Hundred Days

"Without elaborate sets, costumes, large ensembles of singers and dancers, and multi-million-dollar budgets, The Bengsons have successfully mounted a stunning musical with a believable story and a brilliantly executed score...The creative team create a space where The Bengsons create magic and transcend all expectations set by traditional musical theatre. Sonya Tayeh’s movement direction creates exquisite images throughout the performance." Full Review

“Exceptionally entertaining, not to mention deeply moving...An earlier version was seen at last year’s Under the Radar festival, and it’s gotten sharper and better in the year since...Accompanied by four equally personable and talented musicians on a stage seemingly lit by Edison bulbs and astutely directed by Anne Kauffman, the show takes just 90 fleet minutes to sink its teeth into your heart. It’s funny and charming and dead serious without ever being deadly.” Full Review

“The unconventional and deceptively simple concert-cum-musical is a show about romantic love, pure and simple...This love you see in front of you, which is manifested by the Bengsons’ glorious cycle of songs, is real, and it’s achingly beautiful to behold...The current production vastly improves upon that previous run, thanks in large part to Kaufman’s subtle but impactful directorial touches...Once timid performances have also grown more confident and compelling." Full Review

"It’s glorious and spellbinding...This band, with soaring vocals, a foot stomping and hand clapping beat, entwined with brilliant songwriting will pull you in to their mythology as if in a dream. Not just with their musical excellence, but with their dedication to vulnerability, truth, and passion...Insanely theatrical while being simple and direct, they tell their story without much of anything else beyond their powerful drumming of the beat...Every moment feels authentic and spontaneous.” Full Review

"A luminous musical memoir...Staged with resonant economy by the talented Kauffman, with sharp and subtle movement direction, 'Hundred Days' is cabaret as cri de coeur, and it is advisable to watch it with a handkerchief...The shift in focus from outside to inside clarifies and intensifies what was already an affecting piece...The Bengsons are stirring, and surprisingly witty, company. The Bengsons’s distinctive stage presence matches the story they tell." Full Review

"Abigail and Shaun Bengson share their love story with lush, emotional songs that will touch your heart...Some of the details they share are funny; some of them are sweet; some are intense...The music is, in one word, glorious…They explode and come alive when they perform in a way they don’t when they are just speaking…I don’t know if there are enough adjectives I can use to express how beautiful the music was, especially when paired with the story.” Full Review

"Director Anne Kauffman plays against the internal emotional extremism of the material with an elegantly spare staging...Though only 75 minutes long, 'Hundred Days' has a slow, deliberate sensibility, in keeping with the Bengsons’ ways of dealing with death: not to outrun time but to force it to the pace you choose, extending it by a shared exultation in detail. The trick to sustaining love at first sight, their show suggests, is to never stop looking." Full Review

"In one scene, we watch the couple foresee growing older, decade by decade: both a witty meditation on maturity and a sober meditation on mortality. Under Anne Kaufmann’s subtle and clever direction, Abigail and Shaun and the band do not stay still...Every musician plays powerfully, but it is Abigail’s wail of sadness and pain in her key song that stays with you, piercing the night." Full Review

"A deceptively simple affair: a stage largely unadorned save for musical instruments, a book by playwright Gancher that gives a voice both wry and poignant to the story of the Bengsons’ meeting and marriage, and of course, a collection of lush, plaintive, soaring songs...Shaun is a model of the classically self-effacing, hella-talented indie rock musician—his guitar holds the show together—and Abigail, out of her roiling anxiety, is able to release a vocal hurricane." Full Review

"More squarely concentrated on Abigail's journey now, which works because she is an extremely exciting performer. Her vocal work is overwhelming in informing the rawness of her character. With slightly less of an emphasis on Shaun's side of the journey, the story's arc as a whole feels not quite as well rounded as before...Kauffman and the Bengsons have created a universal story, recognizable to anyone who's ever loved and lost." Full Review

"The inherent sadness of the situation is an essential part of an eclectic score that is anything but sad in its execution. It's hard to put a label on this very listenable and exciting score...Perhaps a decision was made early on to keep 'Days' contained in an uncluttered musical framework that is uncompromisingly direct in its presentation. Without gilding the lyrics (I wish I could have heard them more distinctly) a little more imagination in the staging wouldn't have hurt." Full Review

"Abigail delivers some of the most unearthly vocals that I have heard in a long, long time...Some of their songs are quite fetching...But it isn't very long into 'Hundred Days' before the feeling sets in that the Bengsons aren't really playing fair with us...Leaves one with the feeling that the Bengsons, for all their surface charm, are a self-involved and self-dramatizing pair...Even so, 'Hundred Days' is informed by real talent and enjoys a sleek production." Full Review

"The format of the work is unsatisfactory. The book they wrote with Sarah Gancher is basically a song cycle interrupted by dialog. At a crucial point in the evening there is a long stretch of dialog where I would have expected music to carry the emotional thrust, as if they mistrusted the expressive power of their music to get the job done. To my senior ears, the music was much too loud and percussive and the lyrics were occasionally hard to decipher." Full Review

“Despite its emotionalism and theme of death's imminence, the show barely touches one's heart…Wonderful as they are on a stand-alone basis, the songs too often seem more about themselves or their emotional workings than the drama they're supposed to illuminate. Too often, the lyrics get lost during the musical pyrotechnics…It's hard to become involved in their characters, about whom we learn only the barest minimum. They come off more as abstractions than people about whom we care very much.” Full Review

"To accept it as a musical, or judge it as a work of theater – I must then acknowledge the frustration of trying to follow a story that is often vague in its details and mumbly in its presentation. Shaun and Abigail are personable singer-songwriters and sometimes droll storytellers, but they are clearly not trained actors nor experienced dramatists…Passed more quickly for me once I treated the spoken words as patter between the songs." Full Review

"Despite its rollicking indie rock- and folk-flavored score, it feels entirely like TMI...There's little dramatic tension derived from watching the couple making moony eyes at each other, and their profuse declarations of love become more than a little grating...All this is a shame, because their music proves consistently tuneful and engaging, even if the amplification often prevents the lyrics, so important to the storyline, from being fully understood." Full Review

"It’s a rock cycle for which much has been done to make it theater-stage-worthy by director Anne Kauffman. Much has been done, but to little avail...The music is blandly insistent, the lyrics aren’t consistently intelligible and Abigail Bengson’s pipes reside somewhere between belt and strident...The musicians-back-up singers, are first-rate." Full Review

"There will undoubtedly be people who enjoy and connect with 'Hundred Days,' but if you're like me you'll find it a challenge...The story, written in conjunction with Sarah Gancher, can't support a 90-minute drama even when it's shoehorned into a 'concert musical' framework...If this sounds like a bore, it is, despite the fact both Abigail and Shaun Bengson are charismatic performers. There were many times during 'Hundred Days' I had to stifle the urge to yell 'who cares?!' at the stage." Full Review