Review Roundup: Critics Weigh In On Encores! Off-Center's GONE MISSING

Encores! Off-Center, New York City Center's popular summer musical theater series, continues tonight with Gone Missing. John Behlmann, Susan Blackwell, Aysan Celik, Deborah S. Craig, Taylor Mac, and David Ryan Smithwill star in the special two-night-only engagement, presented in honor of composer and 2017 Encores! Artistic Director Michael Friedman.

This wry and whimsical docu-musical was created by The Civilians from interviews with real people about physical objects they'd lost and offers a very personal account of how we deal with loss in our lives. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, with music direction by Chris Fenwick, the production will also feature choreography by Karla Garcia.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Alexis Soloski, The New York Times: The two-night revival of "Gone Missing" at New York City Center is both a very good show and a very bad, very cosmic joke. Because this documentary song cycle is about loss: of minds, rings, a dog, the hour badly spent. And the irretrievable loss, the one you can hear in pretty much every plink and strum from the onstage band, is the loss of the show's composer, Michael Friedman, who died a year ago from AIDS-related complications. Which makes "Gone Missing" an accidental and indispensable elegy.

Matt Windman, amNY: With that in mind, the Off-Center production of "Gone Missing" serves as an opportunity to reflect upon Friedman's untimely passing. The meditative final song, "Stars," contains the line "So when I leave you, you'll know, I'm just a shadow, an echo. You never possessed me. Never possessed me." When the song was performed at Wednesday night's performance, one could hear a few audience members weeping.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: The melancholy lyric "my blackboard's been erased" comes hot on the heels of the tear-inducing "Lost Horizon," a haunting ballad rendered gorgeously by actor-playwright-performance artist Taylor Mac. A man sings of wanting to live in Shangri-La, Xanadu, and Babylon; yearning to "sail away": "And did you say/ I seemed so far away/ Am I ok?/ Why couldn't I stay?" On July 11, the sobs for Michael Friedman were audible, and they were many.

Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review: Gone Missing is a quirky, mostly droll, occasionally touching, 75-minute docu-musical that regards dozens of individuals talking about things they've lost: Keys, heirlooms, pets, phones, teeth, their virginity, their mind, and an array of other items, valuable or otherwise, not excepting the entire continent of Atlantis. Echoing the musical's theme, a specific storyline is omitted here in favor of presenting an assortment of bits and pieces.

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