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 […]
Cyrano De Bergerac at The Shaw Festival – A Review
Cyrano De Bergerac at The Shaw Festival Let’s start with the good news. The central story of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 Cyrano de Bergerac is alive and well in the capable hands of Tom Rooney as Cyrano, Deborah Hay as Roxanne, Jeff Irving as Christian, and Patrick Galligan as De Guiche. Moreover, playwright Kate Hennig, whose […]
Man and Superman at The Shaw Festival – A Review
Man and Superman at The Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival has entrusted the staging of George Bernard Shaw’s monumental Man and Superman on the expansive Festival Theatre stage to the relative tyro director Kimberley Rampersad, whose only previous directorial credit at Shaw was the one-act O’Flaherty, VC last season. It was a risk and I […]
The Crucible at The Stratford Festival – A Review
The Crucible at The Stratford Festival Powered by three amazing star performances, Arthur Miller’s searing drama, The Crucible, is receiving a towering production in the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre under the direction of actor Jonathan Goad. The Crucible is set during the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of the late seventeenth century and the plot hews […]
The Front Page at The Stratford Festival – A Review
The Front Page at The Stratford Festival In 1928, The Front Page was a huge Broadway hit for the legendary writing team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Set in the Press Room of a Chicago courthouse, it tells the story of how rapacious newspaper editor Walter Burns tries to retain the services of his […]
Birds of a Kind at the Stratford Festival – A Review
Birds of a Kind at the Stratford Festival This season, the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre is home to two plays set in the Holy Land, both of them dealing with issues if identity and religious tolerance. They also share most of the same actors, so seeing them both makes for an instructive exercise. Nathan the […]
In the Wake of Wettlaufer at The Blyth Festival – A Review
In the Wake of Wettlaufer at The Blyth Festival Between 2007 and 2016, Elizabeth Wettlaufer, a registered nurse in Ontario, murdered eight elderly patients under her care and attempted to kill six others. Her weapon was lethal doses of insulin. Astonishingly enough, her crimes were never detected by the institutions and agencies for which she […]
Beside Myself at The Foster Festival – A Review
Beside Myself at The Foster Festival These days it seems the most “transgressive” thing a musical could possibly do is tell a tale of heterosexual love. And yet, in Beside Myself, Norm Foster and his musical collaborator, Steve Thomas, have boldly gone where few have dared to tread recently. Foster provided the book, Thomas the […]