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wights

Wights At Crow’s Theatre – A Review

Wights at Crow’s Theatre Wights, a noble failure of a play by Liz Appel, is getting the high-tech, razzle-dazzle treatment from director Chris Abraham that’s fast becoming his signature style at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto. Despite its drawbacks, I found it well worth the schlep into T-Town. In a house

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heist

Heist At The Grand Theatre – A Review

Heist At The Grand Theatre Playwright Arun Lakra, whose Heist is enjoying an exuberant production at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, is a self-confessed fan of heist movies. His favourite and the apparent inspiration for Heist is Ocean’s Eleven, the star studded caper flick of 2001. Heist, the stage

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hedda gabler

Hedda Gabler At The Stratford Festival – A Review

Hedda Gabler At The Stratford Festival Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler from 1891 is one of the masterpieces of early modern theatre. It was quite shocking back then. In the production now playing at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre it is more puzzling than anything else. The title role is

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the diviners

The Diviners At The Stratford Festival – A Review

The Diviners At The Stratford Festival The Diviners, a classic of Canadian literature by Margaret Laurence, is being brought to grand and glorious life in a sinuous adaptation by Vern Thiessen and Yvette Nolan on the stage of the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre. The Diviners is a sprawling work

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Elsewhere
summer stock

Summer Stock At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

Summer Stock At Goodspeed Musicals Summer Stock, the horribly dated 1950 film starring Gene Kelly and a fading Judy Garland, has been transformed into a “new musical comedy” at Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, CT. The big question for anyone who remembers the film is “Why bother?” There are two

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gypsy at goodspeed

Gypsy At Goodspeed Musicals – A Review

Gypsy at Goodspeed Musicals Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Connecticut, known to us old-timers as the Goodspeed Opera House, is mounting a workmanlike production of the Arthur Laurents/Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim classic, Gypsy, directed by Jenn Thompson. The production tries mightily to do justice to what many critics and historians of

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the ripple the wave

The Ripple The Wave At Yale Rep – A Review

The Ripple, The Wave At Yale Rep Playwright Christina Anderson’s earnest The Ripple, The Wave That Carried Me Home makes great use of water as metaphor. The 90-minute play, performed without intermission at the Yale Rep, strives for poetry as it tells the tale of segregated swimming pools in the

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ain't misbehavin'

Ain’t Misbehavin’ At Westport Country Playhouse – A Review

Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse The Westport Country Playhouse is presenting a middling revival of Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical Show. Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz, it wowed Broadway (and me) back in 1978. For this outing, a co-production with Barrington Stage and Geva Theatre

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mojada

Mojada At Yale Rep – A Review

Mojada At Yale Rep The play’s title is Mojada, which literally means “wet” in Spanish, the feminine form of the Mexican slur for “wetback.” The play’s subtitle is A Medea in Los Angeles, so you know things aren’t going to end well. And I’m not talking about the traffic on

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sound of the underground

Sound Of The Underground At The Royal Court — A Review

Sound Of The Underground at The Royal Court Those coming to Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground at London’s Royal Court Theatre expecting the sort of cheerful, glamorous drag show popularized by La Cage Aux Folles and Ru Paul’s Drag Race will likely be disappointed. Those who can handle some

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Blog
shaw and shakespeare

The 2024 Season, Part One

The 2024 Season – Part One As Christmas approaches what better way to escape the crass commercialism of the holiday season than to toss another log on the fire, settle back with your single malt, and savor the crass commercialism of the 2024 theatrical season in southwestern Ontario! By now

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The Best Seats At The Shaw Festival

Shaw’s best seats Back in the days when I was writing guidebooks to Orlando’s many theme parks, I would include a section in my descriptions of various attractions called “the best seats in the house,” wherein I would attempt to guide readers to the best locations from which to maximize

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2023 Season – A Look back

Reflections on the 2023 Season It’s not a horserace, it’s not a competition, and there are a lot of apples vs. oranges considerations when it comes to discussing the very different theatre companies that call southwestern Ontario home. And yet . . . Now that the 2023 season is more

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tom patterson cafe

Is This The Stratford Festival’s Best Kept Secret?

Is This The Stratford Festival’s Best Kept Secret? Looking for a nice quiet light lunch or dinner before the show? Or maybe you’d just like to have lunch in a quiet environment in which you can actually hear your companion. Let me introduce you to the Tom Pat cafe, located

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outrageous fortune podcast

A New Slings and Arrows Podcast Debuts

A New Slings and Arrows Podcast Debuts Slings and Arrows fans rejoice. A “kind of official” podcast devoted to the cult favorite is now available and it’s a great way to mark the show’s twentieth anniversary year. Outrageous Fortune, as the podcast is dubbed, promises to be a gold mine

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robert mcqueen

The Real Poems Returns

The Real Poems Returns To Stratford One of the highlights of last season was Here For Now Theatre‘s production of The Real Poems, a superb one-man show written and performed by Robert McQueen. Here is the opening paragraph of my review: With its closing production of Robert McQueen’s beautifully written,

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