Lear at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto – A Review
Lear at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto Director Graham Abbey and his Groundling Theatre Company continue their gender bending ways with Lear, starring Seana McKenna, which drops the King from William Shakespeare’s title and presents the tragic monarch as a woman. The results are mixed. Once again, Abbey proves himself a masterful interpreter of Shakespeare. The […]
Four Christmas Carols
Four Christmas Carols How do two Americans keep themselves occupied when visiting Canada during the deepening cold of early December? Why take in four very different versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol of course. The initial plan was to see just one, but…well, you know how these things go. First up was our original […]
Shaw Festival 2014
Shaw Festival 2014 The picture-postcard-perfect town of Niagara-on-the-Lake was abuzz with shoppers and theatergoers when we arrived on a resplendent summer day for Shaw Festival 2014. You could be very happy just strolling the streets of this upscale village, admiring homes straight out of a glossy magazine, or shopping in the chic boutiques, or dining […]
The Best Brothers and ‘Hirsch’ at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
The Best Brothers and Hirsch at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival I am fond of saying there is a Poutine Curtain that prevents Canadian culture from penetrating south of the border. So one of the pleasures of visiting the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is the chance to see the work of Canadian playwrights who otherwise might have […]
Much Ado About Nothing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
Much Ado About Nothing In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice and Benedick are the fun couple of the William Shakespeare canon. As seemingly incompatible as oil and water they are nonetheless fated for each other and the pathetic fallacy of their inevitable coming together, engineered with a clever trick by their friends, is what makes […]
A Word Or Two at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
A Word Or Two By his own admission, Christopher Plummer was quite the heartbreaker in his youth. Today, just shy of his 83rd birthday, he’s still at it. In A Word Or Two, at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s Avon Theatre he is sweeping audiences off their feet and leaving them begging for more as he […]
The Matchmaker at Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
The Matchmaker Thornton Wilder’s farce The Matchmaker is perhaps best known, to the extent it is known at all these days, as the progenitor of the musical smash Hello Dolly. It would be nice if the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s current production changes all that. Here is a production that is every bit as worthy of a […]
Henry V at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
Henry V I suppose there’s no escaping that Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film version of Henry V is the Henry of our age, even twenty odd years later. So any new production, let alone one that carries the imprimatur of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, has to be prepared for comparisons to a masterpiece. Leaving the Festival […]
Wanderlust at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
Wanderlust Robert Service is Canada’s most famous poet and one of the most financially successful bards of all time. His tall tales and sentimental verse of the Yukon territory, penned at the turn of the last century, didn’t win many critical kudos from the literati, but regular folks were drawn to their steady rhythms and […]
42nd Street at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
Forty-Second Street Perhaps the highlight of the “naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty” revival of 42ndStreet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s Festival Theatre is the first appearance of beloved leading lady Cynthia Dale since Des McAnuff took over as artistic director. (Cue the conspiracy theorists.) In fact, Ms. Dale has the secondary role of Dorothy Brock, the […]