History & Press
Pro. History
Water by the Spoonful was first commissioned and produced by the Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut. It opened on October 26, 2011, and featured the following creative team and cast.
Director - Davis McCallum Set Designer - Neil Patel Costume Designer - Chloe Chapin Lighting Designer - Russel H. Champa Sound Designer - Bray Poor Original Music Composer - J. Michael Friedman Production Stage Manager - Megan Schwarz Dickert Production Manager - Brian T. Holcombe Elliot - Armando Riesco Odessa - Liza Colón-Zayas Yazmin - Zabryna Guevara Chutes&Ladders - Ray Anthony Fountainhead - Matthew Boston Professor Aman/Ghost/Police Officer - Demosthenes Chrysan Orangutan - Teresa Avia Lim |
Water by the Spoonful premiered Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre in New York City. It featured the following production team and cast.
Director - Davis McCallum Set Designer - Neil Patel Costume Designer - Esosa Lighting Designer - Russel H. Champa Sound Designer - Joshua Shmidt Projection Designer - Aaron Rhyne Fight Director - Thomas Schall Production Stage Manager - Roy Harris Stage Manager - Trisha Henson Production Manager - Jeff Wild Elliot - Armando Riesco Odessa - Liza Colón-Zayas Yazmin - Zabryna Guevara Chutes&Ladders - Ray Anthony Fountainhead - Bill Heck Professor Aman/Ghost/Police Officer - Ryan Shams Orangutan - Sue Jean Kim |
"Hudes’s writing is controlled and graceful. Each of the play’s 15 short scenes is perfectly balanced, the language both lyrical and lucid. Her voice is firmly grounded in her Puerto Rican heritage (she grew up in Philadelphia, of Puerto Rican and Jewish parents), yet there’s no community-organizer didacticism or sentimentality — something you can’t quite say about her book for the 2007 musical In the Heights. Most of all, the play, wonderfully directed by Davis McCallum, has a warm, welcoming spirit and a life-affirming message. People instinctively take care of each other; hitting bottom is the start of the trip back up. It inspired the Pulitzer folks, and it did the same for me."
Richard Zoglin, TIME Magazine, January 2013
"Although this play’s focus is comparatively broad — the
half-dozen primary characters are all given fully developed, overlapping story
lines — Ms. Hudes writes with precision and economy, so that the play doesn’t
feel unwieldy or overstuffed … The dovetailing of some of the stories does
occasionally seem too pat: the growing friendship between Madeleine and
Clayton, resulting in his impulsive trip to Japan, I found a little
romanticized. But they all illuminate the play’s dominant theme, the myriad ways
in which human lives can intersect, and the potentially great rewards — or
irreparable damage — that can result from the unlikely spark of those
connections."
- Charles Isherwood, New York debut at the Second Stage Theatre, January 2013.
"'Spoonful' is an admirable attempt to deal with important issues of addiction, repentance, and redemption. But I must confess to thinking there were stronger candidates for that Pulitzer."
Erik Haagensen, Backstage, January 2013
"Well, there’s no danger of that here: Hudes — even when corralling disparate, loosely interrelated characters spread from Philadelphia to Sapporo, all while grappling with the atomizing effects of poverty and addiction on a close-knit family — clearly prefers the explicit to the mysterious, the harmonic to the dissonant, and, most of the time, the zinger to the poetic digression."
Scott Brown, Vulture, January 2013
"Musical dissonance serves as a thematic thread. And water flows seductively throughout - from silvery spoonfuls to rivers, oceans, a rain forest waterfall and a cathartic bath - as a unifying and abidingly resonant metaphor."
Robert Hurwitt, SF Gate, August 2014