HARD TIMES

Dickens's text reads aloud beautifully. He not only had a lifelong crush on the stage, but he made a good bit of change on the lecture circuit reciting his favorite stories. Well aware of this theatricality, Pennington takes a nice approach with HARD TIMES, a bleakly melodramatic caricature of industrialism. He lays back the narrative and lets out all the stops with his impersonations. Narrowly skirting excess, he makes good use of dramatic pacing, comic timing and regional accents. An added plus is the abridgment, which deletes the worst of the over-writing. (Dickens, whose work was serialized in magazine installments, was paid by the word.) Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: MAR 97]