by Keeley Bell. @omgitskee.
NEW YORK, NY – Is Levi Holloway’s star-studded new horror play Grey House worth the hype? I’ll tell you what I was able to piece together with my hands over my eyes.
With the majority of The Broadway Beat critics on vacation for Memorial Day, someone had to review Grey House in their absence: Me, an unpaid intern who crosses the street in fear every time I walk past a Sweeney Todd poster. What could possibly go wrong?
The marketing for this show is great! For horror fans; not for me. Because as soon as I saw the creepy little girl on the cover of the playbill, my hands shot up over my eyes and I dissociated for 110 minutes straight with no intermission.
After ripping the way-too-spooky cover off of the playbill, I noticed this cast is stacked.
It features Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany, and two girls who I’ve been actively avoiding since 2018 because they were in Beetlejuice and A Quiet Place, two things that would honestly make me throw up in fear were I to see them. Their names are Sophie Anne Caruso and Millicent Simmonds, and I’m sure they were great even though I could only catch the smallest of glimpses of their shoes through the slits in between my fingers.
And the story? With only my eyes covered, surely I would have heard the story, right? Wrong! I also had my fingers in my ears!
Plus, the dialogue was barely audible over the Pasek & Paul I chose to hum in case any scares were some of that “elevated” aka mean-to-my-brain-and-not-just-my-eyes horror. At points, Laurie Metcalf got a little passionate, and the few words I could hear were perfectly scored by a little Dear Evan Hansen. So that’s a win for the story in my book.
At this point, I recommend Grey House if only to increase the chances of anyone seeing it who will (VERY GENTLY) recap it for me.
So it is definitely worth seeing. At a daytime matinee. Because if you go at night, you might think that the creepy little girl from their marketing material is staked out in a dark sewer grate ready to suck you into a void, and end up writing your review with voice-to-text because you just can’t take your hands off of your eyes.