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Chronicling a Love Affair with Canadian Theatre
  • Gypsy At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

    Gypsy At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

    Gypsy at Goodspeed Musicals Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Connecticut, known to us old-timers as the Goodspeed Opera House, is mounting a workmanlike production of the Arthur Laurents/Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim classic, Gypsy, directed by Jenn Thompson. The production tries mightily to do justice to what many critics and historians of the genre consider the greatest […]

  • The Ripple The Wave At Yale Rep – A Review

    The Ripple The Wave At Yale Rep – A Review

    The Ripple, The Wave At Yale Rep Playwright Christina Anderson’s earnest The Ripple, The Wave That Carried Me Home makes great use of water as metaphor. The 90-minute play, performed without intermission at the Yale Rep, strives for poetry as it tells the tale of segregated swimming pools in the fictional town of Beacon, Kansas, […]

  • Ain’t Misbehavin’ At Westport Country Playhouse – A Review

    Ain’t Misbehavin’ At Westport Country Playhouse – A Review

    Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse The Westport Country Playhouse is presenting a middling revival of Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical Show. Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz, it wowed Broadway (and me) back in 1978. For this outing, a co-production with Barrington Stage and Geva Theatre Center, director Jeffrey L. Page […]

  • Mojada At Yale Rep – A Review

    Mojada At Yale Rep – A Review

    Mojada At Yale Rep The play’s title is Mojada, which literally means “wet” in Spanish, the feminine form of the Mexican slur for “wetback.” The play’s subtitle is A Medea in Los Angeles, so you know things aren’t going to end well. And I’m not talking about the traffic on the 101, which runs through […]

  • Sound Of The Underground At The Royal Court — A Review

    Sound Of The Underground At The Royal Court — A Review

    Sound Of The Underground at The Royal Court Those coming to Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground at London’s Royal Court Theatre expecting the sort of cheerful, glamorous drag show popularized by La Cage Aux Folles and Ru Paul’s Drag Race will likely be disappointed. Those who can handle some in-your-face and occasionally angry social […]

  • Vodka With Stalin At Upstairs At The Gatehouse (London) – A Review

    Vodka With Stalin At Upstairs At The Gatehouse (London) – A Review

    Vodka With Stalin [Full Disclosure: I am a long-time friend of the playwright.] Francis Beckett is a prominent English historian of twentieth century left-wing British politics who writes the occasional play. In Vodka With Stalin, now enjoying a brief run at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, in Highgate, London, he has turned for inspiration to one […]

  • Pride And Prejudice At Kentucky Shakespeare – A Review

    Pride And Prejudice At Kentucky Shakespeare – A Review

    Pride And Prejudice At Kentucky Shakespeare Jane Austen purists may be horrified by Kate Hamill’s rollicking, anything-for-a-laugh 2017 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. They would be well advised to put their high standards aside for an evening and enjoy the often hilarious romp being presented by Kentucky Shakespeare in the commodious Bombard Theater in downtown […]

  • Christmas In Connecticut At Goodspeed Opera House

    Christmas In Connecticut At Goodspeed Opera House

    Christmas in Connecticut at Goodspeed Opera House Christmas in Connecticut, the 1945 Warner brothers film, is a sappy, sentimental, but nonetheless highly enjoyable rom-com (to use a turn of phrase not yet then coined). Its success is due largely to the chemistry between stars Barbara Stanwyck and the now largely forgotten Dennis Morgan. The film […]

  • The Brightest Thing In The World At Yale Rep

    The Brightest Thing In The World At Yale Rep

    The Brightest Thing In The World At Yale Rep As Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World opens, two attractive young women, Steph (Michele Selene Ang) and Lane (Katherine Romans), meet cute in a Lexington, Kentucky, coffee shop. And meet. And meet. And meet. Over the course of Steph’s repeated visits (cleverly staged […]

  • Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway – A Review

    Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway – A Review

    Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway Kimberly Akimbo may be the weirdest show to ever worm its way into the hearts of a Broadway audience. But that is precisely what this musical by David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music) is doing at New York’s Booth Theatre. Kimberly is a high school student of fifteen, […]

  • Choir Boy at Yale Rep

    Choir Boy at Yale Rep

    March 31 – April 23, 2022 Yale University has a long and distinguished vocal tradition. There are the undergraduate Whiffenpoofs, of course, and the School of Music confers advanced degrees in choral conducting. So it’s perhaps not too surprising to find that Choir Boy features one of the greatest small male choral groups you’ve ever […]

  • Dream Hou$e at Long Wharf Theatre

    Dream Hou$e at Long Wharf Theatre

    Dream Hou$e at Long Wharf Theatre Playwright Eliana Pipes has furnished her new play Dream Hou$e (as it is styled in the program) with an abundance of themes in a variety of styles. The overall effect is striking but cluttered. The Castillo sisters are trying to sell their recently deceased mother’s century-old house in a […]

  • I Am My Own Wife at Long Wharf Theatre

    I Am My Own Wife at Long Wharf Theatre

    I Am My Own Wife at Long Wharf Theatre         The Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, is giving Doug Wright’s Pulitzer prize-winning one-person play, I Am My Own Wife, a respectful if ultimately disappointing revival starring a very talented young actor, Mason Alexander Park. The play revolves around a real-life German transgender woman […]

  • London Assurance at The Irish Rep – A Review

    London Assurance at The Irish Rep – A Review

    London Assurance at The Irish Rep – A Review After the deaths of Richard Sheridan (School for Scandal) and Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops To Conquer), the English-speaking stage seems to have lain fallow until the emergence in the late nineteenth century of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, at least when viewed from our contemporary […]

  • My Name Is Lucy Barton on Broadway

    My Name Is Lucy Barton on Broadway

    My Name Is Lucy Barton on Broadway “LAURA LINNEY IS LUMINOUS” a sign outside Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater announces. If only the same could be said of My Name Is Lucy Barton. This one-woman show, which I am compelled to report, received rapturous reviews from the New York critics, is an adaptation, by Rona […]

  • Tootsie on Broadway – A Review

    Tootsie on Broadway – A Review

    Tootsie on Broadway Tootsie, currently playing at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre, is a musical comedy that’s strong on the comedy and surprisingly weak on the musical side of the equation. Based on the 1982 film starring Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie tells the tale of Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana), a forty-ish actor who, secure in his superior artistic […]

  • Angels in America’at KC Rep – A Review

    Angels in America’at KC Rep – A Review

    Angels in America at KC Rep Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America is receiving a sturdy revival at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s downtown Copaken Stage. This sprawling two-part epic, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is at turns surreal, whimsical, hallucinatory, bitchily funny, poetic, brutally blunt, and ultimately quite moving. 

  • A Review: Psst! Feelthy Acrobats — Absinthe in Las Vegas

    A Review: Psst! Feelthy Acrobats — Absinthe in Las Vegas

    Absinthe in Las Vegas LAS VEGAS, NV – Everyone loves acrobats but not everyone will have a tolerance for the non-stop, filthy, vile, obscene, and often very funny patter that accompanies them in this sui generis offering on the Vegas Strip. Absinthe is housed in what looks like a temporary storage shed in a courtyard […]

  • A Review: ‘Love,’ Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles Show at the Mirage, Las Vegas

    A Review: ‘Love,’ Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles Show at the Mirage, Las Vegas

    ‘Love,’ Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles Show LAS VEGAS, NV – I entered with high expectations but, alas, I found myself merely in like with Love, Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show. Cirque du Soleil’s high-powered homage to the Fab Four is chock full of Cirque’s trademark glitz and over-the-top surreal creativity but oddly lacking in the […]

  • Craving For Travel Off Broadway: A Review

    Craving For Travel Off Broadway: A Review

    Craving For Travel Off Broadway There are plenty of laughs for everyone in Craving For Travel, the delightful comedy at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on New York’s Theater Row, but travel agents will take special delight in the savvy inside jokes that lay bare the hidden aspects of the profession. Co-writers Greg Edwards and […]