Voices
Royalty Theatre
7:00pm, Wed 15 Mar 2000
Score: 7
Short Review: CloseButNoCigar
Five people sit around a dinner table – a manager, an industrialist, a criminal, an intellectual, and a chairman-of-the-board. All are leaders, in one form or another. One man (Jeron Willems) plays the five parts, including their interactions.
Willems addresses each of the characters in turn, referring to the other characters when needed. Each character’s monologue tends to espouse a point of view towards the free-market economy, ethics, religion, and a whole host of other themes. To be honest, though, some of the monologues were a little… flat? boring? And the entire script was very… um… wordy, to the point of self-indulgence.
I wanted to love this, I really did. But it just didn’t gel. Jeron Willems does an outstanding job, and is clearly a great comic actor, but the performance and the script just didn’t work together *that* well.