Curveball At The Blyth Festival – A Review
Curveball At The Blyth Festival Following up on the success of Sisters of ’78, and with much the same cast, the Blyth Festival’s world premiere production of Curveball tells the story of Stratford’s Kroehler Girls. Like Sisters it is the tale of Canadian women struggling to make their mark in a world dominated by men […]
Funny Girl At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Funny Girl At The Shaw Festival Funny Girl, the bio-musical of Fanny Brice haunted by memories of the performance that shot Barbra Streisand to super-stardom, is being born anew at the Shaw Festival thanks to a luminous Sara Farb. With music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill, and a book by Isobel Lennart, Funny […]
One For The Pot At The Shaw Festival – A Review
One For The Pot At The Shaw Festival What to say about One For The Pot now at the Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake other than “WTF!?” One For The Pot by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton is one of the famous “Whitehall farces” that ruled the London stage in the 1950s and 60s. (Neil Barclay’s […]
Heartbreak House At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Heartbreak House At The Shaw Festival Tim Carroll’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House boasts a stellar cast. Why then does it fall so flat? A major reason, I think, is that a very important character is missing – Heartbreak House. Not the play but the physical location. Shaw describes the set for the […]
Jeeves & Wooster At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Jeeves & Wooster At The Shaw Festival I have a vague suspish that Robert and David Goodale must have seen The 39 Steps or Stones In His Pockets and thought, “Jolly good fun! How hard can it be?” And so, taking the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse stories of the amiable, high-born twit Bertram Wooster and […]
The Long Weekend At The Foster Festival – A Review
The Long Weekend At The Foster Festival When the first line of a play is “This weekend is going to make a colonoscopy seem like a lighthearted treasure hunt,” you sense that it’s going to be a bumpy ride. So it is with the revival of Norm Foster’s 1994 hit, The Long Weekend, at the […]
Brushing Up Your Shakespeare
Brushing Up Your Shakespeare I am an avid listener of The History of English Podcast, by Kevin Stroud, which helps while away the time as I commute back and forth from Stratford to the Great Satan to the south (thank you, Immigration Canada). Unless you’re a hopeless language nerd like me, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend […]
Sleuth At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Sleuth At The Shaw Festival I believe I am on record as not liking plays such as Sleuth, the brain-twisting murder mystery by Anthony Shaffer, now enthralling audiences at the Shaw Festival’s resuscitated Court House Theatre. Like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Sleuth challenges you to figure out “whodunnit” before the playwright finally […]
The Importance Of Being Earnest At The Stratford Festival – A Review
The Importance of Being Earnest At The Stratford Festival Krista Jackson’s vastly entertaining production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, currently playing to packed houses at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre, may not be absolute perfection, but it will more than do until something better comes along. Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” […]
Love Us Most At Here For Now Theatre – A Review
Love Us Most At Here For Now Theatre First, a public service announcement: Please don’t read the programme for Love Us Most, Sara Farb’s world premiere play at Here for Now, before you see the show. I did and expected a very different play from the one I saw. Love Us Most is a sharply […]