'Tony Curtis Speaks Italian' another wonderful one-woman show from Dolores Hydock
review by Alec Harvey -- The Birmingham News
5 out of 5 stars
Dolores Hydock’s “Tony Curtis Speaks Italian and All I Can Say is ‘I Love You’” is just about what you’d expect.
It’s funny and touching, smart and insightful, personal and universal.
In short, in many ways it’s just like her other one-woman shows (“In Her Own Fashion,” “Take a Ride on the Reading”), which is a really good thing. But this one seems better constructed with a smoother flow, which makes it even better.
“Tony Curtis Speaks Italian,” which opened Thursday and runs through April 19 at Terrific New Theatre, is part memoir, part travelogue, a trip down memory lane as Hydock shares some of the adventures of her trip abroad at age 19 with her college roommate. It’s a story that takes her from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., to Germany, England, France, Poland and Italy, and Hydock and director Carl Stewart make sure the audience doesn’t get lost along the way.
On the trip, Hydock introduces us to and inhabits a number of people she meets along the way, ingeniously incorporating other voices into the one-woman piece. She travels backward and forward in time, but it never seems forced. It’s all pretty seamless, and though it’s highly personal, it’s a story that anyone can relate to.
It’s really easy to take performers like Hydock for granted. Every time she steps on a stage, you just kind of assume she’s going to be funny, engaging and pretty much pitch-perfect. Thankfully, for us, she always delivers.