oobr award
For Personal Contribution to Excellence
in an Off-Off-Broadway Theatrical Production
Production Dialect Coach & Actor (“Eleanor Tilney”)
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
Distilled Spirits Theatre
good press
Smith, who conducted more than 300 interviews for the show, portrays 20 characters — doctors, patients and celebrities — using their own words to shape a fluid series of scenes. A phenomenal actress, she performs them verbatim, with the pauses, repetitions, regional accents and unique figures of speech intact.
Georgia Rowe, San Francisco Examiner
on Let Me Down Easy
Bad Texan accents can be the kiss of death to the best play, but dialect designer Amy Stoller did her job well. The Southern accents of the entire cast were believable without being distracting or overdone
Nikki Kruger, Montgomery News
on Dividing the Estate
Happy, Shipkov and Agnes, with their respective precise dialects, memorably create the texture of immigrant experience in their voices.
Donald Brown, New Haven Advocate
on Agnes Under the Big Top
Dialect coach Amy Stoller has certainly seen to a believable consistency among the company members.
Erik Haagensen, Back Stage
on Wife to James Whelan
Dialect coach Amy Stoller has taken care to validate the accents.
Marilyn Stasio, Variety
on Wife to James Whelan
Apart from her own considerable hard work, it takes a dialect coach and a movement coach and assistants and a director and a line coach and a workout trainer and at least one dramaturge to create the circumstances in which Smith, most effectively, can recede, yielding ground to the people she portrays.
Susan Dominus, New York Times
on Let Me Down Easy
Anna Deavere Smith has a glorious team surrounding her in the director Leonard Foglia, set designer Riccardo Hernandez, lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, costumer Ann Hould-Ward and the movement and dialect coaches, dramaturge and various assistants; they all must be noted because Anna obviously knows that all the characters she brings so vibrantly to us are the work of a kind of distillation whereby gallons of liquid are distilled to produced drops of elixir.
Wickham Boyle, Midlife Mambo
on Let Me Down Easy
The production is a major get for bookworms and theater buffs alike, repping a rare chance to see D.H. Lawrence’s world alive on stage. Director Stuart Howard and dialect coach/dramaturg Amy Stoller immerse the whole production in rural England circa 1914 (when Lawrence wrote the play), with finely-tuned accents.
Sam Thielman, Variety
on The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd
It’s the considerable accomplishment of Ms. Coffey and Mr. Brown to make these lines sound like something more than a foreign language. The director zeroes in on the small but important class distinctions at the heart of this story and illuminates the earthy, often-inaccessible slang. Amy Stoller worked on the scrupulous dialect.
Jason Zinoman, New York Times
on The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd
Roslyn Ruff speaks convincingly in the Afrikaans cadence, even delivering the rich, rolling R sounds. Credit is due to dialect coach Amy Stoller.
Susan Hood, Hartford Courant
on Coming Home
Paula Hoza does a terrific Scots dialect as Mrs. Hudson.
Connie Meng, North Country Public Radio
on Sherlock’s Last Case
It’s done in the best possible English accent which, as Karen is from the USA and has just flown in [to England] for the week, is quite amazing. Full marks to voice coach and co-director Amy Stoller.
Philip Horton, Bath Chronicle (UK)
on Cheer from Chawton
Often irresistible hodgepodge, especially a third act fashion show, supervised by flighty couturier Mr. Windlesham (Kraig Swartz), whose French accent is a hilarious disaster.
David Finkle, TheaterMania
on The Madras House
Kraig Swartz’s witty depiction of the showroom’s fey manager is voiced in Cockney-mixed-with-French accents that has to be heard to be believed.
Michael Sommers, The Star-Ledger
on The Madras House
Special mention for Amy Stoller, credited for dialect design. Though the casts’ accents may not sound pitch-perfect to Louisiana transplants, all the performers sound authentic to an outsider’s ears, especially Sean McNall, who brings to mind the boastful cadence of Big Easy native Harry Connick, Jr.
Andy Smith, TheaterScene.net
on Toys in the Attic
Dialect coach Amy Stoller deserves a deep bow for keeping the whole cast in authentic-sounding [New Hampshire] accents, even when singing.
Robert Windeler, Back Stage
on The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World
Well acted by an ensemble that has obviously worked hard and to good effect on the distinct (and difficult) Nottinghamshire accent … dialect coach, Amy Stoller.
Bruce Weber, The New York Times
on The Daughter-in-Law
One can’t be other than awed by Amy Stoller as the dialect coach of this crew. It’s hard to be on stage for two hours and not falter a little putting such strange provincial sounds to English. I didn’t hear a single lapse.
Matthew Paris, XICCARPH: A Magazine of Prejudices
on The Daughter-in-Law