Bedford Community Theatre

Reviews & Press Clippings

Review of "A Christmas Carol"

Press Clippings for "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Press Clippings for "Sound of Music"

Review of "Ths Miracle Worker"

Press Clippings for "The Miracle Worker"

Scarsdale Inquirer

The Bedford Record Review - Friday April 8, 2005

Talk of the Town

A Miracle in community theater is happening right now with the production of "The Miracle Worker" at our very own Bedford Community Theatre at 74 Main Street (on the corner of Church) in Bedford Hills. Community theaters are the backbone and grass roots of theater in our country, and with a production like this, they are really easy to support. Johanna Lewis and Alex Scheer are a tour de force as Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. They absolutely channel these characters in performances that are worthy of a Broadway stage.

Big Miracles in Bedford Hills
by Foxy Gwynne

Just to show how much I am on the bottom of things rather than the top of things, four plays have gone on in the Bedford Hills Community House without my having a clue that anything was going on there other than yoga.

So when John Thompson, the director of Bedofrd Community Theatre's current play "The Miracle Worker", their first drama, invited me to come see, I had two misgivings. One, that I would have to write something about it - and I can't write critical theaterese - ant two, I thought, "Uh-oh, this is going to be pretty terrible to watch after having seen Anne Bancroft play the part long ago". And boy, was I wrong.

I couldn't give enough "wows" about the principals Johanna Lewis (Helen Keller) and Alexandra Scheer (Anne Sullivan), but I will begin with the supporting characters like David Fritsch (Captain Keller), who as spent four years as a director of dramas at John Jay Middle School, so must be well known to a bunch of people in the audience. He played the Victorian father humorously, as he laid down the laws to his wife (Katie Scheibal), who sweetely acquiesed to his demands about Helen but kept her own ideas. I liked it when Capt. Keller said to Annie, "You are a tyrant, Miss Sullivan". "Likewise, I'm sure", replied the spunky, Irish Annie.

The family worked well together: the younger siblings - Percy (Trevor Lovitz), in particular, tickled me, James (Duncan Grosman), the outsider son who later comes to side with Ms Sullivan on Helen's treatment, the spinster Aunt Ev (Sally Price), and Viney, the maid (Bridget McCart), who greets Helen with a "Glad to see you" and under her breath adds "probably".

June O'Neill's set was brilliantly designed on different stage levels from Annie's bedroom at the very top, down the stairs to the dining room where, oh, what tantrums take place. A screen door, often slammed, leads down more stairs to a lower stage level where serious talks take place, the later becomes a small house where Annie lives in confinement with Helen to learn. "She's like a little treasure locked in a safe, waiting to be opened" Annie says of Helen, "but obedience is the gateway through which knowlege enters the mind of a child."

Front and center at the bottom of the set is that most important water pump, which actually pumps water. I had thought someone must have extended the water pipes in the building to the stage, but no, John Thompson, whose life's ambition has been to direct this play, is also an innovator and simply bought the water pump, which recycled water in a box.

You all know the story of Helen Keller, born in Alabama in 1880, who became deaf, dumb and blind from an illness that struck her at two years of age. William Gibson's play does not deal with her earning an honors degree from Radcliffe nor how she advocated the disabled, became an ardent suffragette, and an advocate for peace who corresponded with presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The play begins with the arrival of Miss Sullivan, the teacher who turned the uncontrollable child into an extraordinary human being, signing we war through life, until her 88th birthday.

It is fascinating to watch Johanna Lewis (a John Jay sixth grader who took the lead in Annie) play Helen and work with Ms Scheer (last seen in "Barefoot in the Park"), who plays the teacher Miss Sullivan. Helen has always had her way in the house. At the dinner table she eats with her hands froom everyone's plate, and no one has the guts to chastise her. (I personally felt like going up on stage and giving her a good spanking.) It takes Annie to tame the wild, lashing-out child, knowing intelligence is in her brain "like water underground." Their battles are riveting, slap for slap, push for shove, hair pull for hair pull, as Annie desperately tries to find a way to the chilid's understanding.

In a final scene when Helen has thrown a water pitcher against the wall in the dining room, Annie drags her to the well outside to make her refill it, when the miracle comes - the realization that water has a name. It is a moment so artfully done between the two that I don't think there was a dry eye in the house.

Reprinted Courtesy of the Bedford Record Review

Reprinted Courtesy of the Bedford Record Review

Reprinted Courtesy of the Bedford Record Review

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