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STAGE KISS Today

Posted by: sergius 12:45 am EDT 03/31/14

Ruhl is funny and smart, and she's in top form here. STAGE KISS takes a dull conceit about the performative aspects of love and loving--as time goes by, a kiss is not still a kiss especially when actors are involved--and spins it into gold. This play might have been a good, blithe choice for Broadway. It's packed with fleet, comic invention and splendidly directed. Jessica Hecht, still channeling Sandy Dennis, is a surprisingly adept farceur, and the rest of the company is her equal. In the end, a madcap, drunken treatise on the difference between love and romance and how the theatre represents and misrepresents them, sobers up. Love requires closeness, of course, and romance, it turns out, needs distance. And, onstage and off, playing parts is essential for both. Ruhl has a talent for leavening her humor--it's good AND informed--with unexpected doses of real feeling. STAGE KISS is a total lark, but it's tender, too.


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re: STAGE KISS Today

Posted by: lowwriter 12:59 am EDT 03/31/14
In reply to: STAGE KISS Today - sergius 12:45 am EDT 03/31/14

I was at the matinee, too, and I enjoyed the play and laughed a lot. The relationship between the two former lovers being sparked by the awful play they are reviving is fun to watch. But I found relationship of Hecht with her family pretty trite. And I didn't see any reason why she wouldn't want to run from the daughter.

I didn't quite get the last scene with her former lover returning after he says goodbye.

I've never found Ruhl particularly funny but highly overrated. At least this one did make me laugh.

I actually found some of the staging awkward and amateurish, unless that was supposed to be reflecting the production values of the show they were doing. But the actors were so good I overlooked that.


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re: STAGE KISS Today

Posted by: davei2000 01:40 am EDT 03/31/14
In reply to: re: STAGE KISS Today - lowwriter 12:59 am EDT 03/31/14

I laughed too - too much to get caught up in any serious intent. Since the plays within the play are so gratuitously awful and everyone onstage, actors, director, even the stage manager are portrayed as being terrible at their jobs, I found the periodic outpourings of real feeling hard to believe or care about. It plays like Noises Off.


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re: STAGE KISS Today

Posted by: MarjorieMae 09:03 am EDT 03/31/14
In reply to: re: STAGE KISS Today - davei2000 01:40 am EDT 03/31/14

I was reminded of Noises Off too, except that is a well constructed play. This one, not so much. Too much disparity between Acts I & II. Sort of the way I felt about Lisbon Traviata.


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