Review Roundup: LUCY World Premiere Opens at the Minetta Lane Theatre

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Audible Theater is presenting the world premiere production of Lucy. Written and directed by BAFTA Award nominee Erica Schmidt, Lucy stars Drama Desk Award nominee Brooke Bloom and Lynn Collins, along with Charlotte Surak. The limited four-week-only engagement will run through Saturday, February 25 at the Minetta Lane Theatre, Audible's creative home for live performances in New York.

Ashling is every busy parent's dream: a professional nanny with experience and a warm, sunny attitude. But from the moment Mary hires her to look after her young children, things start to feel just a little...off.

Are Mary's stressful work schedule and lack of sleep playing games with her own sanity, or has she welcomed an unstable troublemaker into her home? At once harrowing and hilarious, Erica Schmidt's Lucy explores the wild range of parents' emotions, asking if we can entrust others with our family's safety.

See what the critics are saying below. 

Sandy MacDonald, New York Stage Review: Mary keeps shrugging off one ill omen after another. We get it: Good, reliable childcare is hard to come by, whatever the price and the pileup of red flags. But to us, the audience, Ashling is clearly a nut job. What will finally push Mary over the edge? You can count on one inevitability: The showdown will come accompanied by a couple of unanticipated revelations, held back too long and to less-than-staggering effect.

Juan A. Ramirez, Theatrely: Like a grizzly bear with a fish, Collins (who could pass for 32, is actually 45, and plays even older here) slams each of her lines against the proverbial stone and eats their every last piece, gutsily swinging between passive-aggressive remarks and aggressive-aggressive directives, her performance growing aptly wilder as the story flies off the rails. Once it is settled that it is not a great play, nor an effective production of what could be a fun exercise in camp, Collins rises to fill the ludicrous gaps left by the direction, though Bloom’s hysterical, climactic, “How do you think I felt, coming home and seeing that SOUP?” is as lip sync ready as they come. Let’s revisit this in 10 years when RuPaul buys the Minetta Lane from Audible and stages drag-only performances.

Gillian Russo, New York Theatre Guide: The perfectly cast pair Schmidt has found in Brooke Bloom (Mary) and Lynn Collins (Ashling), plus an adorable and diverting Charlotte Surak as Lucy, are nonetheless worth the price of admission. Sure, you can wait to hear them when Audible releases Lucy as an audio drama. But then you won't see that "Anti-Hero" dance party, that one blissfully beautiful moment, awash in vibrant pink lights, before everything rapidly devolves. For the characters and the audience, it is exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.

James Wilson, Talkin' Broadway: The premise is reminiscent of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, a film about an evil nanny causing death and destruction in her path. The stakes in Lucy, though, are very low and as a psychological thriller, it is hugely disappointing. Plot points don't always make sense, and there are few clues as to why Ashling does what she does. Is it class warfare? Maybe psychological manipulation or something darker? The audience the night I saw it was primed to scream, but the revelations are laughably banal and the suspense and danger do not accumulate. We are told several times, for instance, that Lucy is at odds with Ashling, but we don't see it. They seem to get along just fine as they dance, play, and eat soup together. Even the ending, which promises a tense standoff between the two adults, is both too timid and too tepid. When the final lights went down, there was a noticeable sense of dejection in the applause.

Average Rating: 55.0%