Stage Review - Soul Breadcrumbs (Leza Danly / Bainbridge Performing Arts)
Stage Review - Soul Breadcrumbs
Presented By: Leza Danly @ Bainbridge Performing Arts’ Sears Studio - Bremerton, WA
Show Run: July 25 - July 26, 2025
Date Reviewed: Friday, July 26, 2025
Run Time: 2 Hours (including a 15-minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Greg Heilman
This past July, I had the opportunity to attend a new solo production from actor, singer, and life coach Leza Danly, as Bainbridge Performing Arts’ Sears Studio hosted Soul Breadcrumbs, a guest production written and performed by Leza and directed by Christine McHugh. The piece, which ran onstage for only two nights, is an unflinching excavation of memory, trauma, and healing, guided by a performer who commands both presence and vulnerability.
The play, which takes experiences from Leza’s life and presents them as waypoints in her journey of pain and healing, begins with an invitation: a gentle acknowledgment that we as a culture often tuck away the “difficult” emotions—the anger, the grief, the despair, and too often fail to adequately deal with them. From there, the evening unfolds in two arcs: first, a presentation of how Leza lost herself emotionally and spiritually, and second, how she found her way back. Each scene is given the space it needs, neither rushed nor indulgent, and the through-line is consistently clear.
One of the evening’s most affecting moments, and a prime example of how Leza has constructed the piece to both present her struggle while asking the audience to consider the same experience in its members’ lives, comes in the scene Mother’s Rules. Here, Leza unpacks the inherited phrases—those pointed admonitions from parent to child—that embed themselves deep in the psyche. These words, delivered by her mother, became internal voices that haunted her well into her twenties. It is a familiar but seldom-addressed truth: the way parental voices can echo as unshakable companions, long after the original speaker has fallen silent. It’s something that most can resonate with, admittedly or not.
Between each live scene, the production incorporates home movies and photographs of Leza at various ages, organized to present those times depicted in the scenes bookmarking the interludes. This choice grounds the performance not just in memory but in history, underscoring the authenticity of her storytelling. Onstage, Leza doesn’t merely recall her younger selves—she embodies them. Her physicality shifts, her voice reshapes, her energy transforms until it feels as if the audience is watching time collapse and expand before it. When she reaches for anger, it comes not as a performance but as a revelation—an excavation of a truth too long buried.
The show is carefully paced, with each scene holding weight without overstaying its welcome. Christine’s direction keeps the focus tight, ensuring that Leza’s storytelling remains at the center, there’s nothing extraneous to the storytelling here. The audience is never allowed to drift; instead, they are continually drawn into a cycle of recognition, reflection, and resonance.
At its core, Soul Breadcrumbs offers a hard-won lesson: to move forward, we must confront why people treated us as they did. Understanding does not excuse harm, but it gives us a way to untangle from its grip. Leza’s performance insists that this process is not only possible but necessary—and, through her example, profoundly inspiring.
It is rare to witness a piece that feels both so intimate and so universal. Soul Breadcrumbs may have only had two nights on the Bainbridge stage, but one hopes it finds a longer life. Stories like these leave a trail for others to follow.
Soul Breadcrumbs has closed, but to keep up with Leza and this particular project, visit https://soulbreadcrumbs.com. And for information on upcoming shows at Bainbridge Performing Arts, head out to https://www.bainbridgeperformingarts.org.
Photo credit: Eric Belluche
