Reviews Fruma Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)
From the 2021 Production,
New York City/The Cell:
“In what might just be the best stage role of her career, Jackie Hoffman plays the multi-faceted Ariana in E. Dale Smith’s Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)… Sitting in place, attached to a hefty rope, she takes the audience and her co-star, Kelly Kinsella as Margo Peterson, “substitute fly captain,” on a journey of a life not well, but interestingly, lived.”
—Joel Benjamin, theatrescene.net
“Smith turns out to be quite accomplished at keeping an audience ahead of him in one way and continually engaged in another. Ariana has a strong sense of humor, even wit. Yet, she’s a woman at the end of her tether, literally.”
—David Finkle, New York Stage Review
“The writing by E. Dale Smith is astounding. He captures the joy, wonder, and disappointment of theater life, whether on Broadway or in a small theatre in central New Jersey.”
—Reviews Off Broadway
“Hoffman, who is at the phase in her career when she is a presence you feel privileged to see in anything, is marvelous in Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings), a new show by E. Dale Smith that isn’t just anything, but that for those of us more than passingly interested in aging and the crap shoot that is life, might be better described as everything… impressively and satisfyingly imagined, performed and staged 75 minutes.”
—Boyculture.com
“Playwright E. Dale Smith is largely successful in crafting a one-act that smoothly segues from satire to pathos… [he] is equally deft at poking fun at the gay community and of the drinking life before turning dark.”
—Stanford Friedman, Off Off Online
“Fruma-Sarah employs a clever structuring device. We hear snatches of Fiddler as the performance moves forward outside our field of vision, and each of its songs cues Ariana into expounding about a different aspect of her life, which has taken a series of disappointing turns.”
—Adam Feldman, Timeout New York
