1812 At The Foster Festival – A Review
1812 at the Foster Festival While you and I were spending the pandemic hunkered down, trying to figure out what to watch next on Netflix or any of a dozen other streaming services, Norm Foster was busy banging out 10 plays. That’s how you become Canada’s most prolific playwright. One of them, the tersely titled […]
Billy Bishop Goes To War At Drayton’s Schoolhouse Theatre – A Review
Photo: Jim Hodgkinson and Jacob James, Drayton Entertainment Billy Bishop Goes To War At St. Jacobs Schoolhouse Theatre Billy Bishop Goes To War, at Drayton Entertainment’s St. Jacobs Schoolhouse Theatre, tells the stirring story of William Avery “Billy” Bishop, a Canadian World War One air ace and hero. Most of my fellow Americans have probably […]
Richard III At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Richard III At The Stratford Festival Richard III can wait. Let us now praise theatre architecture. The Stratford Festival’s new Tom Patterson Theatre is an unalloyed triumph. It’s as if the stage of the old Tom Pat died and went to heaven. The acoustics are superb, the seats are comfy, the upgrades are first-rate (real […]
Chicago At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Chicago at The Stratford Festival I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Donna Feore is a genius and her production of Chicago, currently gracing the MainStage at the Stratford Festival is yet further proof of that immutable fact. Broadway doesn’t know what it’s missing and, for the sake of the Stratford Festival and […]
Hamlet at The Stratford Festival – A Review
Hamlet at The Stratford Festival At last! A fardle-free Hamlet! ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. The director, Peter Pasyk, has given the Stratford Festival a wild and wildly erratic, not to mention much anticipated Hamlet, with visually striking moments producing gasps alternating with ludicrous ones that produce laughter when stunned silence should be […]
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.