffrey Sugarman (Gloucester) also gave a noteworthy performance with another welcome return bring James Bartelle, who captivates in every role he touches: his Edgar has the only arc we can remotely feel good about.

King Lear plays at the Lupin Theatre at Tulane through June 7th, Click here for show information and ticketing 
​

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movie review: the wizard of the kremlin

5/27/2026

 
Picture
The theatre of politics
The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025, Olivier Assayas): review


I’ve long been fascinated by the real life figure of Vladislav Surkov, sometimes luridly known as ‘Putin’s Rasputin’. He emerged from Moscow’s avant-garde theater scene, and in the late 1990s was elevated to powerful senior roles, dramatically shaping Russia’s domestic politics. From 2011 to 2013, he was also the Russian Deputy Prime Minister. 

One of Surkov’s ploys was what came to be known as “non-linear warfare”. This involved using ideas from conceptual art to stage social campaigns, publicity events and even armed conflicts that superficially did not make sense. For example, the government would publicly support opposing political factions with the sole intent of confusing any opposition: the modern western concept of ‘flooding the zone’ is like a (less sophisticated) version of this. 

I was looking forward to this dramatization, then. I’ve been a fan of director Olivier Assayas’ films before (Personal Shopper, Wasp Network), and was equally intrigued by the leads: Jude Law as Putin and the excellent Paul Dano as ‘Vadim Baranov’ (i.e. Surkov). 

It’s a straight telling of Baranov/Surkov’s unlikely rise. We meet Baranov in grungy underground parties as Boris Yeltsin's government crumbles, the collapse of communism over an electro soundtrack. Baranov meets bohemian artists and becomes a TV producer, soon feted by the oligarchs as someone who can brandish social influence. Putin is chosen as a malleable civil servant to replace Yeltsin. He was head of the FSB secret service but was seen as bland, something of a stuffed suit. Jude Law plays him brilliantly as an initially reluctant, endlessly put-upon bureaucrat, regularly disappearing into beige suits and bad comb-overs. 

Dano, meanwhile, I found an uncomfortable presence. He speaks in a consistent low monotone and his intentions and motivations are never really made clear. He flits between theater and TV and politics and business seamlessly, but all we see is surface. Maybe the real Surkov is also inscrutable, but it doesn’t make for great cinema. 

Real life global events occur. Some are dramatized (Yeltsin’s drunken antics, his public downfall) and some are shown through actual news footage (the Kursk submarine disaster, revolt in Ukraine). It all helps explain the socio-political context and Putin and Baranov rising to consolidate power. In terms of actual dramatic scenes in the film, though, I have to say it isn’t gripping. 

It almost feels like two and half hours of exposition, especially if you don’t gel with some of the directorial choices. Wizard goes the Chernobyl route of not affecting Russian accents, and while it doesn’t seem jarring with Jude Law, Paul Dano’s voice and inflection are more distracting. Their relationship is perhaps an interesting story if you don’t know much about it, but the slow pacing here is problematic.

There’s much about the Surkov/Putin relationship to explore, but at this snail’s pace and with little characterization, I feel like this isn’t the ideal medium. For a short version, I would recommend this primer on non-linear warfare, or for a very thorough analysis and lots about this, then the documentary ‘Hypernormalisation
’ by Adam Curtis could be a more edifying and even entertaining use of your time (PO).


The Wizard of the Kremlin is streaming now

movie review: obsession

5/22/2026

 
movie review, obsession, new orleans

​Soul crushing: Obsession
(2025, dir. Curry Barker)


The premise announces itself with disarming simplicity: a lovesick retail worker buys a New Age store novelty 'wishing stick' to win over his friend and colleague. What follows is a meditation on corrosive desire and modes of control dressed up as genre cinema.

Bear (Michael Johnston) works alongside Nikki (Inde Navarette) in the deadened environment of a strip mall music shop. They're best friends, and it’s purgatory for him. When Nikki’s talismanic gem necklace falls into a drain, Bear seizes the moment to employ a strategy, stumbling into the shop and leaving with a replacement stone and his occult geegaw.

The wish, delivered half jokingly to himself, is granted, and immediately delivers a romantic payload with algorithmic precision. Nikki becomes utterly, consumingly his. Her behavior – sexual, social, even spatial – knows no bounds.

The dream inserts itself into Bear’s life with such thoroughness that it begins to collapse under its own weight. Proximity becomes suffocation; devotion curdles into psychosis. Nikki’s personality has been eradicated - like a zoomer Nosferatu, she is appetite.

Director Curry Barker, emerging from YouTube into feature-length narrative, demonstrates no little ability, but this is Inde Navarrette's film. Her transformation – vocal, physical, psychological – charts the dissolution of selfhood with uncomfortable precision. We see personality become pathology, person become possession. Her occasionally-heard screams from the ‘beyond’ suggest something clawing its way up from some hellish ethereal substrata. In among the personalities is character work matching the maturity of Jessie Buckley or Anya Taylor-Joy. 

The violence, when it arrives, is brutal, but much more devastating even are the implications that we’re left with as the heft of the aftermath sits on us. Obsession is a parable about consent and love's totalitarian impulses. It's nasty, effective, and deeply uncomfortable. I can't say I completely enjoyed it, but I couldn't look away (PO).

Obsession is playing in cinemas across the city

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First night review: Medea @ Lafitte Greenway

5/22/2026

 
first night review: medea @ lafitte greenway, new orleans, nola project
The NOLA project present Medea at the Lafitte Greenway (photo credit: Jillian Desirée Oliveras Maldonado)

​First night review: Medea @ Lafitte Greenway
Review by David S Lewis


A powerful sorceress flees her homeland with a famous hero, committing terrible, irreversible acts to save his life and preserve theirs. When he abandons her and their children for a more convenient marriage, his betrayal sets in motion a ferocious reaction. Although this work has echoed through Western history for two millennia, producing Greek theater in 2026 asks a trust-fall of the audience: can a two thousand year-old play speak to modern lives? 


The NOLA Project understand the assignment. Greek theater is serious work for the performers, but audiences were also meant to leave with some responsibility: to bear witness. Perhaps it’s just the weariness of our moment, but sitting on the Greenway with a diverse bunch of neighbors watching an ancient play and sharing the implicit pledge to consider ourselves within the context of this tradition was incredibly cathartic.

Director Gab Reisman’s production sets some dramatic elements aside. Whereas Euripides' Medea was also a divine being, Natalie Boyd’s Medea is entirely mortal. When the gods are out of the action, these stories shrink a little. I suspect that this was a conscious decision, to emphasize the humanity of the characters, and to enhance the feeling that the play was something familiar enough to be containable. It could also be said that denying the gods' activities could allow Medea’s character to accrue more power. 

Although the logical procession of the story is impacted, if every available line of thematic discourse were explored, the production would be unfocused. Reisman is a veteran, an experienced and deft dramatic interpreter, and an accomplished playwright herself: I don’t doubt for a moment that these omissions were weighed considerations. 

This is a feminist Medea, as it has always been, but the admirable modern inclination toward inclusiveness in casting does leave some 2,400-year-old emphases on the table. In casting the always-magnetic Aria Jackson as King Creon, the director somewhat dilutes the ancient narrative. This story is about men trying to control a woman who doesn’t merely reject their assertions of dominance: she utterly dismembers multiple entire lineages of male power. Jackson’s Creon is convincing and well performed, but the sense that powerful male characters are set against Medea and the female characters' morally entangled sorority is slightly reduced by that casting.

The entire ensemble is strong, though, offering believable performances. Robinson J. Cyprian offers a comic turn for Aegeus, the Athenian king Medea manipulates into providing sanctuary. She sews the unwitting royal into her schemes, demonstrating how fluidly she’s able to adapt to the dynamics of her situation. 

Jon Greene impresses as Jason, whose self-serving justifications for his betrayal feel like an indictment of all the awful men that women are constantly derided for objecting to - an exercise in self assessment for any men willing to look upon Jason and see themselves reflected back. This is what really good theater does: it follows us home; it looks back at us from our mirrors. Reisman made some trades with Euripides because she knew how to bargain with him on her own terms, and gave us a Medea we readily recognize – and therefore may learn from. 

The attention to detail extended beyond special effects and costuming. Production manager Tova Steele used the laundry hung by the chorus of Corinthian women to show us torn sheets, symbolizing the mangled marriage bed. The Chorus, often a stumbling block for modern directors but an essential element of Greek dramaturgy, was beautifully woven into the production, and they sang some lines in a nod to ancient practice.

The NOLA Project’s Medea ultimately succeeds, and Reisman’s decisions are vindicated. The audience was perceptibly distressed when Medea’s awesome wrath was finally manifested; they gaped at the final dialogue between the stricken father and the mother whose declaration of independence was bloody and final; and they waited anxiously as the play wrapped, unsure and uneasy. 

Their thoughts and emotions were enthralled to Boyd and Greene’s fury and despair, and to Reisman’s unsparing portrayal of their uncoupling. If her intention was to make the characters more visceral by emphasizing their humanity, she achieved that. I hope that audiences feel compelled to discuss what they witnessed, and that those conversations are rewarded with more Greek theater staged in the city.

MEDEA plays at Greenway Station (436 N Norman C Francis Parkway), performances are on May 22,  24, 28, 29, and 30. All performances begin at 7:30. Bring your own lawn chair (or purchase a premium seat) - you can reserve tickets here
​

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movie review: Project hail mary

5/14/2026

 
project hail mary, review, new orleans
A rock and a far place
Review: Project Hail Mary 


I met Ryan Gosling once. He’s not a real gosling. I say “met”, it was more that we coincidentally checked into a hotel in Thailand at the same time. He was there to film the action movie
Only God Forgives, and I was there for much less glamorous holiday reasons. We stood next to each other and signed forms. I caught his eye for a second, we politely nodded to each other, and then he went to his enormo-suite with hot and cold running caviar, and I to my basement utility cupboard. 


I’ve since forgiven him for making me feel very insecure about my looks and general levels of success for about two weeks, and though I didn’t know much about PHM going in, I had an open mind. I’m a perennial fan of the Sad Space Boy™ genre and honestly they’re my in-flight go-tos if there’s a Big Chris Nolan or Ridley Scott astral odyssey I can whack on for a few hours. 

A lot of this film hit that spot for me. All of the hype you’ve read about the cinematography is justified, and if you think you might like this film, then - trust me - get to a big screen before it leaves cinemas. Greig Fraser’s visuals (under the direction of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) are magical, decking the spacecraft out in cosy earth tones and warm lights as our hero is forced to leave home comforts behind. 

Gosling (again, he’s not a real gosling) is scientist-turned-teacher Ryland Grace, who wakes up on said spaceship light years from home with no immediate recollections. As his memory returns, he remembers his mission: Earth’s sun is dying out. He must use his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save the planet. You know. The usual 'hopecore' set up. 

The story is told in parallel timelines, the flashbacks standing in for Grace’s memories returning while also deftly delivering exposition. Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of Fall) is a quasi-covert government spook who recruits Grace to train her team, promoting him against his will to crew as disaster strikes. I was fully engaged with this strand of the film. Gosling’s duck-(goose?) out-of-water goofiness (goosiness?) (sorry) is a great vehicle for his obvious natural charisma. The rest…well, your mileage may vary. 

Grace encounters and makes contact with an alien, who it transpires is on an identical assignment. Things dumb down quite a lot. Imagine if some people at Pixar watched Interstellar, Arrival and 2001: A Space Odyssey and then made a mash-up of those plots, but aimed at six year olds. Quite a large chunk of the story is this. 

Listen, Grace and Rocky (the name given to this stony crab-like creature) getting to know each other and working out their tactics to overcome an existential threat isn’t without charm. It’s cute, even. I just personally felt that this made for such tonal whiplash that - for me - it was like watching two different movies. We cut between quite adult and emotionally-heavy death scenes in one timeline to, essentially, a man playing with a plush toy - I just found it jarring, is all. 

In short, your enjoyment will probably rest on how tolerant you are to blatant pandering to a child audience. If you have young ones and already watch a lot of kids’ TV, then it might not even register. Even if you’re not on board for this element, there’s a lot to like here, particularly the visuals. Bask in a cinematic celebration of aesthetics and the pitch-perfect Gosling (he’s not a real gosling) and Hüller performances. You might have a rockier time with the rest of it.

Project Hail Mary is playing at cinemas across the city

opening night review: the book of mormon @ the saenger theatre

5/14/2026

 
book of mormon, saenger theater, new orleans, review
The cast of The Book of Mormon, playing at The Saenger Theatre (photo: Teg Folks)

​Preaching across the aisle: The Book of Mormon 

Review by Dorian Hatchett


If there are angels that watch over drunks and children, then the main characters in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s critically acclaimed musical The Book of Mormon (a pair of hapless teens on their first mission trip) should expect invulnerability. Wide-eyed and earnest, they are filled to the brim with (undeserved) confidence, and an enthusiasm unchecked by any kind of valuable perspective. 

Elders Price and Cunningham (Ethan Davenport and Jacob Aune) are the perfect patsies for a relatively new religion seeking world domination through evangelical doorbell ringing. Laughter is the best medicine for all of our collective religious trauma, as Stone and Parker turn a satirical eye on everything wrong with the biggest all-American Christian sect. 

Elder Price is determined to show that he is the perfect Mormon, as long as his mission trip takes him to Orlando.  A clarion voice and enough ego for a whole horde of teenagers give him a clear main-character energy. Elder Cunningham is the underdog.  He is clear on his goal to be a follower, until he has to man up and take charge in Price’s absence. Aune is a master of physical comedy, and his slapstick background moves make him instantly loveable, even if it’s clear he has no idea what being a Mormon missionary means. The chemistry between these two is perfect and natural.  


The ensemble cast is composed of incredible dancers and singers who take turns stealing the show. They manage to forge entire characters out of a handful of lines and perfect choreography. It’s difficult to see a show this polished; this absolutely spot-on, and not feel magic, but to feel that magic about an occasionally crass, irreverent satire evokes a complex set of mixed feelings.

The pure skill it takes to build a complex, moving set that takes us from Salt Lake City to Uganda, to tell a story of unlikely protagonists without feeling preachy, to do all this while doling out a heavy dose of humility to anyone who fancies themselves a savior of others: there’s something really special about
The Book of Mormon and the profoundly skilled cast are the largest part of that.  

No one expects the creators of South Park to pull any punches, but as long as you keep a keen sense of humor at all times, it will be no surprise that this show won nine Tony Awards in its first season on Broadway. With a score that is equal parts clever and crude, the audience laughs from beginning to end.

Full of references that fans of organized religion will pick up on (but perhaps only jovial heretics will appreciate) the script and score are as easy to follow and enjoy as a road paved with good intentions. 


The Book of Mormon is playing at the Saenger Theatre through May 17th. Click here for ticketing and show information.
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