"If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough."
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"Penelope frequently gets caught in this space between silly spoof and meaningful satire, unsure of whether it wants to be pure diversion or a messenger of enlightenment for its audiences. The result is often a diluted version of both, stuck in a no-man's land of unoriginal comedy and toothless moralizing."
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"Weiner's music, a melding of showtune, soft rock, and a cappella, is pleasantly unremarkable, while David Hancock Turner's five-piece ensemble sometimes overpowers the vocals. Too bad, when many of Kellogg's lyrics are very worth hearing. Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written is a less finished work than Desperate Measures, and Kellogg's insistence on capping all this literate, apolitical nonsense with a gender-woke detour is annoying. But these are dire days, and some of us need musical comedy to help see us through them. We'll take what we can get."
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Peter Kellogg’s latest musical-comedy adaptation, Penelope Or How the Odyssey Was Really Written, is a charming if lightweight comic version of Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey told from the wife’s point of view. Kellogg, best known in New York for the award-winning Desperate Measure, a delightful country-western musical of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, worked with composer Steven Weiner this time around who has created a pleasant seemingly derivative score. As directed and choreographed by Emily Maltby for The York Theatre Company, the cast playing iconic characters from Greek mythology gives an excellent account of themselves in this crowd-pleasing new musical. Strangely enough, Penelope is surprisingly faithful to its source material while giving us both a humorous and feminist take on the material.
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"With its origins in Greek epic poetry, the clever new musical Penelope: Or How the Odyssey Was Really Written, is using the advertising slogan: “Greece is the Word.” Funny, but there’s also truth in advertising in that statement. What book and lyric writer Peter Kellogg and composer Stephen Weiner have joyfully concocted is an anachronistic take on the fabled tale of Penelope and Odysseus, boasting a pastiche score that spans decades of popular music."
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"In the absence of a humorous storyline, Kellogg has filled the musical with repetitive schtick. Telemachus, who is afraid of blood, falls in love with Daphne (Maria Wirries), a hog butcher, and faints when ribbons of blood emerge from a slaughtered animal (the pigs are the suitors in masks). Penelope’s would-be husbands are all ridiculously and inexplicably effeminate, especially the most aggressive, Antinous (Cooper Howell). And there are way too many winks and nods to the audience."
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