The newest play from Canada’s beloved playwright Hannah Moscovitch is a stirring and inspiring drama about groundbreaking Polish/Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, set in Warsaw in pre-ghetto 1939 (Act I) and oppressive and war-torn 1942 (Act II). Against Camellia Koo’s innovative set of destructible paper orphanage walls and directed with sublime understanding by Alisa Palmer, Moscovitch’s […]
Aside from listening to the Bing Crosby tune “White Christmas,” I really knew nothing about the 1954 classic film by the same name. For example, I didn’t know it was a musical, didn’t know it starred Bing Crosby, had no idea it took place in a snow-less Vermont, and didn’t know it was in goofy […]
Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins’ 2009 adaptation of Miklos Laszlo’s 1937 Hungarian comedy Parfumerie, about the behind the scenes lives of employees at a beauty supply store, is not something you would assume would be a hit. But it is. Most performances of the Dora-winning remount have already sold out and a discerning friend of […]
Another new Christmas movie for me! Although I’ve seen the animated version more times than you can shake a stick at*, and have read the book pretty consistently since childhood, I was full of enough Jim Carrey-fatigue by the time the live action version of Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas showed up that up […]
Before this project, I had never seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a fact that inevitably elicited gasps from whomever I told it. It’s a classic, sure, but like most of the pre-Community Chevy Chase oeuvre, I somehow missed it. So it was with great joy that I undertook the task of partaking for the first […]
I went to University in Boston. Don’t ask me why but I had it in my head that I had to leave home after highschool, live in another city (another country, as it turned out), get some space from the town where my parents live, where I’d spent all of highschool and lived since I […]
Stephen Spielberg! Christmas! Furry creatures that turn into murdering beasts! It’s a Rachael Christmassmorgasborg! Oh lord in Heaven, had I forgotten how much I love Gremlins. This 24 Days of movies project has been immensely rewarding, but nothing quite prepared me for the rewards of rewatching Gremlins as an adult. From the cheesy pseudo-noir opening […]
Christmas Carols are a dime a dozen. But versions, that don’t make me want to skip through half the ghosts? Well, those are much further and farther between. Mickey’s Christmas Carol is one of those, primarily because it’s only half an hour long. Also, apparently I just can’t handle the classic story if it’s not […]