Gnit At The Shaw Festival Perhaps if you are familiar with Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 verse play Peer Gynt you will like Will Eno’s Gnit (pronounced guh-NIT) at the Shaw Festival more than I did. Perhaps if you are familiar with Ibsens Peer Gynt, you will dislike Gnit more than I
Wait Until Dark At The Shaw Festival Frederick Knott’s 1966 Broadway hit Wait Until Dark is something of an American classic and it is a truth universally acknowledged that every classic is in desperate need of getting a new adaptation. So it is that the Shaw Festival is presenting Jeffrey
A Woman’s Love List At The Orillia Opera House With A Woman’s Love List, now receiving its world premiere in the small, 105-seat Studio Theatre at the Orillia Opera House, Norm Foster ventures into the realm of fantasy – or is it magical realism? – and finds it filled with
Humour Me At Here For Now Theatre Humour Me by Beverley Cooper, the amiable bit of fluff currently at Here For Now Theatre, works yet another variation on the time worn theme of two damaged souls who slowly discover they were meant for each other. For me, at least, it
Quiet In The Land At The Blyth Festival “For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land.” Psalm 35:20 Quiet in the Land by Anne Chislett, the only play being presented this season on the Blyth Festival’s enchanting outdoor Harvest Stage,
On A First Name Basis At The Foster Festival The Foster Festival is celebrating its ten year anniversary by reviving the play that opened their first season, Norm Foster’s artfully crafted and very funny two-hander On A First Name Basis. David Kilbride (Jamie Williams) is a wealthy novelist whose output
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
Private Jones At Goodspeed Musicals Private Jones, Marshall Pailet’s ambitious new musical at Goodspeed Musicals, aims high and hits a few targets but ultimately misses the mark. Based on a supposedly true story, Private Jones tells the story of a deaf kid from Breconshire, Wales, who lies about his age
The 12 At Goodspeed Musicals The 12, the new musical at Goodspeed Musicals by Robert Schenkkan and Neil Berg, about the twelve apostles minus Judas (yes, those guys) looks terrific. The set designer John Doyle, who also directs, has created a surprisingly attractive dump of an abandoned industrial site. It’s
Wish You Were Here At Yale Rep Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here, now playing at New Haven’s Yale Rep, is a well-intentioned disappointment. Wish You Were Here charts the gradually unravelling relationships among a tight-knit group of five female friends in Karaj, Iran, during a tumultuous period. The decade
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
