My overall impression
Great little show from the Theatre Unleashed team — or should I say a series of sketches about 2 and a half minutes long each — the good variety of comedy and drama pieces and constant shift kept my attention the whole time. Of course, this has its pros and cons, if you don’t like a particular sketch take heart because it will be over in two minutes, if you do, it will also be over in two minutes, which for the ones I did like it left me wanting to see more of that particular story and characters.
Overall, most of the writing was good. The stories presented some good ideas and explored some interesting themes and situations that could be the basis for a full story, which I expect was part of the point of this show — to experiment and explore a lot of different ideas and see which ones hit home to possibly develop further. I could be wrong on that — most of the characters that the talented cast portrayed were well rehearsed and embodied truthfully. Some stand out members of the cast were Lee Pollero, who I found to have a great comedic through-line with all of the characters that he played. I also enjoyed the richness that Danny Grossman brought to all his characters, even in the 2.5 minutes that he played them. It was well prepared and wrapped up beautifully by Director Aaron Kozac.
I haven’t seen much ‘speed theatre’ or been a big fan of sketch in the past, I ‘liked it’ because I’m more for the traditional narrative, and because it takes me about 15 minutes to get invested in the story and care about the characters anyway, short plays, short films, and any type of short story really usually leaves me with something to be desired. Take this review with a grain of salt, but if you’re one for sketch from the get go I believe ‘25 Plays per hour’ will definitely satisfy.
