It's all to do with the training. You can do a lot if you're properly trained.
Queen Elizabeth II
winner
2000 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
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reviews
[Anna Deavere Smith] channels their voices through her own, using the specifics of speech patterns more than any fancy vocal gymnastics to let us hear each as an individual.
Charles Isherwood, New York Times
on Let Me Down Easy
As she carefully re-creates facial tics and misspoken syllables, [Anna Deavere Smith] casts a radiance on the many ways in which we can care for one another, as well as ourselves.
Sam Thielman, Variety
on Let Me Down Easy
Smith doesn't impersonate, exactly. Instead, her emphasis is on language — not just what these people say but the ways in which vocal rhythms change with the emotional significance, the hesitation with which people defend themselves from questions that go too close to the bone.
Linda Weiner, Newsday
on Let Me Down Easy
She enacts all of the subjects, capturing their physical and vocal traits as well as their passions and intellect … Smith captures every hesitation and search for the right word as well as every pain and adrenaline-induced rush of her interviewees.
David Sheward, Back Stage
on Let Me Down Easy
Impersonating with uncanny precision 20 real people — their lines are taken verbatim from interviews she conducted — the author/performer explores the connection between body, mind, character and soul.
Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post
on Let Me Down Easy
With a few props — a pair of eyeglasses, a white coat, a cane — and a magical command of gestures, postures, expressions and voices, Ms. Smith became an injured rodeo rider, a medical school dean, an evangelist, her own elderly aunt.
Paula Span, New York Times
on Let Me Down Easy
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
Colman Domingo nails Alfred—down to the walk, the posture and the accent.
Luis Santoyo, Yale Daily News
on Coming Home
The cast work extra-hard to convey the buoyant, trilling, thrilling pace and patter of South African dialect and gestures … the South African verisimilitude adds another layer to [Athol Fugard’s] accessibly issue-laden dramas.
Christopher Arnott, New Haven Advocate
on Coming Home
The current version of Let Me Down Easy incorporates the words of The Rev. Peter Gomes, former Governor of Texas Ann Richards, photographer Cheryl Diaz Meyer, opera singer Jessye Norman, and assorted theologians, imams, monks, professors, artists, sports figures, medical professionals, and survivors … as well as perpetrators … of the Rwandan genocide — complete with Smith’s re-creation of each person’s mannerisms, inflections, and accents.
Kilian Melloy, Edge
on Let Me Down Easy
Portraying all the subjects, Anna Deavere Smith weaves together sections of these exchanges onstage, smoothly switching from a Texas drawl to a melodious African lilt as she embodies each man and woman with crisp efficiency.
Charles Isherwood, New York Times
on Let Me Down Easy
It was interesting to see someone being me on stage. She got a lot of my mannerisms correct, and it was a really thought-provoking work.
Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360° Blog
on Let Me Down Easy
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 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
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