"If 'The Smuggler' aims to be about the price of the American dream and the moral cost of being a successful American citizen, it takes more than a few measures of doggerel from a black-market bartender to do so."
Read more

“Mellamphy is a dynamic presence, shifting easily among male and female roles and a variety of accents, while showing off some damn impressive cocktail-mixing moves.”
Read more

“ ‘The Smuggler’ does raise enough troubling questions about what being an American truly means in this day and age for Finnegan's extended barroom anecdote to be worth seeing and contemplating.”
Read more

“There is much food for thought in ’The Smuggler,’ and much of it leaves a bitter taste. But you'll be glad you partook.”
Read more

“While the verse format is less effective in serious moments—forcing sentences into specific rhythms undermines the emotions of a scene.”
Read more

"Be advised, the drinks, and also the plot, are served with a twist."
Read more

With his throaty Irish accent and magnetic presence, Michael Mellamphy dazzles for 85 minutes as a legal Irish immigrant unemployed bartender who gleefully embraces a life of crime in author Ronán Noone absorbing contemporary solo play. It lives up to its billing as a “thriller in rhyme,” with its punchy rhyming sentences and gritty film noir-style plot twists and turns among corrupt police officers, vicious human traffickers and scheming strivers.
Read more

“The performance is a physical as well as verbal feat. Bagley’s direction of Mellamphy is skillful and well-paced, energizing the 70-minute play.’The Smuggler,’ however, leaves the moral quandary of thievery and smuggling a tangled mess.”
Read more