When it comes to getting creeped out, what better place for that than the comfortable environs of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre?
And beating the Halloween rush, the Rep's producing artistic director, Robert Hupp, has put together a masterful thriller, Wait Until Dark, which opened Friday night to an appreciative audience that likely was somewhat rattled at the end.
Known to most folks as a movie in the late 1960s -- although Frederick Knott first wrote it as a play -- Wait Until Dark relies on a complex plot to set the stage for the terror that befalls a blind woman. Amy Hutchins is quite believable as a woman who can take care of herself, even as she trips and stumbles navigating the basement Greenwich Village apartment where she and her husband live.
Hutchins' character is menaced by three men who try to trick her into revealing the whereabouts of a heroin-stuffed doll they know her husband carried home from a trip abroad. The desperadoes have sent her husband on various false missions so they can get the doll from the wife, so he's mostly out of the picture.
Michael Stewart Allen, who closely resembles Paul Shaffer of Late Show with David Letterman fame, is the chief terrible bad guy. His hired hands, Craig Maravich and Robert Ierardi, alternate as good cop and bad cop, as it were, and both are good at being good and bad, respectively.
Reagan Hodson almost steals the show as the 11-year-old neighbor who starts out as a bratty little girl and becomes a true pal to Hutchins in her plight.
Fight choreographer D.C. Wright deserves plaudits for creating some realistic fight scenes in darkness or partial darkness between Hutchins and Allen -- who are husband and wife in real life.
The show continues through Nov. 9, with performances at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and at 7 p.m. Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays plus matinees at 2 p.m. Sundays at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Sixth and Main streets in Little Rock. Seating is reserved and tickets range from $30 to $40, with student tickets $20. More information is available from (501) 378-0405 or online at therep.org/attend.
Metro on 10/25/2014