"No one would enjoy a return to the days of slick sex comedies more than I, but Chasing Happy will do little to advance the cause. Even the frothiest, most artificial romp needs to bear some resemblance to life as it is really lived. The people in Chasing Happy act like they were conceived by an old TV sitcom and not one of the better ones. They're artificial in the wrong way.'
Read more
“Overall, and despite some lovely performances, neither the playwright nor director Alexa Kelly has been able to pull it all together into a clearly defined style of comedy, and so what we get is a mash-up of rom-com, sit-com, dramedy, and farce, along with a set of disparate characters loosely held together by a series of scenes, often well-written in and of themselves, but which fail to coalesce into a seamless whole.”
Read more
"Chasing Happy," written by Michel Wallerstein and directed by Alexa Kelly, is a five-character comedy about a gay love triangle. It unravels like a pilot for a television sitcom that borrows characterizations from other sitcoms. Despite the efforts of a skillful, hard-working ensemble, the show never rises to the challenge of solid character development within a believable story. It was not a well-spent two hours for this reviewer.
Read more
“The play is full of double standards...I will have to say though, that its heart is in the right place. You can tell that it was created with love, it was worked on with love, and it’s presented with love, and strives to espouse that feeling to the audience. It’s just too sugary and sappy to give any real sustenance.”
Read more
"Chasing Happy is a romantic comedy, an untypical genre for the stage outside musical theatre. It’s such a fresh, refreshing break from the heaviness of drama or saccharine-sweet lightness of some musical comedy that it makes one wonder why the style isn’t employed more often by modern playwrights."
Read more
“...a comedy full of exceedingly improbable behavior, overblown characterizations, jarring shifts in tone and contrived sentimentality.”
Read more