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"Best Bet" - San Diego Union Tribune
By Anne Marie Welsh
“Director Al Germani and his quirky Lynx Performance Theatre return to producing with a smart, lively and all too relevent staging of John Guare's 1971 breakthrough play. Actors Fred Harlow, Michelle Burkhart and especially wild Laura Bozanich are especially strong as the wacky triangle at the center of this savagely funny play about delusion and celebrity worship. With Its physical approach to theater making and Its shrewd Intuitions about personal and political relationships, Lynx is a company with a welcome point of view.”
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San Diego Theatre Scene
By Jenni Prisk
“I had a marvelous time watching the spirited cast and dynamic staging of The House of Blue Leaves at the Adams Avenue Studio of the Arts. Directed by Al Germani, the cast led by Fred Harlow (melancholy and moving), Michelle Burkhart (sweet and haunting) and the wild and wonderful Laura Bozanich romped through the madness and mayhem of John Guare's telling work. I was also impressed with newcomer, Tim Curns, in the role of Ronnie. Do see it, and you'll discover what a normal life you live!
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Update Magazine
By Addison DeWitt
"...as an audience member you are sure to experience this production viscerally. Then its panoply of ideas will continue to tilt at the windmills of your mind long afterward. And that's what live theatre is really all about. "
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Reviewer George Weinberg-Harter
"...impressionistic movement involving the whole cast is choreographed to liturgical choral music playing over the ongoing spoken dialogue,creating a layered effect like overlapping clauses of the Credo in some
condensed settings of the mass. The effects are dazzling, done with skill and style."
"... the unique blurred concept of this production can be experienced as one wild and exciting ride."
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CityBeat Magazine
By Martin Westlin
Zookeeper Artie (Fred Harlow) wants to write songs and move to Hollywood. Itinerant Bunny (Laura Bozanich) is the girl of Artie's dreams, or so he thinks. Crazy ol' Bananas (Michelle Burkhart) is the fly in the ointment whose precarious emotional state tears at Artie's loyalties. On top of that the Pope is about to visit New York - it's that subtext over which John Guare's House of Blue Leaves weighs in.
Critics who panned the play when it opened in 1971 said the mix of black comedy realism and farce clashed with the script's harder issues about the American Dream and its false societal values. Au contraire: Under Al Germani's lavish direction, this meeting of styles attends to the subplots while the Willy Loman-like Artie succumbs to the hopelessness of it all. The Obie- and Tony-winning House of Blue Leaves staged by the Lynx Performance Theatre, will afford you the chance to watch a spirited cast invest itself and to moon over Burkhart's haunting, drop- dead-gorgeous smile.
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Lynx gives 'Blue Leaves' a smart comeback
By Anne Marie Welsh, SD Union Tribune
'The House of Blue Leaves" was John Guare's breakthrough play, a harrowing blend of humor and heartache that's getting a smart, relevant production at the little Adams Avenue Theatre in Normal Heights. Director Al Germani's staging marks the return of his quirky, on-again, off-again Lynx Performance Theatre. The company takes a highly physical approach to theater-making and an instinct for hip, sharply written scripts.
Like Christopher Durang, Guare takes an acidic view of the Catholicism that shaped him. He's a Jesuit-trained, Georgetown University grad – and nobody's more skeptical of the human cost of dogmatic religiosity than such fallen "soldiers of Christ." But there's more to this 1971 black comedy than Durang-style mockery; the play indicts the sick fascination with celebrity that drives American culture far more now than it did when Guare pinpointed the problem 30 years ago.
"The House of Blue Leaves" is set on that day in 1965 when Pope Paul VI visited New York. The protagonist is zookeeper Artie Shaughnessy (Fred Harlow, creepily on the verge), who harbors fantasies of being a celebrity songwriter in Hollywood. His current squeeze, Bunny (Laura Bozanich, terrific), encourages his delusions and imagines the pope's blessing on their dreams of stardom and marital bliss – once they can get rid of Artie's crazy wife, Bananas.
But there's a problem: Bananas (Michelle Burkhart) doesn't seem so crazy. Depressed, yes. Schizophrenic, maybe. But though she's destined for the loony bin, she makes more sense than the company she keeps: wacko nuns, a deaf movie starlet, a bomb-loving soldier destined for Vietnam, and Artie and Bunny themselves.
Guare doesn't create full psychological portraits: The play exudes the same cartoon absurdism that runs through some of Edward Albee's works, though with a lighter touch and more freewheeling sense of structure.
In the intimate, in-the-round storefront of the Adams Avenue Theatre, Germani opens the piece with a stylized prologue that establishes this human zoo – as well as the near-tragic predicament of Bananas, played fine and fragile, with wide-eyed bafflement by Burkhart. At one point the cast lifts her overhead, like some sorry combination of icon and corpse.
Swoosie Kurtz gave a highly praised interpretation of the part in a 1986 Broadway revival, casting a tragic shadow over the loopy proceedings. Burkhart, though less experienced, manages a similar spectral effect here. With Tim Curns' manic performance as Ronnie, a GI-turned-suicide bomber, the play takes on added depth and resonance.
Pavorotti warbles "Adeste Fideles" (the music and sound are especially good) while each of these nobodies from a Queens apartment building roams about in a narcissistic haze, this wordless introduction establishing the mixed tone with a few well-chosen dancelike gestures.
Germani, a psychotherapist by profession and a choreographer/dancer by training, reveals sharp instincts about the play, which asks R.D. Laing-like questions about who is really mad, while also unmasking the insane violence of a war whose soldier-victims tended to be frightened blue-collar kids.
Bozanich proves especially riveting as the high-flying, hard-hearted bimbo unconcerned about Bananas' fate, while Harlow's Artie dissolves into tears and terror when his dreams are shattered in the end.
Playwright: John Guare. Director: Al Germani. Lighting: Mitchell Simkovsky. Sound/music: Al Germani and Bill Kehayias. Costumes: Linda Libby. Props: Cecilia Church, Veronica Murphy. Cast: Michelle Burkhart, Fred Harlow, Laura Bozanich, Tim Curns, Connie Terwilliger, Veronica Murphy, Jolene Hui, Bill Kehayias, Dominic Jason Jones.
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