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Review by Jacques Lamarre, Hartford Stage
Mother vs. daughter, East vs. West, a painful childhood vs. an unexpected second chance. Napua Davoy's The Brighter Side Of Alzheimer's is a complex and uplifting musical autobiography that distills her family's turbulent history into a potent evening of theater. The story of a daughter forced to reevaluate her contentious relationship with her mother is movingly told through monologue, movement and haunting original compositions that range from Blues to Opera. An established recording and concert artist, Ms.Davoy possesses a command of the stage as a performer/playwright/composer that moves audiences to tears. A one-woman tour de force!


About Napua Davoy and The Brighter Side of Alzheimer: a one-woman musical drama about her family

Raised in Beaumont, Texas, of Hawaiian/Chinese/Anglo and Cherokee heritage (the Grapes of Wrath meets Paradise) Napua Davoy knew at the age of ten that music was her calling. Singing classically through high school, she became a jazz singer and pianist after earning a Masters in German Literature and attending Oxford University in History. After surviving New York, recording even for Columbia Records, Napua by chance met one Andrei Kondakov, a great composer residing in St.Petersburg, Russia and their collaboration bore 3 albums of mostly original music and 7 years of touring to over 70 cities in Russia, the US and Europe. Ms.Davoy broadened her artistry by taking acting roles in avant-garde operas Dennis Cleveland by Mikel Rouse and Cinderella's Bad Magic by Kyle Gann in the late 90's. It was during the production of Dennis Cleveland at the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia in 2001 where she worked with a cast of experienced, Shakespearean actors that she recalls transforming from interpreting singer into an actor.

Shortly thereafter she started writing The Brighter Side of Alzheimer's, a one-woman musical drama about her family. For several years since her father's death, she had been watching the miraculous changes happening in the relationships of her family. Bolstered by her new experience in theater, she learned to write the play as she was writing it, and then to add the music. She also returned to classical vocal study in order to sing both styes in the play. Having written lyrics and songs since her late twenties, she further developed to compose and record the arias and the orchestrations that you hear in Alzheimer's.

Ms.Davoy has also just put the finishing touches on her second musical entitled MIAMI. A romantic tragedy about a man who falls in love with two women, MIAMI like Alzheimer's, possesses the same sweep of music from popular to operatic. Set mainly in New York City in the late 1930's, the cast of seven has no part for her, but her perfect day would be to finish Alzheimer's at around a quarter of ten and then to rush downtown to Times Sqare to sing in the chorus of MIAMI which is forty five minutes longer. They grow their dreams really big down in Texas.