Review Roundup: What Did Critics Think of DRIVING WILDE at Theatre of Note?
By: Alan Henry Sep. 03, 2019
Driving Wilde, inspired by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey, recently opened at Theatre of Note. Read what the critics had to say!
Driving Wilde is Jacqueline Wright's very free, very contemporary, shockingly frank and surreal adaptation of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wright transforms the gothic horror story into a present-day meditation on the pursuit of beauty. In Wright's version, the beautiful young Dorian awakens from a coma with amnesia, unaware of his past and seeing the perfection of nature with fresh eyes. But how long can innocence last in a corrupting, aging world? Can beauty be kept, or is its fading as inevitable as death? A trip hop fantasy with existential themes.
Read the reviews below!
Deborah Klugman, Stage Raw: It's worth sitting through the show's less interesting sequences to relish the comic antics of these two veteran performers, who are frequently on stage. One of the play's highlights is a picnic scene where Dorian seductively bites into a strawberry while the two elder men look on, practically swooning with desire. Besides their main roles, Johnson and Wilcox don wigs and other costume paraphernalia to play other characters- for example, Johnson transforms himself into a buxom flirtatious waitress at Hooters, while Wilcox appears as buck-toothed Chuck, the only former school pal Dorian connects with.
Steven Stanley, Stage Scene LA: Scenes between Dorian, Basil, and Henry are Driving Wilde's best, as much as anything because of Farrow's lean and hungry sex appeal (and the actor's own seductive London accent), Johnson's deliciously eccentric take on Basil, and the decadence and danger Wilcox brings to Henry, and who can resist a man in drag, especially when it's Johnson's Hooters Waitress looking like Marjorie Main's Ma Kettle in a tank top.
F. Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times: Michael Kodi Farrow plays the handsome, doomed Dorian, who awakens from a coma a childlike innocent ripe for the corrupting influence of Henry (David Wilcox), a jaded sensualist who is ultimately dismayed by the monster he has created. Carl J. Johnson plays Basil, Dorian's doting friend, the nurturing artist who creates the portrait that houses Dorian's iniquity. The cast is rounded out by Raven Moran, who plays two of Dorian's ill-starred lady loves, and Michael Sturgis as a young man who also features into Dorian's moral decay. Stephen Simon plays Wilde, a meta-theatrical presence whose own sad decline mirrors that of his literary creation.
Photo Credit: Darrett Sanders
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