Barflies

“This is site-specific maestros Grid Iron putting flesh on the booze-soaked litanies of novelist Charles Bukowski. Barflies takes three of the old bruiser’s short stories narrated by Keith Fleming’s stumblebum hero, each featuring a very different woman, beautiful losers all. Director Ben Harrison leads Fleming, Gail Watson as the women and composer David Paul Jones on a merry dance that is in turns sorrow-drowning sentimental and self-destructively ugly. It’s grown-up, after-hours stuff, cistern-deep with brutal heart-break and punctuated by the saddest drinking songs ever written. There are laughs too, in a dirty-old-man’s comic fantastia featuring a decidedly uncorked use of a bottle opener that’s likely to leave you as shaken and stirred as the modern-day witch who gives it the ultimate twist.”