A CurtainUp Review
July 8, 2007

Rodney Gardiner in a scene from The Last Year in the Life of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as Devised by Waterwell: A Rock Operetta(Photo: Ryan Jensen)


The Last Year in the Life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as Devised by Waterwell: A Rock Opera(a.k.a. The King/Operetta)
By Christopher Murray


The adventurous and audacious theatre collective known as Waterwell, which creates its works collaboratively, takes as the starting point for its new piece a speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Manhattan’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his murder at the age of thirty-nine. Given before the group Clergy and Laity Concerned, the intentionally provocative and controversial speech, "Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence," was a watershed moment for King, signaling his move away from a focus merely on domestic concerns and linking poverty and class struggle in the United States to our nation’s foreign policy boondoggles.

Read the full review at http://curtainup.com/kingoperetta.html