By turns poignant, hilarious, true and painful, 2 Pianos, 4 Hands looks at what it takes to become a professional pianist. Shari Saunders & Karin Woolridge, performers whose acting skills are matched by their piano artistry, provide superb entertainment over the course of this 90-minute show, which calls on them to create a gallery of characters with little more than a light cue to aid each transition. When we first meet them, they are adults collaborating -- painfully -- on a Bach concerto. Their squabbling over performance technique takes them back to when they were children and being forced to learn the piano. A series of short, swift scenes follow in which they deftly impersonate the teachers, mothers, advisors and critics they meet along the bumpy path to musical maturation. Brief as each vignette is, it contains enough depth and bite to keep from becoming cartoonish.
As time goes by and the girls grow up, we live through their experiences with them, enduring all the moments of agony and tedium, rebelliousness and fury, creativity and joy that go into the making of a pianist -- and even then you might only be "the best pianist on the block." That revelation stuns our two struggling artists, but like the plucky, indomitable people they are, they pick themselves up and return once again to the Bach concerto, giving everything they have to make it live and sing. Brava to these two amazing actresses and to the writers who have given them such splendid material with which to work.
