The Divine Madness of Isabella

My overall impression

I’m not big on leaving reviews on shows I don’t like because I know how hard everybody is working on their projects and this show was clearly a labor of passion… and yet in this case particularly I need to warn people who are buying tickets that this really might not be the show that you were looking for.
I was bored to tears.
The biggest problem for me probably was the fact that many of Isabella’s characters voices were in these annoying upper register and there is only so much of the squealing and scratching puppet voices the human ear can take before you just want to yank your ears clean off.
Another thing that was confusing for me was I had no idea what the context for this play was. Was this a metaphor for the actresses life? The show began with the protagonist doing a monologue and this Isabella character is obviously not that great of an actress since you can tell she’s acting a mellodramatic monologue and then suddenly the audience is thrust into this long pretentious tale about how she became a comedia del arte actress. It would’ve been nice to have some context some allure, or ANY reason at all to hear her story. In fact during its 90 minute running time (no intermission)I was playing the game weren’t editing her play in my head. Ugh. It went on and on, words without moments and masks without magic. I expected more since it was Theatre Unleashed, but this one lost me.