Reviews for Old-Time Radio Storytime Classics: Snow White; Beauty and the Beast; Alice in Wonderland

The average rating for Old-Time Radio Storytime Classics: Snow White; Beauty and the Beast; Alice in Wonderland based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-06 00:00:00 Walter Slade I'll answer the obvious question first: no, King Hedley II is not as good as Fences. I have read all ten plays of August Wilson's "Century Cycle" except Radio Golf, and not one of them is as good as Fences, that masterpiece of modern drama. Then again, not many plays'by anyone, from anywhere, at anytime'are that good. Wilson, however, has written other very good plays: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson, come immediately to mind. But King Hedley II,though it has fine qualities, is not one of the very good plays. The plot has possibilities. Set in the 1980's, the play features a cast of characters enmeshed in a societal decline, caught in the inescapable web of history. Its hero, King Hedley II bears the name of the prophet Hedley featured in Wilson's earlier Seven Guitars, and part of his destiny is to discover his proper relation to this long vanished father. But he has more immediate problems too. Recently released from prison for murdering a man who cut him in the face, he literally bears the scars of his painful past. Can he move forward, become a success (he wants to open a video store), and make a life for his woman Tonya and the baby she carries? Or will the forces of the past be too much for King? Wilson makes us feel the urgency of King's challenges and the enormity of the past, but somehow there is no progress or struggle in Hedley's life'nothing but a unrelated series of hustles and stumbles. The play is loose in construction and disorganized in its effects. True, Wilson has always favored expressionistic techniques and an organic approach to structure, but, in his best work, the rhythms of speech, the power of music, and the hint of a pervasive mystical unity lend to even the most arbitrary misfortunes a sense of purpose and meaning. Still, I have the nagging sense that I may be wrong about King Hedley II As always with August Wilson, though, the language of the characters is filled with a convincing music. Here four characters'King, King's best friend Mister, King's mother Ruby's old hustler boyfriend Elmore, and Stool Pigeon, the neighorhood eccentric'discuss how even violence itself doesn't make the sense it used to anymore:ELMORE: "Teen Killed in Drive-By." I'm tired of hearing that. See . . . a man has got to have honor. A man ain't got no honor can't be a man . . . Now what is honor? You evedr see that movie where this man goes to kill this other man and he got his back to him and he tell him to turn around so he can see his eyes? That's honor. A man got to have that else he ain't a man. You can't be a man stealing somebody's life from the backseat of a Toyota. That's why the black man's gonna catch hell for the next hundred years. These kids gonna grow up and get old and ain't a man among them. KING: It used to be you get killed over something. Now you get killed over nothing. MISTER: You might look at somebody wrong and get in a fight and get killed over that. STOOL PIGEON: I see a man get killed over a fish sandwich. Right down there at Cephus's. Had two fish sandwiches . . . one with hot saucs and one without. Somebody got them mixed up and rthese two fellows got to arguin over them. The next thing you know it was a surprise to God to find out that one of them had six bullets in him. ELMORE: That's why I carry my pistol. They got too many fools out there.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-23 00:00:00 Andrew Stevenson King Hedley II is the ninth play in August Wilson's Century Cycle. This one was good but like the rest of his plays not as good as Fences. One interesting fact that I noticed in this play was that the character of Aunt Ester, who is the main character in Gem of the Ocean, is mentioned as being 366 years old in King Hedley II (she is not in this play but is mentioned). So I asked myself, "when was Aunt Ester born?". So I subtracted 366 from the year that King Hedley II was set which was 1985 and I got 1619. 1619 is an important year in American history. It's like 1492 but there is no clever rhyme to remember the year's significance. 1619 is the year that the first African slaves were brought to America, specifically Jamestown, VA. She is a symbol of African American history going back to 1619. I have one play left in order to finish the Century Cycle.