I loved Verne Thiessen & Yvette Nolan’s adaptation of the Margaret Laurence novel The Diviners, creatively and energetically directed by Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier, but the rest of the straight plays in the 2024 Stratford season left me somewhere on a sliding scale of cold. The remaining plays (meaning not Shakespeare, not musicals, […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Soulpepper Academy grad Katherine Gauthier had the role of her career thus far in 2016 when she was given the opportunity to play Nora Helmer in Daniel Brooks’ contemporary production of A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Soulpepper Director of Design Lorenzo Savoini is a two–time MyTheatre Award winner and a double nominee this year for his outstanding work on two very different Soulpepper shows. For A Doll’s House, he created a hyper-modern canvas of […]
As the curtain went up on A Doll’s House, I was instantly pleased and very impressed by James Noone’s set design. The Huntington Theatre Company so often errs on the side of banal hyperrealism in its sets. While the gorgeous visuals and almost painfully precise attention to detail of those designs are obviously the result […]
All My Sons This Arthur Miller drama feels a-typical for the company that’s made its name on Shakespeare and its money on musicals. Though modern drama isn’t Stratford’s usual racket, Martha Henry’s smartly cast and emotionally wrought production might be the best thing at the festival this year (well, maybe second to Breath of Kings: […]
An Enemy of the People was originally an Ibsen play that has been translated by Maria Milisavljevic and adapted by Florian Borchmeyer then staged by Tarragon artistic director Richard Rose with a distinctly Canadian political slant and is now being remounted with mostly new actors. The plot is so incredibly relevant to our current politics that […]
Enemy of the People: an open forum Florian Borchmeyer’s modern adaptation of the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (translated by Maria Milisavljevic) attempts to instill the 1882 play with new immediacy and contemporary commentary. We’re destroying the earth! Bureaucracy will kill us all! Everyone is corrupt! Resistance is futile! It all works fairly […]
The Shaw Festival’s Hedda Gabler is good but not exceptional, and with a text as brilliant as Ibsen’s that’s not uncommon but always a little disappointing. The legendary Martha Henry’s direction isn’t bold. With fairly conventional character interpretations for the most part and little unexpected in emphasis, she lets the actors and the text do […]