Here’s the thing: the backstage aspects of The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s production of Kiss Me Kate (you know, the parts where the actors are playing actors, not the parts where the actors are playing actors playing some of Shakespeare’s broadest characters) made for a cute, light and altogether not all bad musical. That stuff, the […]
If you can’t tell from the title of this post, I’m incredibly excited about the new casting announcements out of the Stratford. The 2011 season is shaping up to be pretty darn great. Here’s the latest from awesometown: Josh Young as Judas!!!!! My favourite musical performer of the year is returning to the amazing and […]
Easily the most emotional production at the Stratford Festival this year is For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. I’m not usually a cryer at the theatre but I was inconsolably moved by this piece. Here the Canadian master playwright Michel Tremblay shares his most intimate story, that of his mother. That’s it; it’s just […]
I, like almost everyone else, had never seen The Winter’s Tale before this year at the Stratford Festival . I’d read it, discussed possible stagings, and analyzed the characters, but never seen for myself the play with 2 worlds. That, I suppose, is a theme at Stratford this year: 2 contrasting worlds in a single […]
Dangerous Liaisons (at the Stratford Festival this season) is pretty badass. It’s badass in embarrassingly large and frilly french wigs (Yanna McIntosh as Mme de Volanges wears a particularly silly one). It’s badass in petticoats, badass in tights and badass while perched daintily on lavishly ornate pieces of furniture. This solid piece of badassery is […]
Casting is ongoing for Stratford’s next season before this one’s even over. Here’s what we know so far: – super exciting choices are marked with * or **, depending on the degree of awesome. – terrible ideas are marked with an x or xx, depending on the degree of horror. Richard III: Seana McKenna as […]
Do Not Go Gentle, Geraint Wyn Davies’ one-man show at Stratford, was a strange experience for me. I didn’t care about the life of poet Dylan Thomas going in and I can’t really say the play convinced me I should change my mind. But it didn’t seem to matter if I cared about Thomas, as […]
I find it singularly difficult to review a production that everyone seems to love. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s Peter Pan has told me they loved it. And I don’t mean casual love, I mean “that was the best thing ever!”, rave reviews that tell me the production will surely blow […]