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art of war

The Art Of War At The Stratford Festival – A Review

The Art Of War At The Stratford Festival SPOILER ALERT: The Art of War, the lyrical and elegiac new play by Yvette Nolan, has nothing to do with Sun Tzu. The Art of War, now playing at the Stratford Festival’s intimate Studio Theatre, is part art history lesson, part meditation

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blues for an alabama sky

Blues For An Alabama Sky At The Shaw Festival – A Review

Blues For An Alabama Sky At The Shaw Festival With Blues For An Alabama Sky, now at the intimate Jackie Maxwell Studio, the Shaw Festival continues its run of solid revivals of the African-American theatrical canon. This 1995 melodrama by Pearl Cleage may not have the heft of The Amen

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murder-on-the-lake

Murder-On-The-Lake At The Shaw Festival – A Review

Murder-On-The-Lake At The Shaw Festival Murder-on-the-Lake, the improvised mystery now gracing the stage at Shaw’s Royal George Theatre, presents a conundrum. How do you “review” a show that, by design, varies radically from performance to performance? The answer, I think, is that you don’t. Instead, I will attempt to describe

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mechanically inclined

Mechanically Inclined At The Foster Festival – A Review

Mechanically Inclined At The Foster Festival Mechanically Inclined by Stratford Festival star Steve Ross (Chicago, La Cage Aux Folles) is part of the Foster Festival’s recent effort to foster (get it?) new Canadian plays. In a programme note director Jamie Williams, second in command at the Foster Festival, describes Mechanically

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pinkerton

Pinkerton Comes To Prospect At Lighthouse Festival – A Review

Pinkerton Comes To Prospect At Lighthouse Theatre Pinkerton Comes To Prospect by Jamie Williams belongs to a genre (or perhaps sub-genre) of farce that plays fast and loose with the presumed conventions of the melodramas that flourished at the turn of the last century. These shows tend to feature frontier

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powers and gloria

Powers And Gloria At The Blyth Festival – A Review

Powers and Gloria At The Blyth Festival Powers and Gloria by Keith Roulston, which premiered at the Blyth Festival in 2005, is receiving a powerful revival under the deft direction of Peter Hinton-Davis. The Powers of the title is Edward Powers (Randy Hughson), the 73-year-old head of a thriving furniture

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Elsewhere
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

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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here for now theatre

Here For Now Theatre Announces 2023 Season

Here For Now Theatre Announces 2023 Season [From their press release.] On Monday, March 1st, HERE FOR NOW THEATRE announced their exciting 2023 SEASON of SIX CANADIAN ONE ACTS to be presented June 28th– September 23rd, in Stratford Ontario at a BRAND NEW beautiful outdoor venue behind the STRATFORD PERTHMUSEUM.

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