This month, I’m rolling up my sleeves and plunging into two plays and two books that will recharge my critical batteries. These four brief choices will come as a relief after the doorstoppers I recommended last month. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman All My Sons was the play that finally launched Arthur Miller’s sterling […]
What is gained by reviving this play? That is the first question that crosses my mind each time that I attend a revival. In some cases, a show is simply beloved and that alone warrants a revival, but, for lesser known works, a director or producer’s motivation for presenting an aging play to a modern […]
Last year, I gave a rave review to an off-Broadway play called Hand to God starring a (possibly) satanic puppet named Tyrone McHansley and Jason, the timid, church-going boy who brings Tyrone to life. Well, this shocking and outrageously funny play capitalized on its stellar reviews and is now one of the best shows on […]
Everyone loves lists, and at the end of the year there is no lack of Top Lists that reflect on and revamp our cultural excitement about the past twelve months. Although we frequent playhouses and movie theaters to see new works/productions on stage and screen (barring the occasional revival or vintage screening), our reading habits […]
This is a very good season for The Shaw Festival. There isn’t a single truly bad production in the lot, Cabaret is making a splash, and The Mountaintop is a strong dramatic achievement. Among the more standard fare, Juno & the Paycock leaves something to be desired but everything else ranges from fairly to thoroughly […]
The strongest all-round cast of the Shaw season so far is about 70% of the reason that When We Are Married really works. Then there’s the 20% that comes down to the charming and insightful material itself (JB Priestley’s text is not groundbreaking but it is intimate, funny and sweet without being silly, which is […]
I don’t think we talk about Kate Hennig enough (related note: I saw her understudy in both Stratford shows last year and was thus Hennig-starved in 2013), so let’s talk about Kate Hennig a bit, shall we? In the Shaw Festival’s lunchtime show, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, four musical theatre actresses take on […]
Juno and the Paycock suffers from a simultaneous case of too much plot and too little, issues that do, counterintuitive though it may be, go hand in hand. Upon reading Belfast-raised Jackie Maxwell’s director’s note, I was intrigued by playwright Sean O’Casey’s Irish civil war drama. Unfortunately, the moments of war-torn tension and aching loss […]