Lion in Winter Play Review

"The Lion in Winter" was performed on Saturday November 22nd was not as good as I thought it was going to be. The set was a great design and looked as it should for the time period. However, I didn't like how scenes were changed. The set should have been designed to encompass more aspects of the scene structure. There was a lot of unnecessary movement on stage when there shouldn't have been. Stage hands should not be seen or heard. Maybe the curtains could have been drawn for some of their work. The audience shouldn't be made to watch the stage hands reset the stage right after an intermission. I thought it was handled very unprofessionally.

Many times throughout the course of the play I heard pretty much all of the characters stumble over lines. This was not very professional either. All of the characters except for the queen were not into the play they were putting on. It showed through

really badly. Many times during dialogue there were pauses between sentences as if no one was aware of what the next line was going to be. Had this been a Broadway play it wouldn't have made it to the second night of production. The only people that were actually prepared for production were the two characters that weren't students. The cueing is what make or breaks a play and it broke this one all the pieces right in front of everyone's eyes. The people who went to the show I was at were not laughing when they should be, weren't moping with the characters like they should have been. I felt no life in this performance. It really was a sad dissertation of what I had been told and led to believe was going to be great.

The play was also very hard to follow, and by the time I actually began to understand what was going on it was over. I was not alone in this not understanding. The two guys that sat next to me were just as clueless as I was when we walked out together. I believe that WCU Theater department needs to try again on this one.

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