"Lands in the gap between drama and anecdote. It doesn’t help that Mr. Cale is often more compelling when playing other people than when playing himself...Under Mr. Falls’s delicate direction, Mr. Cale makes complicated creatures of them all...The variety of colors Mr. Cale is able to wring out of his voice as he sketches them in song is remarkable. Yet as David Egleton turns into David Cale and the story rushes into the present, the tension inevitably slackens."
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"David Cale gets harrowingly personal in the musical memoir We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time (⭐⭐⭐)"
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"Cale has a voice that warbles, strains, flutters, cracks, and soars. He’s not going for flawless or classical or even consistently beautiful. What he’s got is character — a depth and range of expression and a life force that pours out of him like the frothing mouth of a river...Cale’s play isn’t a tragedy, though — it’s a kind of passage. It’s unblinking and curious, vulnerable and open-hearted without being soppy."
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"The unprepossessing, balding Cale is no great shakes as a singer, and the songs feel more like musical fragments than fully formed numbers. But the score, coupled with Cale's soulful, impassioned delivery, casts a quiet spell, enhanced by the gorgeous chamber music arrangements played by musicians seen only in shadow. Even when the proceedings turn markedly dark, the writer-performer invests them with a humor and humanity that make his individual story seem universal."
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"'We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time' unexpectedly becomes an exorcism of pent-up human emotion, which Cale unpeels with the exactness of a forensic analyst. It is a brutal, honest look at what makes and unmakes a family, and reminds us why we should value the time that we have, since we never know how short it's going to be."
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"David Cale's Survival Song, WE'RE ONLY ALIVE FOR A SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME"
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"David Cale's new piece at the Public is his most personal, and also his gutsiest. In solo works written for himself and others, he has conjured a universe of richly imagined characters; here he turns his sights on himself and the members of his immediate family, who provide him with some hair-raising material."
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"A tale that is entangled in the brambles of a troubled childhood is soaked in so much treacly romanticism that it loses its power to disturb an audience, even if it continues to haunt its teller...Cale quietly and with touches of humor and song fills us in with the broad outlines of his childhood...After a while, however, the straightforward narrative segues into a series of monologues in which Cale takes on the personae of his mother, his father, his grandfather, and his brother."
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