Current Reviews

Carl Youngberg on The Kitchen Witches

Laughter is the best prescription for a hot summer night in August and the Richardson Theatre Centre brought on the laughs big time in The Kitchen Witches. A fun premise that is well delivered with a small but dynamite cast bringing home good performances. As the celebrity guest judge, I got in the thick of the action, complete with a face covered with whipped crème and chocolate chips. All in all, a great opening night and a full house.

 

 

 

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2010-08-19/culture/rajah-that/

Richardson Theatre Centre, the community theater tucked into a sweet little playhouse in a Richardson residential neighborhood, has just opened The Kitchen Witches by Caroline Smith. It's a stupid play. Worse than Legends. And who knew there could be a play worse than Legends?

But just as Legends was goosed into low comedy delirium by actors Coy Covington and B.J. Cleveland at Uptown Players last year, RTC's production of The Kitchen Witches benefits from the broad comic turns of a couple of funny chicks, Rachael Lindley and Lise Alexander.

Lindley plays Dolly Biddle, a middle-aged cooking show host who affects a thick Ukrainian accent and wears goofy aprons for her live 20-minute cable access TV program called Baking with Babcha. Her son Stephen (Ian Loomer) produces the show, staying just out of camera range to grab at the bottles of rum his tippling mom tries to hide on the set.

On the verge of cancellation, Dolly's show is saved by the appearance of her longtime nemesis, Cordon Bleu-trained Isobel Lomax (Alexander). The women's on-camera fights and some shocking personal revelations blurted out on-air boost the show's ratings past the "dozens of viewers" it usually gets. The station makes the women on-camera partners and they suddenly achieve a soupcon of strictly local stardom.

Playwright Smith should treat every royalty check for The Kitchen Witches like a winning lottery ticket. Her play about expert cooks doesn't even bother to get its biscuit recipe right. The second act freeze-dries any possibility of fun when Dolly is rushed to the hospital for a mysterious ailment and Izzy and Stephen try to bond in an emotional scene so overblown it could qualify for FEMA relief.

Directed by Chris Taylor, RTC's cast is sillier and better the more they stray from the awful script. Lindley is a stitch as the shorter and meaner "witch," spitting out ad libs and pulling faces like the old comedian Martha Raye in her Bugaloos kids' show days. With a passing resemblance to lard-loving TV food fryer Paula Deen, Alexander lets her character, Isobel, drip with a greasy Dixie chawm. The actresses play off each other beautifully, achieving a slow-burn Lucy and Ethel finesse through the more-than-a-little-bit-racist Gone with the Wind costume bit. They really sizzle in the face-smearing food fight. You knew there had to be a food fight.

In the RTC production, you're not supposed to notice or mind that Dolly and Isobel have been given what appear to be pocketknives to chop their veggies or that their appliances don't work (it's a plywood stove). The set of Martha Stewart it's not. Good thing Lindley, Alexander and Loomer, along with Fred Thompson in the nearly-silent role of the cameraman, are so skilled at slicing and dicing the crummy script. This is community theater, where they don't really care how the sausage gets made as long as you're laughing at the hams.

 

 

(Interview with Rachael Lindley) http://www.neighborsgo.com/stories/58005

 

We all SO enjoyed this play on Saturday night when we 7 went. FUN FUN
We Red Hats plan to go to the Mystery/October play also.
Keep 'em coming please ......
Mrs. Leanne Wise and friends