![]() ![]() It's December of 1939 in Atlanta as "Ballyhoo" opens. While the bluster of their relationship threatens to overwhelm the play, in the preview performance I saw at TVA, the courtship of the young couple won out, providing a buoyant center that kept the show from going under. Uhry wrote this powerful little play, but then he stuffed it inside a loud, two-dimensional wrapper that unfortunately takes up a great deal of "Ballyhoo." This distracting interference comes in the form of a mother and daughter who quibble and bicker continuously. ![]() It's an intimate drama, filled with sweet and tender humor, a couple of heart-rending misunderstandings and a resolution that satisfies on several different levels. They struggle to reconcile their different backgrounds as they begin to fall in love, assisted along the way by the girl's well-meaning uncle. Tucked inside Alfred Uhry's "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," currently at TheatreVirginia, is a play with as much emotional clarity and honesty as Uhry's first big success, "Driving Miss Daisy." In this small, quiet play, a young Jewish boy from New York meets a young Jewish girl from Atlanta just before the outbreak of World War II. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |