Damn Yankees at the Shaw Festival – A Review
(Image: Shaw Festival) Damn Yankees at The Shaw Festival Two hits, no runs, and plenty of errors pretty much sums up my reaction to the mainstage revival of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s 1955 musical Damn Yankees that swings and misses at the Shaw Festival. A riff on the Faust legend, Damn Yankees tells the […]
Too True To Be Good at the Shaw Festival – A Review
(Image: The Shaw Festival) Too True To Be Good It has become conventional wisdom to dismiss George Bernard Shaw’s Too True To Be Good, which is receiving a sprightly revival in the intimate confines of the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Theatre, as late and lesser Shaw. After he wrote Saint Joan, some critics noted a […]
Gaslight at The Shaw Festival – A Review
Gaslight at The Shaw Festival I confess that I have never seen Gaslight, the 1944 film for which Ingrid Bergman won the Best Actress Oscar. Nor have I seen any of the various adaptations (there have been several) based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light (now rechristened Gaslight). Indeed, I have struggled to understand […]
Blind Date
“ A French clown on a blind date.” From this seemingly inane premise Rebecca Northan, improviser extraordinaire, has crafted a ninety-minute show that has had audiences across Canada (with detours to New York and London) rolling in the aisles for more than ten years. I had been hearing good things about this show for a […]
A Few Good Men at St Jacobs Playhouse
A sturdy production of a well-plotted and gripping courtroom drama, put across by terrific actors who, more often than not, manage to rise above the script’s obvious debts to television clichés and sit-com joke craft.
A Huron County Christmas Carol at The Blyth Festival
Artistic Director Gil Garratt has transposed the tale to present day Huron County, Ontario, where Ebenezer Scrooge and his deceased partner Jacob Marley have pretty much cornered the market in grain mills. Scrooge wields his monopoly power with villainous fervor.
Mary Poppins at The Grand Theatre
What elevates this production of Mary Poppins to must-see status is the superb cast, most of them veterans of the Stratford and Shaw Festivals.
Aunt Agnes For Christmas at The Foster Festival — A Review
Aunt Agnes for Christmas is as airy and insubstantial as spun cotton candy and every bit as sweet, which makes it ideal for a family outing to the theatre, especially if there’s a tween girl in your clan.
Bed and Breakfast at The Blyth Festival – A Review
Bed and Breakfast at The Blyth Festival Bed and Breakfast by Mark Crawford, a plea for tolerance wrapped in a deceptively simple (and quite funny) comedy, is packing them in at the Blyth Festival prior to a whirlwind tour of British Columbia. Brett (Crawford himself) and Drew (Paul Dunn), two Torontonians in a committed relationship […]
Victory at The Shaw Festival – A Review
Victory at The Shaw Festival Howard Barker is the bad boy of British theatre. He revels in filth, flatulence, four-letter words, and fornication displayed on stage with all the verisimilitude that the law allows in plays set for the most part in past eras and other countries — for the “distancing effect” he says. “A […]