Review Roundup: ANIMAL WISDOM at Signature Theatre

Signature Theatre is presenting the off-Broadway premiere of Heather Christian’s Animal Wisdom, led by Kenita Miller. Read the reviews in our roundup.

Step into a musical séance like no other — where the veil is thin, the music is wild, and the spirits of memory come roaring to life. Heather Christian’s piece blends storytelling, requiem, and family mythology in a musical ritual made for sinners and saints alike. A journey into the haunted spaces of memory and loss, this transporting experience comes to Signature in a thrilling new production helmed by director Keenan Tyler Oliphant, diving deep into the relationship between the soul, the seen and the unseen. With her raucous, singular music fusing blues, gospel and folk, Obie Award-winner Heather Christian invites you to pay tribute to the forces that shape our lives.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: Miller is terrific, gently leading both her fellow musicians and the audience through some tricky pathways — and delivering powerful vocals with soulful runs and an easy command of many musical traditions. There’s a muchness to Animal Wisdom that is both admirable and daunting.

Christian Lewis, New York Theatre Guide: Toward the end, a large, superfluous chorus enters, and soon the stage is plunged into complete darkness for about 20 minutes of singing. In this portion, as in much of the piece, it’s difficult to hear the lyrics, with the band too loud and the singing not amplified or articulated clearly enough. Because the piece can be hard to follow and is very long (an unseemly 130 minutes with no intermission), Animal Wisdom is perhaps asking too much of its audience.

Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: Animal Wisdom could afford some cutting. The first half is filled with a hodgepodge of random observations. We’re told that you must not verbally deny a ghost that you know is in the room; Coca-Cola works better than sacramental wine, and “what they don’t tell you about dying is that you lose chronology. ” All of that is often repeated and it can try your patience. But by the second half, director Keenan Tyler Oliphant takes us to church and it all comes together in a moving crescendo.

Lindsay B. Davis, 1 Minute Critic: A memory play with a musical soundtrack. A Southern gospel-infused, folk-rock opera. A deeply personal, emotional, and spiritual purge told through requiem-inspired song and story. Animal Wisdom is difficult to categorize. But what matters most is not what it is but how it is: visceral, unusually powerful, and at once primal yet sophisticated.

Average Rating: 75.0%