Saturday

I don't usually post on a Saturday, but I thought I would share the review of "Tuesdays with Morrie" from the Telegraph Journal Online. I am getting ready to head into town for today's matinee, and tonight's final performance....so if you haven't already seen it, make sure you don't miss out. Plus tonight is going to be the last ever cast party at the SJTC Loft, try and drop by if you can.

I bolded a section...because....How often does the sound guy get a shout out in a review?????

Here's the Review:

Well Taught Life Lessons

SAINT JOHN - There are many life lessons to be found in Tuesdays With Morrie. Actor Bob Doherty, who plays the title character in the Saint John Theatre Company's production of the play, said in an interview earlier this week that the one that resonates most strongly with him is Morrie's advice to forgive everyone everything.

"When you're where I am, it won't matter who is right," Morrie tells Mitch, his former student, from his deathbed.

It's appropriate Doherty chose this aphorism as his favourite of Morrie's many, considering the highly sympathetic performance he gave on opening night, Wednesday at the Imperial Theatre.

As Morrie Schwartz, a 70-something professor stricken with ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease, Doherty exudes the loving benevolence and peaceful wisdom that so endeared Morrie to readers - and there are tens of millions of them - of Mitch Albom's best-selling memoir.

Doherty's Jewish New York accent is pitch-perfect, his comedic timing spot-on, his quips eliciting plenty of laughs from the audience made up mostly of local students Wednesday night.

It is a sentimental role, to be sure, one that could easily drown in its own bittersweetness, but Doherty nails it.

Unless you've been living in a cave, you likely know at least the broad strokes of Tuesdays With Morrie. First published in 1997, the book tells of the reunion between teacher and student 20 years after Morrie taught Mitch sociology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. As so often happens, promises to stay in touch after graduation fell to the side as career and adult life intervened. By chance, Mitch rediscovers Morrie when his old professor has just months to live, and begins calling on him every Tuesday. These visits became their final class together. The subject: the meaning of life.

Jeff Smith is well-cast as Mitch in the SJTC production. Cocky, ambitious, work-obsessed, Smith is tasked with a character who is far less sympathetic than Morrie. A successful sports journalist who says things such as "You've got to hustle if you're going to stay on top," he is brisk and sarcastic, impatient with that "touchy-feely" stuff.

In contrast, when we first meet Morrie he is a healthy senior, an old man with lots of life and fun left in him as he gently soft-shoes it across the stage, unabashedly dancing by himself, mixing goofy jazz hands with a solo fox trot.

Doherty does a great job charting Morrie's decline, as the degenerative disease takes away his ability to dance, to walk and, eventually, even to breathe. The momentum is never broken with no intermission in the 90-minute play.

When Morrie receives the prognosis that he has just months to live, he quickly decides to embrace the time he has left, to observe his death and share what he sees.

"I'm not quite alive, not quite dead. I'm in between," he tells Mitch. "I'm going to take that journey into the great beyond. People want to know what they should pack."

One particularly well done scene smartly illustrates Morrie's increasing influence on Mitch and the frantic pace of the young sportscaster's life. Busy reporting at Wimbledon, the sound of a tennis match bouncing around the theatre is joined by a ringing cellphone and Morrie's voice in his head, asking Mitch if he's happy, if he's living life as he should. The tempo grows frantic, the sounds cacophonous, and Mitch reaches his breaking point, shouting out.

The show's simple set - a backdrop of old leafy trees, an old leather recliner toward the front of the stage, a piano to the other side that Mitch plays a few times during the show - doesn't detract from what is essentially a character study that needs no embellishment.

Those of you who read - and loved - Tuesdays With Morrie will likely delight in the sharp dialogue of the stage adaptation and its fidelity to the memoir.

But even if, like Mitch, you don't have much time for that "touchy-feely stuff," the show is still a worthwhile outing if only for the chance to enjoy some great local acting. Who knows? You may even take away a life lesson of your own.

The Saint John Theatre Company's production of Tuesdays With Morrie opened Thursday at Saint John's Imperial Theatre and continues tonight at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets, $16, $24.50 and $27.50, are available at the Imperial Theatre Box Office or by calling 674-4100.

* Okay so it wasn't a direct mention of me as the sound guy...but it did mention the sound effects in "One Particularly well done scene".....which incidentally is a pretty hard scene to do, and we should have it perfect by Sunday.