King Lear At The Stratford Festival – A Review
King Lear At The Stratford Festival Where’s Geoffrey Tennant when you need him? I really, really wanted to like the Stratford Festival’s King Lear by William Shakespeare currently playing at the Festival Theatre and I strove mightily to do so. But try as I might I couldn’t get past Kimberly Rampersad’s inept direction and the […]
Casey And Diana At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Casey And Diana At The Stratford Festival A small miracle is unfolding at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre where the world premiere of Casey and Diana by Nick Green is receiving a splendid – and far too brief – production under the assured direction of Andrew Kushnir. Casey and Diana weaves a tale of courage, […]
Rent At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Rent At The Stratford Festival The Stratford Festival is trying to attract a younger audience and they seem to be succeeding, at least for their full-throttle production of the musical Rent. The packed houses at the Festival Theatre are reminiscent of the “youthquake” Froghammer produced for New Burbage in season two of Slings and Arrows.* […]
Spamalot At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Spamalot At The Stratford Festival Eric Idle’s Spamalot, now holding forth at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre, is surely up for some sort of ecological award. After all, everything in it is recycled. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Whether you’ll enjoy this Spamalot will depend to a great extent on your level of […]
Prince Caspian At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Prince Caspian at the Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival continues its exploration of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels with Prince Caspian, now enjoying its world premiere at the Royal George Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It’s another substantial entry in Shaw’s list of plays for young audiences. (The earlier outings in the series were The Magician’s Nephew […]
Gypsy At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Gypsy at the Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival has seemingly always played second fiddle to the Stratford Festival when it comes to musicals. No longer. Their current production of Gypsy, the legendary 1959 Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne musical with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is an unalloyed triumph. Much of the credit for that goes to […]
On The Razzle At The Shaw Festival – A Review
On The Razzle At The Shaw Festival If you are one of those people who subscribe to the mistaken notion that Tom Stoppard plays are dense, philosophically abstruse, and difficult to follow, you can check your apprehensions at the entrance to the Royal George Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake and simply enjoy the Feydeau-esque farce that is […]
The Prom At Drayton – A Review
The Prom At Drayton The slight but sprightly musical comedy The Prom, a modest succès d’estime on Broadway in 2018, rests on an odd premise. Dee Dee Allen (Blythe Wilson) and Barry Glickman (Andrew Scanlon), two stars with solid Broadway cred (two Tonys and a Drama Desk Award) are headlining a musical based on Eleanor […]
Mahabharata At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Mahabharata At The Shaw Festival Mahabharata, a joint production of the Shaw Festival and Toronto’s Why Not Theatre, has major event written all over it. A sumptuous physical production, spell-binding original music, a splendid operatic interlude, a feverish dance number by an actor representing Shiva, the god of destruction, a five-and-a-half-hour running time (divided into […]
The Gig At Theatre Aquarius – A Review
The Gig at Theatre Aquarius, Hamilton Playwright Mark Crawford has always mixed social commentary with his deceptively light comedies. Bed and Breakfast explored changing attitudes toward the love that dare not speak its name in the strange, straight world outside Toronto; The New Canadian Curling Club dealt with anti-immigrant prejudice. His latest play, The Gig, […]