Shaun Taylor-Corbett

Distant Thunder

October 8, 2024

We’ve come a long way from "Annie Get Your Gun" to the new musical "Distant Thunder" produced by Amas Musical Theatre at the A.R.T./New York Theatres. The Irvin Berlin song “I’m an Indian, Too” from "Annie" is filled with silly clichés about our indigenous people that "Distant Thunder" puts to rest. "Distant Thunder," written by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Shaun Taylor-Corbett (book) and Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Chris Wiseman (music and lyrics), (with additional music and lyrics by Robert Lindsey-Nassif and Michael Moricz,) deals sensitively with issues facing Native Americans today. All of the actors are members or descendants of Native Americans and all give body and soul to their characters. [more]

Between Two Knees

February 19, 2024

At the performance under review, part of the audience found the show hilariously funny, while others proverbially sat on their hands. The show makes use of history, parody, satire, burlesque, musical comedy and tragicomedy, never being consistent to any one genre. At two and a half hours this kind of parody seems a bit too long. "Between Two Knees" is a noble effort to tell the story of one hundred years of Native American suffering through the Lakota tribe, but it seems to want to cover too much in too parodistic a style. [more]

Arcadia

November 17, 2023

This being Bedlam famous for its experimental revivals, the second act is handled differently. The audience is asked to leave their seats in the amphitheater and when they return are given other seats now arranged on what had been the stage of the theater before. The second act then takes place mostly in the seats that were just vacated. Unfortunately, as both acts are supposed to take place in the same setting this is rather distracting. The opening of the second act is a speech given by Bernard which makes perfect sense in what now looks like a college lecture hall or an amphitheater but the rest of that act makes little sense in such a setting. In each act, a character enters and is made to walk through one of the rows of the audience, not only breaking the fourth wall of the theater so to speak but also inconveniencing everyone seated in that row. [more]

The Winter’s Tale (Bedlam)

October 21, 2022

Many of Bedlam’s productions have used small casts with most of the actors playing more than one role. In the case of "The Winter’s Tale," not one of Shakespeare’s more often produced plays, the casting uses so few actors that the play becomes confusing and difficult to follow, and a great many characters and much dialogue has necessarily been cut. In one head-scratching scene, Elan Zafir is required to play King Polixenes and his son Prince Florizel at the same time. While the sets and costumes are modern, with the Shakespeare poetry sacrificed to sound like contemporary speech, the characters are still referred to as “King Leontes” and his wife “Queen Hermione.” As the setting by John McDermott looks like three rooms in a frat house, one wonders why the Royal Family of Sicilia would be living in such shabby quarters and continually guzzling beer in the palace. [more]

The Crucible (Bedlam)

November 25, 2019

As produced by Bedlam in association with The Nora, Arthur Miller’s 1953 tragedy, "The Crucible," based on the Salem Witch Trials proves to be both riveting and relevant all over again. In the past, the play was seen as a cautionary tale about the McCarthy Era witch hunt that destroyed so many lives. Now in 2019 it becomes a story of truth and lies, fiction and fact. One of the judges refers to the situation in Salem as “this swamp.” In the age of Trump, Miller’s play has new meaning for our time. You could hear a pin drop during Eric Tucker’s unfussy production which becomes more and more scary as the Salem witch trials progress and the townspeople become entirely carried away by the hysteria. [more]