Stick Around At Here For Now Theatre – A Review Here For Now Theatre describes its season opener, the world premiere of Stick Around by Rebecca Northan, as a comedy. “Comedy” is apparently Canadian patois for “it’ll rip your heart out.” While it has a few laughs, Stick Around is
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels At The Stratford Festival I saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels when it premiered on Broadway in 2005 and didn’t care for it very much. Twenty years later, at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre, I found I liked it even less. Here’s what I had to say in 2005
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,
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
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
