Tiny beautiful things nia vardalos7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In Cox’s nimble staging, they rotate like a human carousel around Sugar as she pecks out answers on a laptop, with laundry on a clothesline behind her. In one-to-one exchanges, she opens up to letter-writers - played by Kelly Chick, Adrian Peguero, and the indispensable Nael Nacer - whose issues range from relationship dilemmas to self-destructive habits to the loss of religious faith to the crushing experience of parental rejection to unappeasable grief, and more. Sugar dispenses advice not from the lofty heights of Mount Olympus but rather from ground level, where the complicated realities - very much including her own - lie. Oliva portrays the columnist with the precision and subtlety that are among this splendid actress’s trademarks, investing her with a combination of empathy, self-doubt, and just-say-it directness as Sugar goes to a few places, subject-matter-wise, that Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (”Dear Abby”) would never have dreamed of going. But it matters more that “Tiny Beautiful Things” is so solidly constructed, with a script by Nia Vardalos of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” fame, adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s book about her stint as an advice columnist that Lyndsay Allyn Cox directs with such verve and, above all, that it stars Celeste Oliva as the pseudonymous Sugar. ![]()
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