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By Philip Dawkins
Coeurage Theatre Company
Los Angeles, CA
July 24-August 29, 2015

“CRITIC’S CHOICE”
-LA TIMES

“STAGE RAW TOP 10, RECOMMENDED”

“This is a story about grabbing hold of life and savoring it to the fullest, come what may. The pileup of tragedy is counterbalanced by a surfeit of good cheer, an equilibrium that Windy City playwright Philip Dawkins nimbly maintains. In this, he is enthusiastically abetted by Michael Matthews, the ever-imaginative director whose work includes the L.A. production two years ago of Dawkins’ “The Homosexuals.””

-LA TIMES

“Dawkins’ 2012 script has been accused of having problems that I imagine belong less to the text than to productions unlucky enough not to have been directed by Michael Matthews. In gorgeous story-theater gestures, given human scale by the genius of arranger and composer Gregory Nabours and uplifted by Janet Roston’s show-stopping choreography, Matthews’ shockingly well-cast ensemble gets everything more than right. People play piano and pretend to be clocks; they play the banjo, and birds; they sing, and slither as snakes. On JR Bruce’s fantastical set, under the unreal magic of Matthew Denman’s lights, playing with Michael O’Hara’s mad props, they act the roof off. They make you want to fall out of love so you can fall back in again in the full and constant knowledge that it can’t last forever, that every game’s a loser in the end, and that knowing that much counts as a win. What might seem like campy, cutesy bad taste instead, in this dead-eye production, hits the soul as eternal truth.”

-STAGE AND CINEMA

“Michael Matthews smoothly directs and inventively stages his large talented, triple-threat cast as they sing, dance and act out this saga of the Fail family, with seemingly more deaths than the Kennedy clan has endured.”

-BROADWAY WORLD

“It’s difficult to imagine the success of Coeurage’s dodgy gamble without the imaginative contributions of Matthews, his cast, and his designers, who work passionately to let the Fails’s message seep into our bones while we never even realize what’s happening.”

-ARTS IN LA

“…director Michael Matthews’s blithe-hearted staging is all about good feelings, high-spirited atmospherics, and celebration.” “A deceptively delicate story with unexpected layers of sophisticated meaning, this play’s philosophical mix of comedy and ennui lasts long after the curtain call.”

-STAGE RAW

 

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

2015 Ovation Award: Director/Play
2015 Ovation Nomination: Production/Play
2015 Ovation Nomination: Ensemble