THEATER
The McKittrick Hotel
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
New York Times Critic's Pick!
- BEN BRANTLEY, NEW YORK TIMES
The McKittrick Hotel has done it again!
- ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
ABOUT THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is a transporting, music-filled folk theater fable, that unfolds within The McKittrick Hotel’s bar and music venue, The Heath, which has been transformed into a high spirited Scottish Pub for the occasion. The full Scottish cast straight from the National Theatre of Scotland perform among and around its audience, weaving an ingenious, lyrical and enchanting story told with live music throughout an intimate and supernatural setting.
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/theater-review-drink-up-and-be-dazzled-at-the-strange-undoing-of-prudencia-hart-121516
Theater review: Drink up and be dazzled at The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
When reviewing, sobriety is rather mandatory. Critics ought to arrive fresh and alert, the better to catch every nuance of story and staging. (Even at Cats, although I would gladly have accepted 10 milligrams of morphine before curtain.) So it was with profound ambivalence that I gulped down the whiskey offered me at the immersive, site-specific The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. I clutched several drink tickets, and two friendly fellows were lining up free shots along the bar. It would have been rude to refuse such a simple kindness.
Co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (Black Watch) and written in cheeky rhyming couplets by David Greig, Prudencia Hart is perfectly enjoyable even without a chest-warming, peaty buzz. Director Wils Wilson stages this satiric fable inside an ad hoc Scottish pub in the Heath, normally the bar and music venue for the McKittrick Hotel (which also houses the long-running Sleep No More). The title character is a prickly academic (Melody Grove), whose specialty is folkloric literature (her dissertation is titled “The Topography Of Hell In Scottish Balladry”). At an academic conference, she trades barbs with her rival, cocksure and flashy Colin Syme (Paul McCole). Following a surreal bacchanal in a pub and a blizzard, Prudencia falls under the spell of a sinister stranger (Peter Hannah) who owns a vast library that enchants our learned heroine.
A witty send-up of literary theory and rom-coms that morphs into a real (and rather scary) mini-epic of damnation and obsession, Prudencia Hart keeps a fine balance between supernatural shocks and Fringe-like silliness. Wilson’s scrappy troupe tears around the room, pulling off audience-interactive shenanigans with adorable aplomb. They sing, they dance, and they risk life and limb on top of cluttered tables for our amusement. Someone buy those Scottish kids a round.
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