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Chronicling a Love Affair with Canadian Theatre
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macbeth

Macbeth At The Stratford Festival – A Review

Macbeth At The Stratford Festival I saw Robert Lepage’s production of Macbeth at Stratford’s Avon Theatre and I came out humming the scenery. If you saw his Coriolanus at Stratford or Kà, still playing in Las Vegas, you know that Lepage is a visual artist of considerable genius and one

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tons of money

Tons Of Money At The Shaw Festival – A Review

Tons of Money At The Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival’s laudable tradition of reviving forgotten comic gems from the so-called “mandate period” (Shaw’s long lifetime) continues with the 1922 farce Tons of Money by Will Evans and Valentine (the pseudonym of Archibald Thomas Peachey). Alas, Tons of Money is not

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anything-goes

Anything Goes At The Shaw Festival – A Review

Anything Goes At The Shaw Festival Anything Goes, directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad is yet another musical comedy triumph for the Shaw Festival. Rampersad and the Festival are most definitely on a roll. Rampersad seems to have made a decision to foster a troupe that can tap dance like

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stick around

Stick Around At Here For Now Theatre – A Review

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

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dear-liar

Dear Liar At The Shaw Festival – A Review

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.

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Elsewhere
the salvagers

The Salvagers At Yale Rep – A Review

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 –

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dreamgirls

Dreamgirls At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

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

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private jones

Private Jones At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

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

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the 12

The 12 At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

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

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wish you were here

Wish You Were Here At The Yale Rep – A Review

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

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Blog
here for now new home

Here For Now Is Here To Stay

              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

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hugh o'brian

Who’s Hugh O’Brian?

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

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Our Audience Is Dying

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

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Wisconsin Theatre. Yes, Wisconsin

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

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The 2023 OntarioStage Awards

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

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gil garratt

The 2024 Season – Part Two

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

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