Review by anonymous
June 16, 2026 certified reviewerWhat I liked
Athena Dante from Girls – she’s great!
A good performance from Loucks as Maya. She got to showcase her singing ability and is good at playing subtlety.
The toilet chair broke while someone was sitting on it – clearly unplanned but very funny
What I didn't like
The toilet chair broke – and so did the actors! I can imagine that’s a difficult thing to stay in character for. And perhaps the directors said please no improving when things go wrong. But if that were me up there, extremely high and dramatically defecating, and the toilet shattered beneath me, you better believe my next line would have been “I S*** SO HARD, THE TOILET DIED!” Acting is reacting!
In addition to that, I get having very little money for a show like this, but y’all can’t buy a chair that’ll support a 5’5’’ lady?!
Difficulty understanding dialogue sometimes. There was a moment when Edmund came onstage and screamed something that was supposed to be funny, and someone in the audience literally went “What?” because it was unintelligible. Another Edmund moment is him shooting up from behind the couch with a bowl on his head to declare “ALL HAIL PLANKTON”, a funny, fitting reference to the SpongeBob movie from the aughts, something that all the Gen Z and younger millennials in the audience will immediately recognize. However, the bit in the movie is SO famous, and everyone knows that all the citizens of Bikini Bottom while under Plankton’s control say “ALL HAIL PLANKTON” as a zombielike, monotone drone in unison. Maybe they decided to make a choice and have him say it all crazy to be funny, but idk, the joke to me would have been stronger had he properly invoked the way the line is said in the film.
Final small thing: Jalen goes to take a shower, comes back fully clothed with a towel around himself. Someone in the scene says “you’re completely naked” even though they really weren’t under that towel. Then later, Jalen comes out in very little clothing (for a very funny bit). I sat there thinking to myself, why is Jalen practically naked now and wasn’t at all when people said he was? Perhaps there isn’t enough time to rip off clothes backstage, but it looked odd to me in retrospect.
My overall impression
It’s a show about half-baked kids figuring out how to finish the recipe. No question will be posed to you in this play that you won’t be able to answer, but there will be questions you’ve already answered in your own life. That can be enjoyable in a play, watching the folly of youth and remembering your own, but it doesn’t make for a completely great play.
