The New York Times has called Gillett’s shows “an intimate portrait of a man in the thrall of show business dreams, for whom popular standards are platforms for unguarded confessions.” In reviewing Cast of Thousands, Stephen Holden, in the Times, said, “The verb ‘sings’ is really inadequate to evoke the acute empathy with which Eric Michael Gillett transformed theatre songs by Craig Carnelia into lived experience. Not only do you see the world through the characters’ eyes, but you also feel it through their nervous systems via Mr. Gillett’s theatrical shamanism.”