This Gunna Be On The Test, Miss? Review: A Fun, Emotional Ride

Taking the audience into the emotional journey of an aspiring actress turned community college professor, Ronna Levy’s “This Gunna Be On The Test, Miss?” is the type of one-person show that pulls at your heart strings. If you care about the human condition, love, responsibility and respect, this production will grab you.[/caption]

Endearing and charismatic throughout, Levy is real. While she is a performer and does work to entertain throughout, those moments when you can tell she’s speaking from heart are plentiful and add to her consistent and enjoyable performance.

If you’re looking for a laugh-out-loud comedy though, it’s not quite there yet, even if Levy’s impersonations of a few choice students are hilarious.

What Levy’s production is, well, is smart. It’s a journey every adult finds themselves in- what they want to do with their lives and what they have to do to pay the bills. The fact that Levy is able to do both, at this point in her life, is the cool part of the production. She is a college professor, a damn good one, as her ratings on RateMyProfessor.com indicate, but she’s also a solid performer. Her “commercial auditions” that break up the narrative are cheesy, but they’re supposed to be. Her willingness to show her journey ends up being the performance’s strongest trait, even if a lot of facts, her relationships with her family mainly, aren’t as elaborated on as we’d like them to be.

Small hiccups with her projections also hinder the production a tad, but it’s nothing that hurts the overall quality of the show. When Levy takes us to present day and shares a tweet on the board that she said she got a few weeks ago and the tweet is from 2012, it’s a small stumble that could be avoided in future shows to smooth things out.

Regardless of these small qualms, Levy’s production is able to put a face to a community college professor and show the difficulty those in the education sector face on an everyday basis and how in spite of that, she’s there, for her students.

She may have wanted to be the next Doris Day, but Levy is a teacher that has managed to change lives in other ways. Simply put, her performance in “This Gunna Be On The Test, Miss?” proves she’s better than any actor currently doing Nestle Hot Chocolate commercials and one that has made the most of her opportunities in life, just on a different timeline than she expected.

mm
About Patrick Hickey Jr. 13820 Articles
Patrick Hickey Jr. is a full-time Assistant Professor of Communication & Performing Arts and Director of the Journalism program at Kingsborough Community College and is the chairman of the City University of New York Journalism Council. He is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of ReviewFix.com. He's also a former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and National Video Games Writer at Examiner.com where his work was mentioned in National Ad campaigns by Disney, Nintendo and EA Sports. Hickey was also the Editor-In-Chief of two College Newspapers before he received his BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College. Hickey's work has been published in The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Complex, The Hockey Writers, Yahoo!, Broadway World, Examiner, NYSportScene Magazine, ProHockeyNews.com, GothamBaseball.com, The Syracuse Post-Standard, Scout.com and the official sites of the Brooklyn Aces and New York Islanders. His first book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult And Classic Video Game Developers was released in April 2018 and is chock full of interviews with legendary developers. His second book in the series, The Minds Behind Adventures Games, was released in December 2019. His third book, The Minds Behind Sports Games, was released in September 2020. His fourth book, The Minds Behind Shooter Games, was released in March 2021. The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games and The Minds Behind PlayStation Games were released in 2022 and The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 was published in January 2023. Hickey is also a contracted comic book writer, currently penning his original series, "Condrey," as well as "The Job," "Brooklyn Bleeds" "Dem Gulls" and "KROOM" for Legacy Comix, where he serves as founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief. Hickey Jr. is also a voice actor, having starred in the 2018 indie hit and 2019 Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release, The Padre (also serving as English language Story Editor), from Shotgun With Glitters. The sequel, The Padre: One Shell Straight to Hell was released in February 2021- Hickey also served as a Story Editor and Lead Voiceover performer. He has also done narration and trailers for several other titles including The Kaiju Offensive, Relentless Rex and Roniu’s Tale. Hickey is also the lead voiceover performer on Mega Cat Studios’ upcoming title WrestleQuest, responsible for nearly 90 characters in the game, as well as Skybound's Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, where he voices both Dracula and Renfield, as well as several other characters. He also stars in Ziggurat Interactive’s World Championship Boxing Manager 2, where he performs the VO of nearly every male character in the game. He also worked on the Atari VCS’s BPM Boy.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*