“Milo Cramer is snagging the audience’s attention at Playwrights Horizons in ‘School Pictures’, a song cycle of 10 numbers, each pertaining to a youngster under Cramer’s tutoring...These intimate tutor-child interactions underpin the show’s critiques of the classist and racist education system that burdens children with inequities.”
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“...in a little over an hour, it unfolds into an extraordinary meditation on teaching, learning, what we’re learning through institutional structures as much as through literal instruction”
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“Your reaction to Alexandra Tatarsky’s ‘Sad Boys in Harpy Land’ is likely to be less warm-fuzzy and more head-scratchy. The 80-minute show is about the creative process... and it’s a clown show!”
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“Cramer is a personable performer with an unruly shock of hair and a wicked glint in his eye, both of which contradict his supremely mild manner. He's a talented performer and a writer of wit but the excessively cutesy quality of the early passages is supremely counterproductive. If he put down the uke and simply spoke to us, School Pictures -- a piece that ultimately becomes captivating -- might be a knockout.”
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“it's fun at first, but 70 minutes is a long time to sustain this sort of gambit, and by the end you wish he'd spoken more and sung less. He's a pleasant presence, and if you've ever taught or tutored, you'll probably empathize strongly with Cramer and his feeling of helplessness in a very damaged system. For the rest of us, it's a moderately revealing glimpse into unfamiliar territory.”
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Each of the story songs are poignant as well as hilarious as these young people deal with adolescent problems, the world around them and their parents’ unreal expectations. Cramer is always charming and amiable as they use varied voices to make each student sound different. The lyrics are inventive and unusual, each song in a different form. Smoothly directed by Morgan Green, "School Pictures" is that rare one-person show: satisfying and original as well as honest in revealing child psychology as well as a teacher’s perspective.
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“ ‘School Pictures’ is at once entertaining, educational, thought provoking, vulnerable, hilarious, sentimental, and heart-warming. It reaches you on an extremely human level, and on a political one. It gives you hope for humanity while exposing the privilege and racism within its education system.”
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