The Beaver Club At Lighthouse Theatre I feel compelled to warn my readers that The Beaver Club by Barb Scheffler, now playing at the Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, ON, contains humour that is raunchy, off-colour, smutty, and occasionally downright dirty. I loved every minute of it! Four women of
Something Rotten At The Stratford Festival Donna Feore’s Something Rotten, the big hit of the 2024 season, has been remounted this season along with another of Feore’s smash hits, Guys and Dolls, to celebrate, one can only assume, Antoni Cimolino’s last season with the Stratford Festival. Cribbing shamelessly from my
Death Of A Salesman at the Stratford Festival Starting off with an ear-piercing trumpet solo, Stratford’s Death of a Salesman at the Avon Theatre may be the loudest production on record. Director Dean Gabourie has given us a Salesman full of sound and fury signifying . . . well what
I Am An Island At Here For Now Theatre I Am An Island by Julia Lederer, now receiving its world premiere at Here For Now Theatre, is described as a “surrealistic drama (with some very funny bits).” Okay, fair enough. I guess that absolves me of any obligation to try
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival I absolutely loved Chris Abraham’s gender-bending take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival’s Festival Theatre in 2014. Graham Abbey’s sumptuous staging of the play in the Tom Patterson Theatre is utterly different and every bit as good, if not
Finding Neverland At Drayton Entertainment Finding Neverland, the undistinguished musical tale of the creation of J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” has followed a long and winding road which has brought it to the Hamilton Family Theatre in Cambridge, Ontario. When, after several iterations, it arrived on Broadway, Neverland was pooh-poohed
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
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 –
Rampersad Helms ‘The Red Shoes’ At RSC Following in Tim Carroll’s footsteps, Kimberley Rampersad, the Associate Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival is directing and choreographing The Red Shoes at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. This Red Shoes is a new version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “dark fairy tale”
The 2024 OntarioStage Awards What they lack in prestige, they more than make up for in pointlessness.™ It’s the third time around for 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
Lighthouse Theatre Announces Its 2025 Season The Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, Ontario, was new to me this season, but based on my visit to see Norm Foster’s Lakefront, I’ll be returning to their comfy 350-seat house next year. Lighthouse has announced its 2025 season and it looks more than
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
