Review Excerpts

“RANDY KIM PLAYS MARK TWAIN TO A T….Seldom has a local actor ‘disappeared’ so completely and become the character he was playing…Kim looked like Twain and convinced me he sounded like him. It is a measure of Kim’s expertise that he couldn’t have looked the way he did onstage and sound any other way.”
               –Phil Mayer, HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN (1/8/1968) 

“IT WAS JUST AS IF TWAIN WERE ALIVE AND IN ISLES….If you missed it, you missed an amazing event…We had been warned that it would not really be Mark Twain but a remarkable actor named Randy Kim impersonating him. If that was true, ‘impersonating’ is the wrong word. Randy Kim became Mark Twain. The physical resemblance—at least to the photos we’ve all seen—was almost disturbing…His movements were those of an old man too. When he sat down, he sat down cautiously. When he smiled, it was often with head turned downward, as though amused inwardly at some joke his young audience couldn’t possibly catch. Occasionally he gave a perfunctory glance at the rostrum where a prepared lecture seemed to await, but he never read from it. Perhaps most uncanny of all were his pauses. Of course, there were the pauses for comic effect, as when he would milk an anecdote line by hilarious line. But sometimes, even in the middle of an anecdote, the old man would gaze out at nothing, in silence, as though his mind had wandered. In such moments it was almost impossible to believe that the ancient humorist wasn’t living, though in his decline, before our eyes…For the most part, the material was funny—some hilarious. Twain’s caustic irreverence, his bitterness, his self-mockery were there in abundance. Kim’s timing and inflection of the Mark Twain humor were impeccable.”
               –Joseph Maltby, HONOLULU ADVERTISER (1/8/1968) 

“It was almost beyond belief, but from the moment Randy Kim came out on the improvised stage, waving his big black cigar, I had the uncanny feeling that Mark Twain had somehow invaded Kim’s body…somehow taken possession of him. It was almost creepy, but the whole audience was absolutely spellbound—which is a cliché, but in this instance…they were—we were—absolutely under a spell woven by Randy Kim.”
               –Jeanne Booth Johnson, MAUI NEWS (3/27/1968)