"Very busy...Its sheer abundance of story and song, and its fast cuts from one narrative to another, can make it feel like a tasting menu...There’s nostalgia in the gorgeously played songs...Backhaus’s stories, vivid with the colors of human experience, are a vital defense against sentimentality...The narrative frame feels forced, though, teetering between earnestness and self-consciousness without solving the problem of uniting the three different plots...Only partly succeeds."
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"Simultaneously intimate and epic as its multicultural cast conjures three tales from our collective American memory...Even if you guess where these narratives will go, you won’t anticipate the emotional epiphanies they evoke as they spin facts into melodic fiction. The numbers are enthralling throughout and make up for flaws in the storytelling...Although the show occasionally slips into pretension, it gets at something deep about the way the past can hold us back or push us forward."
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"There are a few standout dishes, the company is charming, but the whole is less than the sum of its fragmented parts...All signs suggest that we're in for something akin to side-by-side episodes of 'Wishbone' rather than a scrutinizing look at these three eras of American history. And yet, the latter portion of the show — which features one particularly jarring tonal shift — subverts that expectation in a way that leaves us more confused than moved by the suddenly changing winds."
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"The only thing linking these stories is the ineptitude with which they are told...Jaclyn Backhaus' book is so sketchy and poorly constructed that it is impossible for these three intercut narratives to build on each other...The score, by ten contributors, lacks a cohesive style or point of view...Andrew Neisler's direction allows for plenty of mugging among the members of the large cast, but there are striking contributions."
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"Beautifully performed...A charming and good-natured musical...The score is an accomplished blend of well-crafted songs in a variety of styles...Neisler's staging is expertly panoramic...Hobbs' choreography is a delightful assortment of dances and movements that represent the different time periods and moods...Though the ambitious linking of the three disparate stories is at times strained, 'Folk Wandering' succeeds as an original and absorbing entertainment."
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"The overall excellence of the ensemble is one of the joys...Where 'Folk Wandering' attempts to plumb more profound emotional depths, the production suffers from a lack of any really strong connection to the key characters...The overall quality of the scenic and performative elements of disguise some of its shakier dramaturgical elements. The book...is basically strong on a scenic level, but does not seem to know where to land...A thoroughly enjoyable new musical."
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