Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War
Opening Night: February 9, 2012
Closing: February 18, 2012
Theater: New Ohio Theatre
In an alternate global history, the cold war was decided not by détente, not by nuclear holocaust, but by massive robot invasion. Among the survivors, a team of Russian radio hosts, warmed to a lost culture of 1950s Americana, broadcast a story of brothers’ love drawn straight from the American heartland. Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War combines 1950s radio drama, vintage country music and Soviet science in a sci-fi surrealist War of the Worlds meets A Prairie Home Companion examination of American nostalgia.
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February 12, 2012
In “Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War,” an imaginative riff on atomic age fears (have they ever gone away?) robots wiped out the United States in 1959, killing its people and leaving it unfit for habitation. But sometime in the middle of the 21st century a small outpost of Soviet Free Radio in Irkutsk keeps bits of American culture alive, broadcasting a play about two Iowa brothers, Samuel and Alasdair, and their lives before the robot holocaust.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 13, 2012
The New Ohio Theatre has a hit on its hands with Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, a radio play-within-a-play set in post-apocalyptic Russia. The radio show is styled closely after “A Prairie Home Companion,” featuring an idiosyncratic host (Joe Curnutte), a lovelorn doctor (Marc Bovino), a singer (Stephanie Wright Thompson) and a near-mute guitarist (Michael Dalto). The terrific cast created the story with director Lila Neugebauer, whose sense of pacing allows the actors to hit comedic and suspenseful notes when needed.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 11, 2012
Flip around the radio dial lately? You probably won’t find anything as entertaining as the programming put on by Soviet Free Radio Order. Especially its “At Home Field Guide,” a homespun combination of storytelling, hokey audience-participation games and country-and-western songs that makes Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” look positively urbane.
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January 6, 2012
At just 75 minutes, it feels like there was a lot left out of Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, now at the New Ohio Theatre.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 10, 2012
I couldn’t have been much more pleased with my first sojourn to the New Ohio Theatre in its fresh space in the far West Village. Comfortable seats fill a theater that’s spacious and clean yet retains a bit of the downtown funkiness that made the old Ohio so unique. Samuel & Alasdair, by a new company called The Mad Ones, has an old-time radio-station setting and back-to-the-future weirdness that make it a perfect occupant.
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