Cymbeline At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Cymbeline At The Stratford Festival William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which is receiving a disappointing production at the Tom Patterson Theatre, is the most problematical of the Bard’s so-called “problem plays.” Critics from Dr. Johnson to Harold Bloom have wrestled with explicating the play with middling success and I am not foolish enough to try. Cymbeline is […]
Beehive At Drayton Entertainment – A Review
Beehive At Drayton Entertainment Beehive: The 60s Musical is an innocuous bit of fluff cobbled together by Larry Gallagher from the discographies of 1960s-era girl groups and female soloists. It is getting a suitably bouncy production from Drayton Entertainment courtesy of director/choreographer David Connolly. There’s no real “book” to this musical. It’s simply a succession […]
Romeo And Juliet At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Romeo And Juliet At The Stratford Festival There are a number of refreshing aspects to Sam White’s production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, now playing to shamefully small houses on the Stratford Festival’s main stage. For starters, she has stripped the legendary “Tanya stage” almost to its essence, providing an opportunity to more fully […]
Something Rotten At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Something Rotten At The Stratford Festival When I saw Something Rotten on Broadway in 2015, I knew it was destined for the Stratford Festival. Not everyone at Stratford was as keen on the idea as I was, or at least so I was told. Fortunately, saner (or at least less stuffy) minds prevailed and Something […]
My Fair Lady At The Shaw Festival – A Review
My Fair Lady At The Shaw Festival Coming off last year’s largest operating deficit in history, the Shaw Festival took a calculated risk by announcing that Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady would run straight through both the summer and winter seasons at the Festival Theatre. On the evidence of the sprightly performance I saw, […]
Witness For The Prosecution At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Witness for Prosecution At The Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival is taking its first whack at Agatha Christie’s old chestnut Witness for the Prosecution (they’ve mounted several others over the years) and under the schizophrenic direction of Alistair Newton it is something of a puzzlement. Witness for the Prosecution is a talky period piece and […]
Escaped Alone At Yale Rep – A Review
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 garden and natter on […]
Who’s Hugh O’Brian?
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 Hugh O’Brian. It’s worth repeating […]
Our Audience Is Dying
Our Audience Is Dying 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 was […]
A View From The Bridge At Long Wharf Theatre – A Review
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 Miller’s 1955 A View From […]