Iron Age Theatre
&The Montgomery County Cultural Center
Present
Requiem For A Heavyweight

by Rod Serling


Directed and Designed by Randall Wise & John Doyle

Click to hear Mountain's Theme

with real player G2
Real Media of Requiem for A Heavyweight
at the Iron Age Video Archive


November 20-23, 28-30 December 3-6
at the Montgomery County Cultural Center
208 Dekalb Street, Norristown - (610) 279-1013
Read reviews of the production

Giampetro as Mountain
Featuring:
Tony Giampetro as Mountain McClintock
Bill Rahill as Maish Resnick
Gerre Garrett as Grace
Jeff Jerome as Army
Tom Crognale as Leo Lumis
Laurence Beck as Pirelli
Jennifer Margasak as Golda
Ray Saraceni as the Doctor
Sound Design: Bill Johnston & Maize Music
Costume Design: Beth Case

Army Importunes Grace


The gritty Rod Serling classic about a boxer struggling for self respect and redemtion as his career comes to a close.

For reservations and Info call:
(610) 279-1013
For Directions Click Here

Special Dinner Discounts at AJ's Bar and Grille










Reviews:


The production of Requiem for a Heavyweight that Iron Age Theatre presents at the Montgomery County Cultural Center opens with two boxers fighting. Actually, only one is fighting. He is busy pummeling his opponent, who desperately tries to shield himself from the onslaught until he crashes to the floor.
Directors John Doyle and Randall Wise added the fight scene to the script of the stage version of Rod Serling's celebrated teleplay, which won an Emmy Award as the best television program of 1956. It's a smart touch, too. Credibly brutal, the scene shows what Mountain McClintock, the man being beaten, has endured in his boxing career.It's an exploitative, corrupt world of sleazy managers, promoters and mobsters that Serling presents, and it's successfully evoked in the production's deliberately tacky settings and dim lighting.
Anthony M. Giampetro offers a fine portrayal of McClintock. Enthusiastic, blissfully innocent of what's going on around him, his character comes across as an overgrown, clumsy, appealing boy. It's an engaging, sympathetic portrayal that makes the audience feel the pain of his betrayal by the manager he has always trusted.
Douglas Keating
Philadelphia Inquirer

The Doctor Checks MountainThe bleak landscape serves as an apt introduction to the Iron Age Theater production of Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight.
Under he muscular direction of Randy Wise and gritty production by John Doyle, the seedy 1958 underworld of Mountain and Maish is recreated with a detail that is totally involving. The barroom with its servings of tall bottles of Miller and black-and-white television running old fight films invokes enough of the grit of a inen-only club to impact the audience with the feel, if not the literal assault to the senses, of the stench of old I)cer, sweat, sawdust and vomit.
William Rahill nails the part of Maish. He has the age, the grit and the nuance that gives credence to the sleazy manager.
Giampetro is a bit young for Its part but his acting ultimately over comes this handicap and wins the audience over to a belief in his ultimate sacrifice and salvation.
Jim McCaffrey
Main Line Life
Dark and designfully humorless, "Requiem For a Heavyweight," is what "Rocky" might have resembled had it been conceived by Nietzsche instead of Sylvester Stallone.Golda and Maish discuss his betrayal of MountainRod Serling's dusty but timeless aesthetic is revisited with supreme confidence by Iron Age Theatre.
Retro ... right down to its seedy Film noir-ish sensibilities, the play's time-warp holes are brilliantly patched by directors John Doyle and Randy Wise. The pair have judiciously fiddled with some of the Mickey Spillane-ish colloquialisms and thoughtfully addedscenes to the stage version of Serling's gritty 1956 teleplay, such as the opening sequence of Mountain McClintock (Anthony Giampetro) being pummeled by an opponent.
While William Rahill puts in a fair night's work locating the depth of the insecurity that Serling seems to leave intended for Maish, Giampetro's performance is the truly transcendent and complex one, giving a black eye to the notion that playing it blissfully dumb is a one-note occupation.
Gary Puleo
The Times Herald
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