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The play You Can’t Take It With You by the school’s drama team this year, really shocked me as the comedic senses combined with the fluency demonstrated by the cast was superb. There were pros and cons for the play, and the playwright was excellent at luring the audience to the plot as well as interacting with the crowd.

The play started off with the Sycamore and Vanderhof family demonstrating their weird habits. Immediately afterwards, Alice, the daughter of Penelope, was about to go out on a date, which peaked his family’s interest. Scared of being rejected by her counterpart due to the differences of their family (one being weird goofy, while the other being formal and serious with a mask on all the time), Alice discouraged her family of making too much interactions with Tony. However, tragedy occurred as Tony brought his family to the Sycamore’s for dinner a day earlier than planned. This not only led to an avalanche of blunders that created a horrible impressions for the Sycamore family. Then the play goes on to show and explain the moral of all this – take life easy and live it the way you want it to be, because you can’t take it with you when you die.

We can see both the cast and the plot demonstrating preeminence within the play. First of all, we can see that the cast was well prepared for the play, as they were ready to ad-lib during special circumstances, such as the fireworks not lighting up when it needed to be (at least that is what I thought happened). Being able to transition smoothly when a mistake was made, not only shows their fast-mindedness, as well as demonstrating their familiarity with the script. Secondly, the actors were able to project their voices towards the audience with clear passion and clarity at the same time. Being able to hear their devoutness, was a great way of demonstrating their eagerness for the stage and being able to put up an adequate show for us. Last of all, the way they incorporated jokes alongside with the script was great as it cheered me up, and lightened my mood.

As much as I want to say it was perfect, I knew there were also flaws in the play. Firstly, even though there were able to cover the mistake, the lighting of the gunpowder (I have no idea what it is) failed, as audiences we were able to identify that mistake pretty easily, therefore showing some of the lack of practices they had, which should be practiced more, which would make the play more successful. Another incident that happened that occured was some of the cast was stuttering between words, and even this was not significant, but I think the audience could have still picked it out, making it a small dent within the play. Last of all, even though this might not relate to the crew directly, but the play was confusing at times as we as the audience were not sure what is happening at the start of different scenes and acts, and have to wait until later to understand the whole picture.

All in all, the play was a success as well as a great way to spend your time. With the cast combining both emotions as well as jokes into their performances, the play successfully creates both suspense for the plot as well as interactions with the audience which lightens the mood; which is the reason I am strongly suggesting the play to others, as it was a magnificent performance.

Review: Watching the play at school was really interesting as I do not usually go to the plays. I was involved of building the set, and I feel personally connected to the play when it was going on. At the start of the play, I was partially confused of what was going on, however, as it went on, the play was more and more interesting and I was really enjoying the jokes. All in all, the assignment was really fun as we got to watch the play and writing the critique was not hard as the pros and cons were very clear.