Acting Reviews

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ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

Damon Bonetti delivers a sidesplitting performance as nephew Mortimer Brewster, a relatively sane theater critic in love with Elaine Harper (Jennie Eisenhower), the minister’s daughter. With expert comedic timing and physical brio, he registers concern, shock, confusion, and near-hysteria as he discovers the secrets of his aunts and acknowledges to Elaine the insanity that runs– “practically gallops”—through his family.
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GOD OF CARNAGE

Damon Bonetti perfectly embodies a high-powered attorney whose business, the one that makes Cobble Hill affordable, comes first. Bonetti beautifully signals contempt for what he considers to be Veronica’s mountain-making regarding their sons. Bonetti is a great physical comedian, but his best comic moment comes when Alan, exasperated because Annette has deadened his attached-at-the ear cell phone by immersing it in a vase of flowers, sinks to the Novaks’s floor in a helpless, inconsolable heap while maintaining the idea of Alan’s in-command crispness.
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HAPGOOD
Damon Bonetti lends swagger, humor, sexual charisma, and menace to his role as another British spy, Ernest Ridle.
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HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
Returning for the third time as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (and others), Damon Bonetti and Dave Johnson have a sparkling chemistry. Bonetti’s Holmes is an overconfident, narcissistic dandy. Johnson’s oft-ignored and overlooked Dr. Watson plays the (not-so) straight man to Holmes.  Pacek and Bonetti offer a masterclass in differentiating character roles and rounding out sparsely written characters. In particular, Bonetti’s Barrymore and Stapleton ooze with mystery and menace.
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JULIUS CAESAR
Bonetti and Northeast present an enjoyable tandem—her jocular, relaxed would-be killer balancing his logically impassioned orator. Their competing-motives relationship both drives and grounds the proceedings with as much conflict as the military battles.
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MARIA MARTEN
Damon Bonetti was absolutely delightful, relishing the almost entirely comedic role of a doltish village bumpkin. It’s especially fun to see the exceptionally handsome Bonetti, a leading man type if ever there was one, have a chance to do something like this. (Bonetti and Hodge switch roles at different performances, and it would be interesting to see each of them do both.)
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 MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS
Bonetti’s Selznick emits boundless creative energy in constant turmoil with utter dread, dancing around the room clutching a tattered copy of the huge novel.
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IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Damon Bonetti is noble and sympathetic as George; like Jimmy Stewart, he has the power to bring a lump to the throat.
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RED VELVET
The cast which surrounds Mr. McClendon’s Ira is wonderful, especially Damon Bonetti as Pierre.
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ALLS WELL THAT ENDS WELL
Damon Bonetti turns in a sidesplitting performance as Parolles, a relentless rogue who, in one of the play’s funniest scenes, ultimately suffers disgrace at the hands of his detractors.
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BLOOD
Mr. Bonetti has a challenge playing the prim and proper Matthew. But he rises to the occasion and — as the susceptible victim of a hypnosis demonstration and a big fan of hot-pepper-cheese cubes — steals a couple of scenes with some daunting physical comedy.
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RIZZO
The play is adapted from Sal Paolantonio’s book “Rizzo: The Last Man in Big City America,” also a well-rounded work. Paolantonio, now an ESPN correspondent, was an Inquirer reporter who covered Rizzo and, in this telling, was never intimidated by him. He’s played in “Rizzo” as an unflappable journalist by a poker-faced and excellent Damon Bonetti.
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AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
Damon Bonetti portrays Phillip Lombard, a mysterious soldier who served in Africa; Bonetti creates an engaging character with a bit of bravado, his sarcastic remarks aide in lightening tense situations and he and Bedford have an amicable chemistry onstage that make these two characters standout.
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THE HAND OF GAUL
So appears “Le Falcon”, a ridiculous Belgian contract killer played by a delightful Damon Bonetti. Bonetti’s joyously farcical French accent (“the gelkipper stopped every shit [shot] that came hees way”) salutes Peter Sellers’s Pink Panther films and episodes of the 1980s British comedy ’Allo ’Allo!
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CREDITORS
Gustav (Damon Bonetti), a mysterious smooth talker, manipulates the conversation, advising Adolph to assert himself and "husband your masculinity."..The performances are breathtakingly nuanced, sculpted with subtlety and passion -- Hodge and Apple and Bonetti are absolutely embedded in their roles. And the venue is perfect; the upstairs reading room of the Franklin Inn Club suggests the past, a world of books and grandfather clocks and ascots and long skirts, where dangerous obsessions roil under a civilized surface....What fun they must be having with this vicious, brilliant play, which may well be the star of this year's Fringe.
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BECKY SHAW
Under the skillful direction of Tom Quinn, the ensemble delivers terrific performances. Most notable is Carson, whose Becky reveals ever-surprising motivations, and Damon Bonetti, who reveals the emotional desolation beneath Max’s brutal but always entertaining nastiness.
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GLASS MENAGERIE
This production is far more measured than Williams' overwrought stage directions suggest. As Tom, both past and present, Bonetti finds just the right note (with the slightest hint of a Southern accent) of exasperation: He is torn between his love for his family and his sense of responsibility toward them, and his own frantic need to get out of the trap that is his life.
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FAT CAT KILLERS
Damon Bonetti is slick and charismatic as the heartless, manipulative executive...
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BASH
LaBute crafts his play to reveal the brutality lying in wait beneath the surface of everyday life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Iphigenia at Orem”: In an age of corporate downsizing, a mid-level manager (Damon Bonetti) sacrifices his own infant daughter to generate enough sympathy to keep his job. Here, Bonetti’s initial surface-level sympathy devolves into a vicious artifice; coloring his performance with subtle nervousness, he offers a glimpse of the hideousness that lies dormant in every human heart.
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PERICLES
Damon Bonetti's Pericles sizzles - commanding when necessary, playful if it seems right, abject in his pain, always a mensch. Christie Parker is huggably tender as the woman he eventually marries, with the prodding parental oversight of her father.  Bonetti and Parker, falling in love, create the sweetest scenes you'll see here this season.
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ROMEO AND JULIET
As one of the world's most widely produced plays, Romeo and Juliet presents a challenge to any Artistic Director who wants to present a fresh, new staging.  The PSF's production achieved this goal in Bonetti's towering performance as Mercutio, who fused mime, dance, facial expressions, gestures, fighting, and voice in an incredibly athletic yet very artistic way.
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HATE MAIL
Real-life married couple Damon Bonetti (Preston) and Charlotte Northeast (Dahlia) work seamlessly with director David Stradley, bringing to life the cringe-worthy confusion, humor and frustration of early adulthood courtship. The actors roll with their characters' whims - from a cultish ashram in Montana to a vitamin-selling escapade in Miami - and grow their identities before our eyes. Even when the script gets outlandish, Bonetti and Northeast take it in stride, and bring us along with them for the joyride.
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TAMING OF THE SHREW
Damon Bonetti's Petruchio and Teresa Castracane's Katherine first meet in a scene whose pacing is played as though written for Bogie and Bacall, complete with witty banter and smoldering magnetism. The pair's polarity is so much fun to watch.