With Love And A Major Organ At Here For Now Theatre Have you ever given your heart to someone? Most of us have been in love at least once in our lives, but no one gives their heart quite like the heroine of With Love and a Major Organ by
Snow In Midsummer At The Shaw Festival The programme for Snow In Midsummer by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, now showing at the Shaw Festival’s Studio Theatre, tells me that the play is “based on the classical Chinese drama The Injustice to Dou E that Moved Heaven and Earth by Guan Hanqing.”
Sherlock Holmes And The Mystery Of The Human Heart At The Shaw Festival It is with heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these last words in which I shall ever record the singularly entertaining piffle that is Sherlock Holmes And The Mystery Of The Human Heart
Candida At The Shaw Festival The works of George Bernard Shaw seem to be almost an afterthought these days at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which was founded precisely to honor his considerable output. Severn Thompson’s smashing production of Candida is a bracing reminder that the Festival ignores the master
The Melville Boys At The Foster Festival The Melville Boys, an early play by Norm Foster, is marking its 40th anniversary with a sterling revival at The Foster Festival in St. Catherines, Ontario. The Melville Boys was Foster’s second published play and according to the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia the one
Onion Skins And Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes At The Blyth Festival The Blyth Festival is capping its 50th anniversary season with Onion Skins And Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes, a vibrant and moving story of the thousands of young women who volunteered to work the fields of Ontario during the Second
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
The Salvagers At Yale Rep The Salvagers by Harrison David Rivers, having its world premiere at Yale Rep, is the latest in a long line of semi-successful plays to indulge in kitchen sink realism. There is an angry young man at the center of the working class Salvage family –
Dreamgirls At Goodspeed Musicals In 1981, when Dreamgirls debuted at the Imperial Theatre, it electrified Broadway – and me – thanks to a star-making turn by Jennifer Holliday and an eye-popping production orchestrated by director Michael Bennett with the aid of theatre design legends like Robin Wagner (sets), Theoni Aldredge
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding At Manhattan Theatre Club These days White people get lectured a fair amount about the dos and don’ts of how they should approach Black women’s hair. Thanks to Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Jocelyn Bioh’s hit comedy at Manhattan Theatre Company, curious White folk have an opportunity
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
Wisconsin Theatre As an American, I pride myself on having pierced the Poutine Curtain to bring news of Canada’s theatrical riches to my benighted fellow countrymen. Now I discover that Ilana Lucas, an intrepid reporter for Intermission, a Canadian online magazine devoted to theatre, has made the reverse journey and
The 2023 OntarioStage Awards What they lack in prestige, they more than make up for in pointlessness.™ Once more unto the breach with the annual awards compilation voted “Easiest to Ignore” by the Canadian theatre establishment. The usual caveats apply: As an American, my time in Canada is limited thanks
The 2024 Season – Part Two To the extent that Americans are aware of the theatrical riches of Ontario’s summer “festival” season at all, they are probably familiar with The Stratford Festival and The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I discussed the 2024 season at these august institutions, along with my
