School for Scandal, Reviews, and Seeing Plays

This will serve as an all-purpose post about seeing plays, reviewing plays, our class's trip to see School for Scandal, and whatever else fits into it. There's no requirement to comment on this post; it's just there in case anyone wants to vent, discuss, ask questions, provide answers, and so forth.

Info on School for Scandal: 

We're on for Tuesday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m. Dr. Z has the tickets and will distribute them at LCW on Tuesday. Please make sure you bring $30 to LCW on May 3. Dr. Z will then do his best to get the reimbursement money pledged by the Dean / LCW, hopefully for $20 per ticket.
 
  - also, based on what students have said about being able to go or not, we should have two extra tickets, available also for $30 each, which are to be made available to LCW students on a first-come, first-served basis. So please try to get a friend to come to the play! If you know of someone who will be able to commit to going, please let Dr. Z know immediately.

Info on play-going and review-writing in general:

First, here's a short comedic piece from The Toast about seeing plays. It's called "So You're Thinking About Seeing a Play." (If you don't know about The Toast, and particularly its pieces on art, you should. Some of them are hilarious.) It's sort of about seeing plays, and sort of about what plays are, but it's also apparently about what it's like when your friend is a playwright, or if you yourself are a playwright.
http://the-toast.net/2016/04/14/plays-for-normal-people/

And here are some examples of reviews of plays. These will get you in the mood to write an extra-credit review of S for S, and will show you how the professionals write reviews. They have to deal with word limits, so they try to get as much as possible into short a text as possible. So they often use sentences like, "The parade of extravagant costumes, by Constance Hoffman, brings a colorful injection of visual drama to the proceedings, too." Or phrases like "played with foot-stomping exasperation by Patrice Johnson Chevannes" and "Mr. Camargo’s pale, darkly expressive face" -- in other words, descriptions for an audience who have not seen the play, using vivid (but brief) language to convey the experience in snapshots rather than wholly covering everything exhaustively.
  
- the above examples are from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/theater/review-in-pericles-much-ado-about-a-lot-of-things.html -- a review of a recent performance of Pericles

  - and here's a somewhat older review of a performance of The Rover
  http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/27/theater/stage-the-rover-feminist-comedy-from-1677.html -- it apparently had Christopher Reeve (who played Superman in the late 1970s and 1980s) as Willmore