A Huron County Christmas Carol At The Blyth Festival As near as I can tell, Blyth’s 2023 remounting of 2019’s A Huron County Christmas Carol sticks pretty close to the original script, but with a largely new and energetic cast it seems like a completely new show. Artistic Director Gil
Peter Pan: The Panto At Drayton Peter Pan: The Panto, at the comfortable St. Jacobs Country Playhouse in Waterloo is Drayton Entertainment’s second foray into “panto” for the 2023 season. If you are unfamiliar with the term, let me refer you to an explanation of the genre in my review
The Christmas Tree At The Foster Festival At barely 45 minutes, Norm Foster’s The Christmas Tree is something of a theatrical amuse-bouche. You know, those minuscule bits of deliciousness served by fancy restaurants before the meal proper gets under way? But rather than coming at the beginning of anything, The
The Master Plan At Crow’s Theatre I was familiar with the work of director Chris Abraham mostly through classics like Much Ado About Nothing and Uncle Vanya, so I was eager to see what he would do with The Master Plan, Michael Healey’s new “ripped-from-the-headlines” play at Crow’s Theatre. I
The Amen Corner At The Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival’s production of The Amen Corner, James Baldwin’s searing tragedy set in a Pentecostal church in 1950s Harlem, marks the first time a play by a Black author has graced the mainstage of the Festival Theatre. Having seen Kimberley Rampersad’s blockbuster
The Shadow Of A Doubt At The Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival has a history of rediscovering long-forgotten plays. With The Shadow Of A Doubt they’ve done themselves one better by producing the world premiere of a 1901 play by none other than Edith Wharton, the first woman to receive
Tootsie on Broadway Tootsie, currently playing at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre, is a musical comedy that’s strong on the comedy and surprisingly weak on the musical side of the equation. Based on the 1982 film starring Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie tells the tale of Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana), a forty-ish actor who,
Angels in America at KC Rep Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America is receiving a sturdy revival at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s downtown Copaken Stage. This sprawling two-part epic, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is at turns surreal, whimsical, hallucinatory, bitchily funny, poetic, brutally blunt, and ultimately
Absinthe in Las Vegas LAS VEGAS, NV – Everyone loves acrobats but not everyone will have a tolerance for the non-stop, filthy, vile, obscene, and often very funny patter that accompanies them in this sui generis offering on the Vegas Strip. Absinthe is housed in what looks like a temporary
‘Love,’ Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles Show LAS VEGAS, NV – I entered with high expectations but, alas, I found myself merely in like with Love, Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show. Cirque du Soleil’s high-powered homage to the Fab Four is chock full of Cirque’s trademark glitz and over-the-top surreal creativity
Craving For Travel Off Broadway There are plenty of laughs for everyone in Craving For Travel, the delightful comedy at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on New York’s Theater Row, but travel agents will take special delight in the savvy inside jokes that lay bare the hidden aspects of the
Richard III and Twelfth Night on Broadway At the Belasco Theatre, New Yorkers are being treated to an all-too-rare opportunity to see William Shakespeare’s Richard III and Twelfth Night performed under the “original practices” rubric favored at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London. All costumes are authentically Elizabethan, meaning no
Serving Elizabeth Streaming on Stratfest@Home Serving Elizabeth, a wonderful new play by Marcia Johnson, travels in time from Kenya in 1972 to London in 2015 with five terrific actors playing all the roles. The conceit of Serving Elizabeth – and this is all entirely fictional – is that Mercy, an
Midsummer Night’s Dream Streaming on Stratfest@Home Before he tackled the job of desecrating Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 2022, director Peter Pasyk warmed up with the Bard’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2021. The script has been ruthlessly cut to accommodate a cast of just eight and an intermission-less running time of about
Billy Bishop On Demand If you missed Drayton Entertainment’s excellent production of Billy Bishop Goes to War earlier this year, you’ve been granted a second chance. In honour of Remembrance Day, November 11th, Drayton is presenting “Billy Bishop On Demand” for a limited time, from November 7 to 11. And
Three Tall Women Streaming on Stratford@Home Edward Albee has legions of devoted fans. I am not among them. But I soldiered through the Stratford Festival’s nicely observed production of Three Tall Women, now streaming on its Stratford@Home platform, to savour Martha Henry’s final performance. What a performance it was! Henry
Toward Beauty Book Review I’ve been a fan of Dennis Garnhum ever since I saw his masterful take on A Christmas Carol at the Grand Theatre in 2017. I even had a chance to chat with him briefly when he was workshopping Grow at Goodspeed in Connecticut. So when I
Want To Become A Canadian Citizen? Well join the club. I know a lot of Americans who would love to become a Canadian citizen. The same holds true for folks from a lot of other countries. But if you’ve given any thought to what it takes to move to Canada
