That's Entertainment!

 Shameless Plugs for impressive performances.

As part of The Rep's outreach program, they partnered with The Zeidler Group to facilitate after-performance conversations about their play. This is the 5th year of this practice, and they are doing it with Antonio's Song.

The play is a 90-minute coming-of-age tale about a mixed-race boy maturing into a young father with a five-year-old son. The performance is impressive. We can't visually watch him mature, but his actions, dialects, and speech carry us through his story.

It is the story of a man living in the Bronx where the blacks don't like the Puerto Ricans, and the Puerto Ricans don't like the blacks. Antonio's father is Puerto Rican, and his mother is black. His friends of both races fight for survival on the streets where violence is the capital that guarantees your survival.

Through several experiences, Antonio discovers a never could be dreamed-of adulthood, a wife he loves, and a child he cherishes. He also finds that he can not leave his past behind him but recognizes that it helped him become a better man in many ways.

If you see this play on Wednesdays or Thursdays, do attend Act II,  the Zeidler facilitated conversations with fellow attendees in the lobby following the play. I'd love to see you.

I took the afternoon off watching Premier League Football (Soccer in the USA). Instead, I have wanted to check out a movie starring Bod Odenkirk (Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad) titled Nobody.

We find our hero stuck in a boring domestic experience. His wife has constructed a pile of pillows in their bed, signaling she doesn't want 'it.' His teenage son thinks he's a wimp. This looks like life for our man until a desperate young couple burglarizes them one night. He wakes up, arms himself with a golf club, and faces off with the young couple. The young female burglar threatens him with a gun. His son tackles the male burglar. It looks like a face-off he can't win, so our man calls off his son and drops the golf club. The couple makes off with his watch and what they think is a few dollars in change.

Our man is chastised by his family, friends, and co-workers for not attacking these crooks, particularly when he admits to his father, a former FBI Agent (Christopher Lloyd), that he knew the gun the girl had was not loaded. That is until his daughter can't find her bracelet, and Dad realizes when the thieves scooped up the money, they got the bracelet.

What follows is comedy-drama with a body count higher than your typical war film and fight scenes that could have been choreographed by Fossi. Instead, we find that our friend is such a wimp because he had turned his back on a career as a government assassin. 

If our characters were not played just the right amount of 'Over-the-top,' this could be a bad B movie. But Odenkirk shows us the right amount of passion and commitment to his own redemption that I  found myself pulling for him. I mean, dozens of people had to die? Yeah, after all, they stole his daughters' bracelet. What would you do?

Question de jour?

How the hell did they get these dogs to pose for this?

Or

Are these realistic stuffed animals?