Broadway World - Somewhat Recommended
"...The performance is a success, but as with all story-driven theatre which had its style epitomized to commercial success in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby or the later Peter and the Starcatcher, there are self-referential excesses which do not support the propulsion of the story. While actors swinging on ropes and white text projections are accepted within the quasi-minimal style, here they seem entirely superfluous. How could this performance excel further if devoid of all theatrical entrapments that do not support the narrative arch?"
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...In what is Los Angeles’s best season since well before the pandemic, comes along the best show of the season. Only in New York would one expect the caliber of talent and technical elements than in A Noise Within’s production of Animal Farm. Riveting, frightening, and entertaining, director Julia Rodriguez-Elliot’s astounding marvel — her best staging to date — will leave you breathless."
LA Splash - Highly Recommended
"...The entire production team has done an excellent job to turning this allegorical fantasy into a stage reality. And let's not forget Rod Bagheri's music direction, a crucial function in this musical version of the tale, so enhanced by the clever lyrics. This is a production which should please any audience, whether viewers are focused on story, satire, music, history, or just sitting back and being royally entertained."
Stage Scene LA - Highly Recommended
"...A superlative cast, inspired direction, and designs that are the epitome of imaginative top the list of reasons not to miss Peter Hall's musical adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm at A Noise Within."
On Stage Los Angeles - Highly Recommended
"...The Elliotts and A Noise Within have blown out the stops to create a spectacle. It is an allegory for our times? Or, perhaps just a very imaginative show? It must be seen."
Hollywood Progressive - Highly Recommended
"...ANW’s superb production presents Sir Peter Hall’s Animal Farm, with live music by Richard Peaslee and lyrics by Adrian Mitchell, is a perfect choice to open over Labor Day weekend. The musical premiered at the UK’s National Theatre in that most Orwellian of years – 1984, but of course – and adapts the 1945 novella by George Orwell."
Stage Raw - Highly Recommended
"...Just as Animal Farm the book was written to disturb and provoke (rather than primarily to entertain), Animal Farm the musical is a show you heed and respect while perhaps finding its themes too discomfiting to actually enjoy. Orwell's perspective of humankind - including the inability of many people to think for themselves, thus rendering them susceptible to propaganda and manipulation - is grim indeed. You don't have to be a scholar to shudder at this allegory's embedded truth or perceive its all-too-real application to the current events on our public stage."
Haines His Way - Highly Recommended
"...Most of the cast of eleven-also including Jeremy Rabb, Deborah Strang, Cassandra Marie Murphy, Nicole Javier, Philicia Saunders and Sedale Threatt Jr.-play several roles, all effortlessly. The production is a feast for the eyes-Angela Balogh Calin's barn setting and her varied costumes, Ken Booth's painterly lighting design, the musical direction of Rod Bagheri leading the three-piece on-stage band, and most especially Tony Valdes's wig and make-up design and Dillon Nelson's mask design. Kenneth R. Merckx Jr.'s fight choreography really makes The Battle of the Cowshed memorable. You probably won't leave the theatre humming any of the tunes, but you will still be thinking about the ideas Animal Farm harvests. Bravo to all involved, be they on four feet or two."
Ticket Holders LA - Highly Recommended
"...The production, which initially played all three venues at the British National Theatre, is a brilliantly imaginative piece, very avant-garde in its day and seldom mounted since. Leave it to that wildly innovative visionary director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and her cohorts at A Noise Within to tackle Sir Peter's epic-and only a few months after presenting Mary Zimmerman's equally challenging Metamorphoses."
