Dear Liar At The Shaw Festival I was somewhat distressed to note that this season the Shaw Festival is only presenting one play by their namesake playwright, Major Barbara, which opens relatively late in the season. So Dear Liar by Jerome Kilty, presented in the intimate Spiegeltent, is especially welcome.
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe At The Shaw Festival Back in 2016 at the Stratford Festival, Shaw Artistic Director Tim Carroll directed an adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereinafter LWW) by English playwright Adrian Mitchell. I didn’t review that show but
Bedtime Stories At The Firehall Theatre Bedtime Stories, a 2006 comedy by Norm Foster, which just opened at the Firehall Theatre in Niagara Falls, Ontario, is unusual for a Foster comedy. It also marks an unusual collaboration between the Foster Festival and the community theatres of the Niagara Region.
Annie At The Stratford Festival Let’s put aside the many ironies of Canada’s premier theatrical company staging a musical that features a New York City billionaire who not only claims to be the world’s most successful businessman but who has the ear of the president. Instead let’s talk about Annie,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf At Canadian Stage I’m not a big fan of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the new production at Canadian Stage’s Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto did nothing to change my mind. Perhaps when it debuted in 1962 this three hour plus exercise
Wights at Crow’s Theatre Wights, a noble failure of a play by Liz Appel, is getting the high-tech, razzle-dazzle treatment from director Chris Abraham that’s fast becoming his signature style at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto. Despite its drawbacks, I found it well worth the schlep into T-Town. In a house
Safe House At The Abbey Theatre I haven’t had much luck with the Irish avant garde. I have vague memories of a wordless Grotowsi-esque rendition of the Great Hunger that came to New York some decades ago. Now there’s Safe House, the new 90-minute whatchamacallit by Enda Walsh and Anna
Stereophonic on Broadway Stereophonic, the cleverly crafted play by David Adjmi, directed with surgical precision by Daniel Aukin, that plays like a Frederick Wiseman fly-on-the-wall documentary, snagged a Tony for Best Play. It’s easy to see why. Set in a Sausalito recording studio circa 1976 and clocking in at just
The Hills of California On Broadway “The hills of California will give ya a start. I guess I better warn ya cuz you’ll lose your heart,” says the Johnny Mercer song from 1948. The Hills of California, the new play from Jez Butterworth now at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre, may not
Falcon Girls at The Yale Rep Falcon Girls by Hilary Bettis, now receiving its world premiere at the Yale Rep, is a grab bag of characters, themes, issues, and notions that comes across more as notes for episodes in a multi-season TV mini series than a fully formed play. That’s
Escaped Alone At Yale Rep Caryl Churchill’s 2016 play, Escaped Alone, is a puzzlement, which despite its 55 intermissionless minutes seems to go on forever. The four women in Yale’s production of Escaped Alone, middle-aged to elderly (although Churchill apparently specified that they are all “at least 70”), sit in
A View From The Bridge at Long Wharf Theatre The now homeless and itinerant Long Wharf Theatre is making ingenious use of an ad hoc space on the second floor of the sleek Canal Dock Boathouse on the shore of New Haven harbor to mount a smashing revival of Arthur
Shaw Announces Its 2025 Season In size and scope the Saw Festival’s 2025 season will look a lot like the current one, with some intriguing differences. The morning one-act in the Royal George seems to have been axed. But the other shows slated for that venue seemed ideally suited to
Stratford Announces 2025 Season The Stratford Festival has announced a somewhat slimmed down season for 2025 that reflects ongoing financial struggles as the post-pandemic “recovery” proves more sluggish than hoped (or anticipated). For starters, there will be eleven productions next year as opposed to the more usual twelve. Only one
Shameless! I have now seen Something Rotten three times and can reliably report that the show has done nothing but get better, tighter, and more self-assured. I have also now had the opportunity (twice) to see Steve Ross as Shylock. No offense to his understudy, who filled in admirably the
Here For Now Is Here To Stay [Press Release] On Monday, June 10th, 2024, HERE FOR NOW THEATRE announced that the company has found a permanent home for the next 15 Seasons. Here For Now Theatre, an award-winning independent professional theatre company in
Who’s Hugh O’Brian? A recent conversation with an actor friend (yes, we all go slumming from time to time) brought up the old showbiz wheeze about the Five Stages of an Actor’s Career. I looked it up on Quote Investigator and the earliest documented telling of the joke was by
Our Audience Is Dying Twenty years ago, in the brilliant Canadian television series Slings and Arrows, the fictional advertising agency Froghammer created an ad campaign for the equally fictitious New Burbage Festival featuring a billboard headlined “OUR SUBSCRIBERS” that showed an elderly white woman on her deathbed, her husband grieving
