The Bite Magazine - Spring 2019 - Issue 24

bite theatre their home, it hits home and even he starts to think of alter- natives to the previous dream-life he had been dreaming. He even starts looking for ‘free courses’ at local colleges, having had dreams of attending a prestigious one prior. But these horrid facts of history took away no part of my en- joyment of the play. With just the right amount of song, dance and movement, with a peppering of humour in this 18-cast play, I was glad to have caught this and on my first visit to The Old Vic too. My favourite character was a man: too-cool-for-school charac- ter that played the classic American narrator to the story add- ing that feeling of watching an American movie (a la narrated by Morgan Freeman). In Arthur’s original text this part was played by Lee Baum, the son, but Chavkin had other charac- ters doing this which felt right. Another character used song to narrate some of the story and sing the emotions of the now poor and homeless. She had a beautiful and soulful voice and would just appear from the corner of the stage belting out beautiful lyrics which tended to close any scene we had just watched. The very first scene beheld a grand piano centre stage – a Steinberg, which became pivotal to the story as well as a main prop. The revolving inner part of the stage was fascinating to me as at times it lent to the choreography of a dance, scene- change or to the drama of a scene. I was humoured by the Welfare Office waiting room scene and Lee’s innocence at buying a bike with his saved-up $11, unbe- known that his mother could well have done with that money to keep the home afloat a bit and my favourite quote of the play being “It was the war that saved us”. How oxymoronic! I did have to laugh out loud at this point. Fred Haig in The American Clock Golda Rosheuvel in The American Clock