A Woman’s Love List At The Lighthouse Festival
I saw A Woman’s Love List by Norm Foster last season at the Orillia Opera House and liked it quite a bit. This season I took friends to see a remount of the play, with a different cast and director, at the Lighthouse Festival in Port Dover. I hadn’t intended to re-review the play, but director Lisa Horner’s take on the material was so much fun that I have reconsidered.
Cribbing liberally from my earlier review, here’s a précis of the plot, with the new cast:
Carly (Nicole Wilson) and Megan (Stephanie Pitsiladis), two thirty-something single women, have a somewhat tenuous friendship. Carly has such a busy career as a sports journalist that she has not had a man in her life since a two-week fling with Blaze, a charismatic surfer dude she met in San Francisco, some fourteen years ago.
Megan, who owns a successful hair salon is her “jaded, miserable best friend” (Megan’s words not mine). She too lacks a man in her life, but she feels Carly’s need is greater than hers.
Fortuitously, Megan knows a certain “Aunt Beulah,” who is a shaman or maybe that should be witch. She offers a bespoke matchmaking service and for just $20, if you fill out a form listing the ten qualities you are looking for in a mate, she guarantees a match.
Megan has generously laid out twenty bucks so Carly can find the man of her dreams. With a great deal of bickering and over Carly’s sceptical resistance they come up with a list of qualities for Carly’s ideal mate.
No sooner has Megan left with a promise to drop the list off with Beulah the next day than there is a knock at Carly’s door and in walks a tall handsome man (Cole Munden) who just happens to have the same name as her long ago fling. He seems to know everything about Carly and apparently they have been dating for quite some time.
It doesn’t take Carly long to realize that this guy possesses all the qualities she had put on her “woman’s love list” and after a night of more than competent sex she is smitten, to hell with the fact she doesn’t know who this guy is or where he came from.
When Megan returns we learn that she has neglected to pass the list on to Beulah and, seeing that Carly seems well situated, she decides to use the list for herself. She, of course, has different ideas of what constitutes an ideal mate so she erases some qualities and adds her own.
The gals quickly realize that every time something changes on the list, Blaze changes accordingly – instantly. Carly also discovers that once Blaze walks out the door he literally vanishes. He doesn’t exist!
Needless to say, this being a Norm Foster comedy, complications ensue to often hilarious effect.
Director Horner has upped the fantasy and the farcical elements quite a bit, with ample assistance from lighting designer Alex Sykes and an uncredited sound designer.
She has drawn broad performances from Wilson and Pitsiladis that often border on the cartoonish, but are never too much. Foster’s material holds up to Horner’s approach beautifully and, on balance, I’d have to say this is the funnier of the two productions I’ve seen.
Wilson is especially masterful as she first swoons at the discovery of the “perfect” man and then reveals her inner Frankenstein as she realizes she has complete control of him.
The set (Megan Cinel) and costumes (Alex Amini) were of the high standard I have come to expect at Lighthouse.
Not only was this second viewing of A Woman’s Love List a lot of fun, it was an object lesson in how two rather different approaches to the same vehicle can be equally valid.
A Woman’s Love List continues at the Lighthouse Festival in Port Dover through September 12, 2026. It then transfers to Port Colborne from September 16 through 27, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Lighthouse Festival website.
