Before I get to my review, I keep forgetting to mention - - bit by bit I've been taking my past reviews and posting them in my archives here at divamensch.com. I finally posted the last review last week, and thought it would be interesting to know how many reviews I've written. Would you believe that *Red Scare on Sunset* was my 250th review?

FYI every review I write as a blog post gets planted in my archives as well. So if, for example, six months from now you feel like reading my review of *Hello, Dolly!*, simply go to divamensch.com, click on Reviews, then Theatre, then Musicals, then Musicals: G to L, then *Hello, Dolly!* FYI the Diva / Mensch pairings each week are also archived: click About Divamensch (on the far right), then Diva / Mensch Archive.

Lots more to come!

Karen and I saw Samuel Beckett's *Happy Days* at Theatre For a New Audience in Brooklyn on 4/26/17. Let me meet you at the pass and say that the play has NO relation to the beloved 1970s sitcom. *Happy Days,* the TV show, was about Richie Cunningham and his friends and family in 1950s Milwaukee. *Happy Days,* the play, is about a woman in a vaguely post-apocalyptic world, buried up to her waist in dirt. You see the similarity. Her only companion is her husband, who is mostly silent and/or absent. She spends the first two-thirds of the play buried up to her waist in dirt, and the final third buried up to her NECK. And it's Beckett's warmest, sweetest, most life-affirming play!

This is the third time Karen and I have seen this play, we see nearly every Beckett production that comes through town. We first saw Lea Delaria do it at a kooky little theater downtown, in the winter of 2005. Delaria was wacky, she used all kinds of funny voices, like it was her way of keeping herself entertained, keeping herself company.

Then we saw Fiona Shaw do it at BAM in the winter of 2008. Her interpretation was rather grand, like a 1930s film star. She dealt with her loneliness and abandonment by pretending that she was above it.