Season Ranking: #6 I was really looking forward to The Light in the Piazza. I love small, contemporary musical theatre and I’d never seen Adam Guettel’s work though I’d heard wonderful things about it. But it didn’t quite capture me. The classical bent of the music, language-barred lyrics and awkwardly rushed love story just aren’t […]
Season Ranking: #7 It seems genuinely weird to me that, in a season of 10 shows, Major Barbara is the only George Bernard Shaw text being produced at The Shaw Festival in 2013. Now, I’m not a great George Bernard Shaw fan so that’s not a huge problem for me, it just seems a little […]
Season Ranking: #3 Every time I’ve reviewed Moya O’Connell in the past, I’ve made some mention of how beautiful she is. The reason I do that is two fold: 1- The major roles in question were Maggie the Cat and Hedda Gabler, characters whose beauty is talked a lot about in their respective plays; so […]
Season Ranking: #4 When Globe & Mail critic J. Kelly Nestruck reviewed The Shaw Festival’s current production of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1915 comedy Our Betters, he somewhat dismissively declared it outdated and a negative representation of women. This led to a mild hullabaloo as its big name director Morris Panych took the comment too harshly, […]
Season Ranking: #1 Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is a genius text written by a genius about geniuses. It gets better every single time I read or see it and The Shaw Festival’s 2013 production easily continued that trend. The play is complicated and rewarding but also fun and diverting. It’s filled with scholarly concepts the full […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2012 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. The MVP of The Shaw Festival’s 2012 season, Ben Sanders’ performance as the enigmatic Alan in French Without Tears remains one of the most memorable I’ve ever seen at the festival. The articulate and self-effacing Best Actor in a Play nominee […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2012 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. A long-time My Theatre-favourite, Mike Shara has become one of Stratford’s most reliable leading men. He’s a consistent charmer and master comedian whose turn as Cornelius Hackl thoroughly stole The Matchmaker from the likes of some of the country’s […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2012 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. One of Canada’s best male triple threats, Kyle Blair already has a My Theatre Award (2011’s Best Supporting Actor in a Musical for his role as the Scarecrow in Ross Petty’s Wizard of Oz pantomime). So we weren’t […]