"It’s hard not to feel that 'Hound Dog' is stuck on the outside of her own story, listening in."
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"Little moments of insight brought me back: Hound Dog celebrates how the song of America becomes beautifully distorted as our cultural megaphone blares across the seas...It shows how people find freedom in the most unexpected places."
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There's plenty of conversation onstage in Hound Dog -- whenever all hell isn't breaking loose -- but really, it's all talk, lacking in the power of suggestion. The title character -- yes, really -- of Hound Dog has some big decisions to make, but Aker forgets to make her (and her problems) engaging. The production's other amenities, including some attractive songs and a keen sense of the fantastic, can't make up for the general lack of interest.
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"The intermingling of music and dream-like elements gives the sense that 'HOUND DOG' is working under its own system of logic, but it isn't clear what that includes...The production has yet to find a suitable tone."
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Director Machel Ross does little to guide this play to any semblance of cohesion. Scenes 1 and 13, between Hound Dog and Ayse, her childhood best friend, begin with the exact same lines and stage blocking up to a point…so, did one scene happen and the other one not happen? Which is the real scene? Scene 6, between Hound Dog and Yusuf, the neighborhood trash collector and best friend to Hound Dog’s father Baba, happened three days after their meeting in Scene 4, or is it, as Hound Dog perceives, only yesterday?
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There’s much to appreciate in each performance and in several of the songs, but many of this show’s 90 minutes fail to register strongly enough on the scales of humor, emotion, lucidity, or even sociology. It’s good, however, to see something, even if tepidly done, about a rarely represented culture on the stage.
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"The cast is on-point and the direction (by Machel Ross) smooth, and all in all it's an enjoyable, if not completely satisfactory, 90 minutes...Credit where it's due: watching 'HOUND DOG' is an entertaining and enjoyable experience. I just left with questions."
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We eventually figure out that Hound Dog hasn’t fully processed her grief at the death of her mother a year earlier, and is also probably experiencing culture shock... The problem with the play is that the playwright doesn’t seem to have fully processed Hound Dog’s grief and culture shock either, which makes it difficult for the audience to figure out how we’re supposed to react, or even what’s going on.
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