"One of those 'issue' plays that goes down easy and leaves you undernourished...Whenever the play allows Della’s contradictions to flower, it feels dramatic, raising usefully unanswerable questions...These are stories that burnish the audience’s progressive credentials without really testing them against formidable opposition...Della — like 'The Cake' itself, if you can get past its cloying elements — is nevertheless trying to grapple with something quite complex for a comedy."
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"Brunstetter's compassionate and nuanced depiction of Della, a woman some might dismiss as a bigot, is 'The Cake's' biggest treat, and Rupp is delectable in the role...If only the rest of the play were so multilayered...Brunstetter is a master at mixing punch lines and sight gags with insightful sentiment, but she stirs in some unnecessary plot twists. And despite the actors' best efforts, Macy and Della's husband, Tim, mostly come off as two-dimensional mouthpieces."
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"The biggest surprise about 'The Cake' is how sweetly inoffensive it is...Brunstetter isn't particularly interested here in exploiting her topic's incendiary aspects...The play ultimately isn't very thought-provoking, but it's certainly entertaining...It's hard not to wish the playwright had explored the situation in greater depth or given her characters more nuance. But Brunstetter's crowd-pleasing instincts prove spot-on...Rupp's terrific performance is key to the evening's success."
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"'The Cake' is a play about our changing world that tries to understand every opinion in it, leavening the underlying seriousness with laughs. The comedy only works intermittently. Most of the time, I just wanted to strangle everyone onstage...Eventually, the author’s backbreaking determination to make everyone lovable leads to some happy-ending compromises I found unconvincing...Ultimately doesn’t provide much nutrition to take home...Its values belong in a doggie bag."
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"Brunstetter succeeds in creating compellingly real characters by exposing these contradictions...Rupp gives a fleshy, vulnerable, and deeply sympathetic performance as the Christian baker. On top of that, she's really funny, with near-perfect comic timing...Meadow supports these four excellent performances with a well-paced and handsomely designed production....If I can fault 'The Cake' for anything, it's an almost too-optimistic ending."
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"The conflict between seeing multiple sides of an issue and the insistence that there is only one correct side is the power that fuels Bekah Brunstetter's sweet and provocative multi-layered comedy/drama...An endearing and frequently moving production...If there seems to be a missing ingredient in 'The Cake,' it's because the situation appears to only be about the civil rights issue of purchasing a cake with no mention of the First Amendment."
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“The tastiest thing by far in ‘The Cake’ is Rupp...Brunstetter has crafted a madly scatterbrained steel magnolia, and Rupp brings her fully to life...A comic sketch, no matter how delightful, does not a play make, however, and ‘The Cake’ is on less solid ground when it turns to other, more serious matters...Still, under Meadow's smooth direction, Rupp opens up to us every step of Della's journey to an appreciation of a world that is far more complicated than she ever imagined.”
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"A hoot, and also a full, satisfying meal that clings to the ribs well after its hour and a half...Beneath the straightforward narrative, and along with Brunstetter's many comic lines and characters changing the subject when the subject becomes too uncomfortable, is a smart exploration of why, even in a land where so many of us watch the same TV shows and post on the same blogs and social media, we're so radically disunited...'The Cake' is delicious."
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