The Surrogate At Here For Now Theatre The Surrogate by Mohsin Zaidi provides a smashing opening for Here For Now’s 2026 season. Under the shrewd, kinetic direction of Christopher Manousos the play grabs the audience by the gut immediately and doesn’t let go. Zaidi has crammed a lot (arguably too
Ruby And The Reindeer At Here For Now Theatre Ruby and the Reindeer by Mark Crawford, Here For Now Theatre’s holiday gift to Stratford, is flat out terrific. Heartfelt, warm, effortlessly charming, and with a sweetly powerful feminist message, it is destined to become a Christmas classic. Ruby and the
Rogers v Rogers At Crow’s Theatre After seeing Michael Healey’s brilliant (and brilliantly funny) The Master Plan at Crow’s Theatre not even the dreaded Canadian winter could keep me from coming to Toronto to see his Rogers v Rogers. The fact that Tom Rooney was playing all fifteen characters was
A Huron County Christmas Carol At The Blyth Festival This year’s production of A Huron County Christmas Carol is the third iteration of Blyth’s inspired adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic. I enjoyed its previous outings in 2019 and 2023 and it just seems to get better every time it’s
A Niagara Christmas Carol At The Foster Festival It’s become quite the thing for regional theatre companies to create bespoke variations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The Foster Festival’s entry in the growing list, A Niagara Christmas Carol moves the action to the Niagara region during the construction of
Goblin:Oedipus At The Stratford Festival There once was a king named Oedipus Rex. You may have heard about his odd complex. His name appears in Freud’s index ’Cause he looooved
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
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
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
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
