Review: Traveling Through Time With BIG EXPECTATIONS

Will you look back on your life fondly or regretfully?

For Stoogie Lucotch or "Stuart Lucas" it's a dilemma for the ages.

Combining personal reflections with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Ray Olderman's Big Expectations (first performed in 1983) at Broom Street Theater examines the correlation between happiness and success.

Orphaned as a child, Stoogie grew up in poverty. He finds a job at a local bowling alley where he eventually finds employment with a pair of wealthy, socialite sisters. When he meets their niece Teresa, Stoogie makes it his mission to rise above his station and become the kind of man that she could love.

Stoogie eventually becomes the man he always hoped to be, only to realize that the grass isn't always greener. Which is where the time traveling robots of 'the very near future' (played by the goofy Vanessa Vesperman and Pam Adams) come in. They show Stoogie (in a very Christmas Carol kind of way) where he may have gone astray.

Big Expectations goes back in time from the 'near future' to dates in 1964, 1946, 1952, 1953, and 1962. Giving Stoogie plenty of opportunities to look back on his life as well as the many people he has encountered over the years.

54 other people to be exact.

With only 10 performers (save for Mitch Taylor as Stoogie) to span the multitude of personas, each actor is faced with the difficulty of portraying numerous parts. This multi-casting decision by playwright and director Olderman is nearly impossible to pull off. With all of the actors wearing so many hats (sometimes literally), many of the characters are difficult to differentiate from one another. Which makes following the story an arduous task. Time jumps don't follow in sequence and most of the characters have only a garment to make them stand out from one another and when portrayed with the same mannerisms, it's a challenge to tell them apart.

Taylor, as Stoogie, is lovably naive as he journeys up the social ladder. Holding his hands innocently in front or behind him gives the audience a clue that Stoogie/Stuart's self assuredness is a facade.

Where Stoogie loses believability is in the first or final scenes when Taylor dons a felt hat attached to a grey wig to show his aging. Staging in these moments remains the same as the others - Stoogie still moves around the space easily, like a young man, and the suspension of disbelief back into his twilight years is gone.

Whereas Christine Chang, who plays Terese, moves a bit more slowly in her scenes as an older woman. A far cry from her lovely, short dance routines throughout the production. As the show progresses, Chang's body language allows her to speak words of love to Stoogie that she cannot utter allowed.

Movement is largely a triumph in this particular BST production.

Down to the subtlest scene changes involving Ken Adams' intricate set with hanging design elements or the dance sequences inspired by Fred Astaire, each aspect of Big Expectations goes straight back to movement and the passage of time.

Perhaps the relationship between the abundance of characters, the incongruous time jumping, and movement are all relative. Perhaps, if you really think about it, life is often a muddled mass of memories that can lead to a flurry of sensory overload.

And it's up to us to make our way through the amalgamation of remembrance and decide if we look back on our choices with pride or disdain.

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