Resort To Murder At The Blyth Festival Murder mystery plays like Resort To Murder are part of a grand theatrical tradition that dates back at least to Mary Roberts Reinhart’s creaky 1920 murder mystery, The Bat, and that includes such old chestnuts as Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap of 1952, which
12 Dinners At Here For Now Theatre Longtime Stratford Festival star Steve Ross, now wowing audiences as Albin in La Cage Aux Folles, has reunited with director Jan Alexandra Smith to bring us 12 Dinners at Here For Now Theatre’s intimate tent at the back of the Stratford Perth Museum.
Halfway There At Drayton Entertainment Drayton Entertainment is doing southwestern Ontario a favour this summer by mounting two of Norm Foster’s best plays, Doris and Ivy in the Home at St Jacobs and now Halfway There at their eponymous playhouse in tiny Drayton, Ontario. Halfway There is Foster at his
The Golden Anniversaries At The Blyth Festival Following up on Saving Graceland, the Blyth Festival has another hit on its hands with Mark Crawford’s dark – very dark – comedy, The Golden Anniversaries. Crawford seems to go from strength to strength. The Golden Anniversaries may be his most accomplished work
Those Movies At The Foster Festival Those Movies, the latest Norm Foster play, is receiving its world premiere at the Foster Festival’s spiffy new venue at Ridley College in St. Catherines. It is Foster in a distinctly minor key. Foster has hung this short on laughs comedy on the slender
The Last Timbit At The Elgin Theatre Toronto Happy Birthday Tim Hortons! Tim Hortons, Canada’s phenomenally successful home-grown donut and coffee chain, is 60 years old. What will their future look like? Well, Hortons’ senior management must have seen Something Rotten because they decided that the future is MYOO-sicals! Specifically
Escaped Alone At Yale Rep Caryl Churchill’s 2016 play, Escaped Alone, is a puzzlement, which despite its 55 intermissionless minutes seems to go on forever. The four women in Yale’s production of Escaped Alone, middle-aged to elderly (although Churchill apparently specified that they are all “at least 70”), sit in
A View From The Bridge at Long Wharf Theatre The now homeless and itinerant Long Wharf Theatre is making ingenious use of an ad hoc space on the second floor of the sleek Canal Dock Boathouse on the shore of New Haven harbor to mount a smashing revival of Arthur
The Salvagers At Yale Rep The Salvagers by Harrison David Rivers, having its world premiere at Yale Rep, is the latest in a long line of semi-successful plays to indulge in kitchen sink realism. There is an angry young man at the center of the working class Salvage family –
Dreamgirls At Goodspeed Musicals In 1981, when Dreamgirls debuted at the Imperial Theatre, it electrified Broadway – and me – thanks to a star-making turn by Jennifer Holliday and an eye-popping production orchestrated by director Michael Bennett with the aid of theatre design legends like Robin Wagner (sets), Theoni Aldredge
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding At Manhattan Theatre Club These days White people get lectured a fair amount about the dos and don’ts of how they should approach Black women’s hair. Thanks to Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Jocelyn Bioh’s hit comedy at Manhattan Theatre Company, curious White folk have an opportunity
Private Jones At Goodspeed Musicals Private Jones, Marshall Pailet’s ambitious new musical at Goodspeed Musicals, aims high and hits a few targets but ultimately misses the mark. Based on a supposedly true story, Private Jones tells the story of a deaf kid from Breconshire, Wales, who lies about his age
Shameless! I have now seen Something Rotten three times and can reliably report that the show has done nothing but get better, tighter, and more self-assured. I have also now had the opportunity (twice) to see Steve Ross as Shylock. No offense to his understudy, who filled in admirably the
Here For Now Is Here To Stay [Press Release] On Monday, June 10th, 2024, HERE FOR NOW THEATRE announced that the company has found a permanent home for the next 15 Seasons. Here For Now Theatre, an award-winning independent professional theatre company in
Who’s Hugh O’Brian? A recent conversation with an actor friend (yes, we all go slumming from time to time) brought up the old showbiz wheeze about the Five Stages of an Actor’s Career. I looked it up on Quote Investigator and the earliest documented telling of the joke was by
Twenty years ago, in the brilliant Canadian television series Slings and Arrows, the fictional advertising agency Froghammer created an ad campaign for the equally fictitious New Burbage Festival featuring a billboard headlined “OUR SUBSCRIBERS” that showed an elderly white woman on her deathbed, her husband grieving by her side. I
Wisconsin Theatre As an American, I pride myself on having pierced the Poutine Curtain to bring news of Canada’s theatrical riches to my benighted fellow countrymen. Now I discover that Ilana Lucas, an intrepid reporter for Intermission, a Canadian online magazine devoted to theatre, has made the reverse journey and
The 2023 OntarioStage Awards What they lack in prestige, they more than make up for in pointlessness.™ Once more unto the breach with the annual awards compilation voted “Easiest to Ignore” by the Canadian theatre establishment. The usual caveats apply: As an American, my time in Canada is limited thanks
